That's part of a conversation at "Diddy and Our Culture’s 'Himpathy' for Powerful Men/How the allegations against/Sean Combs change the way we talk about #MeToo, rumors and powerful men" (NYT)(and that's my last gift link of the month, which should tell you there's a lot more to read there).
Also, there's this from Michelle Cottle: "Yeah, there’s quite a bit of fatigue, I think, around 'trust women, believe women,' even within the #MeToo movement. Not only did it need to be a woman that you cared about. Not only did it need to be a woman who you thought deserved better. We needed the visual evidence because, I think, at this point, people do sort of, like, lump all criticisms of wealthy and powerful men into this bucket of 'Well, we can’t ever really know,' and 'I think #MeToo went too far,' sort of thing.... I’m just fascinated by the possibility that there are fields that are built around principals. You know, whether you’re talking about music, entertainment, to some degree, politics — you know, the whole joke that senators are all their little kingdoms and nobody ever says no to them, either. And if you’ve got one of these principals, it’s not just them that you’re fighting against. It’s an entire machine... that is devoted to keeping them where they are."
ADDED: That new piece links to something Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote in Vanity Fair in 2021, "With Love, Sean Combs/He was the original influencer. Now the artist and mogul formerly known as Puff Daddy is defining his next era. Can LOVE conquer all?" I quote:
I am amazed when he brings up #MeToo before mentioning Black Lives Matter. "If you living on this earth and you trying to keep on dealing with this shit, that ain't the way we going to live. And people out there that are tired of it. And it's not just a Black and white thing. You know what I'm saying? It's just tired of the way that it doesn't have to be. Like when they said it was over—when they said in the #MeToo, when it was over, it was over," he says emphatically.
Combs sees #MeToo as a qualified sign of progress and evidence that celebrities can change the world. "The #MeToo movement, the truth, is that it inspired me. It showed me that you can get maximum change," he says. What Combs wants now is for that maximum change to come for his tribe. Enter the Love era.
I ROLLED MY EYES when I first heard about Combs's new name, Love.... On a lesser man it sounds like an anthropomorphized "Live Laugh Love" sign from a discount decor store.... "Love is a mission," he tells me with all seriousness....
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Douthat's question is phrased like and either/or but the real answer is both. There are dangers far more likely than being falsely accused of sexual assault (though Cottle goes too far in comparing it to being sex trafficked during a visit to the mall--it is far more likely than that), but it's also normal to worry about it. We worry about lots of things, and everybody worries about some things out of proportion to their likelihood.
My recollection is that "trust women, believe women" went out the window all at once at the moment when it was Tara Reade who was asking to be trusted and believed.
Logically, you can't have "believe all women" without an increased worry that a man you care about will be falsely accused.
The world doesn’t need to be changed. It needs to be left alone by feminists and feminist ideology. A return to expected Judeo/Christian observance would be a big help.
As a mother of boys, I certainly worried about it. Especially when they went off to college.
I seem to recall a lot of hubbub years ago about 'consent contracts'. Not in the figurative sense...literal pieces of paper to be signed before any sexual activity. There were even campus harridans that advocated for clauses and subparagraphs in said contracts to be mutually consented to as sexual activity escalated. This was real.
I also remember an entire farce about A Rape On Campus or something that turned out to be a complete falsehood. But sure...that's all just normal maternal anxiety.
I'm not sure if it's reasonable or not but the MeToo conversation is way different for women with teenage boys than for those without. And these women do warn their sons about certain types of girls (mostly the pink haired, know my pronouns type). The mothers might be nice about it and say something like "a false allegation of abuse can sabotage your education and your life" or they can be blunt about it. Usually they're blunt and may even include a "don't talk to the police ever if you're accused of a crime" conversation. With thirty or forty percent of these girls on anti-psychotic medication, it must suck to be a teenage boy right now. (Also please stop taking your daughters to psychiatrists. It's bad idea to get them hooked on those drugs. Those drugs will turn their brains to mush.)
This Diddy person is pure scum. I hope he gets life.
"this default sympathy for men and for the male condition and that it is so deeply embedded in our culture."
And this didn't get your 'Bullshit On Mega-Steroids" tag?
The feminist philosopher Kate Mann calls it 'himpathy; — this default sympathy for men and for the male condition and that it is so deeply embedded in our culture.
I'm sure she's leading the fight to stamp it out!
Never forget Emma "Mattress Girl" Sulkowicz. That crazy bint lost her Abilify-addled mind when she went head over heals for a German student at Columbia and accused him of rape after their fling went south when he came to the realization that she was crazier than Miss Havisham. But instead of accusing him of rape, she just passive-aggressively carried her bed around with her everywhere.
As I recall he got no "himpathy", just a nice juicy settlement from Columbia for the slander to his reputation.
As a father of boys, I will be vigorously training them to think strategically about their dalliances, avoid certain female personalities like the plague, and anticipate accusations by having extensive corroborating evidence before, during, and after the fact.
If women are like this now, I can't imagine what things will be like in 15 years.
"this default sympathy for men and for the male condition and that it is so deeply embedded in our culture" Piling on, but--WTF? Let's ask the Duke lacrosse team, shall we? Or check on Saifullah Khan's lawsuit? Maybe ask K.C. Johnson and Stuart Taylor to do a guest post?
The default sympathy is reserved for men who serve the prog cause. The moment they become useless, or worse, they must be reviled.
We worry about things out of proportion to their likelihood if the consequences are dire. And given that colleges assume men are guilty with no due process, it seems pretty reasonable to worry about it. I even worry about it a little as a professor. What's to stop a student who's upset about her grade from making an accusation?
Teach them about the "Hot Crazy Matrix".
Love is a mission and baby oil is your breaching charge.
"MeToo" was intended as a gotcha against Trump. Lots of collateral damage - Matt Lauer (fully deserved), Harvey Weinstein, even though he walked, Garrison Keillor, Al Franken.
E. Jean Carroll couldn't even prove rape and had to settle for sexual abuse and a civil verdict of $5M, last I knew, still pending appeal.
T-shirt worthy.
"this default sympathy for men and for the male condition and that it is so deeply embedded in our culture"
Otherwise known as innocent until proven guilty.
With all the other drugs, legal and illegal, that young women take, now men have to worry about a few already neurotic girls on testosterone, hating themselves and the world for having their breasts removed.
Only if you imagine he could have a future as a conservative politician
"Do you think it’s at all reasonable for the mother of a teenage boy to worry about a false accusation of sexual assault? Or is that just like, a normal maternal anxiety?""
Douthat's response is ludicrous. Women in college have basically free rein to make accusations, no matter how flimsy the evidence, and the schools will automatically default to a finding of guilt. The court system can be just as bad - I know of a college kid who was accused of rape by a woman who met him on Tinder, showed up drunk at midnight with a bottle of vodka, admitted to consenting to various sexual acts, and who had no memory of what happened but assumed (with guidance from the campus rape advocates) that vaginal penetration had occurred because her tampon was lodged higher up than usual (which, of course, would be consistent with her trying to put a new one in in a drunken haze without removing the first one). He got two years prison based on speculation.
Uh, I don't worry about my boys being falsely accused of sexual assault because we live in a home that actively preaches abstinence before marriage and nothing close to it beforehand. We live in an entirely different culture than mainstream Americans. But casual sex has risks for both men and women and the consequences can be dire. Seems right to worry about both.
"Douthat's question is phrased like and either/or but the real answer is both."
Oddly, he asks if it's "reasonable" or "normal." It's a sideswipe at mothers: "normal" for them is to be anxious about their own kids and, in the larger scheme, unreasonable.
Is Tressie McMillan Cottom a mother? Of a teenage boy?
If not, she has nothing to worry about and is safe in saying this nonsense.
John Henry
James K. That happened to a friend of mine, fellow teacher. A black asshole (and he was an asshole, I had him in my classes) accused him of giving him a C based on race. Shaun had to go through an investigation in which the burden of proof was on him to prove he was not racist.
When the guy came through my class, I just marked everything A. Didn't even need to read it. Fuck him, let his future employer figure it out.
A couple years later he used me as a reference for a PhD program. I gave him a reference. Hopefully it resulted in him getting turned away.
John Henry
Sounds like he passed on your Frankenstein movie!
Seriously, I agree that he sounds like scum. And some of the accusations are non-concensual and/or with children. If guilty, he does need to face serious consequences, perhaps life.
But a lot of the accusations seem to be about consensual, though kinky, relationships between adults. Why should anyone be punished or sued for that?
Remember mattress girl who paraded around Columbia, including graduation, with a mattress? For what even she admitted was consensual sex. For the rest of his life, every job interview, every date, every mortgage etc that is going to pop up and he is going to have to explain it. And some people are not going to believe the explanation. Or they will believe it but don't want to deal with it.
Where does he go to get his life and good name back?
John Henry
John Henry
I say, based on her flippant response, there is no way Tressie has sons. She has no clue.
Marriage rates are way down -- my observation is that the boys who grew up in this era, now men in their 20's/30's, are generally not interested in marriage, while many more women in their 20's/30's still are. Maybe Tressie can find out why.
"Presumably we could have known about some of these things sooner."
Uh, Ross, he's a Negro. We don't know nothin' about no Negroes!
Would I worry my teenage son might be falsely accused - like Diddy - after a multiyear investigation by the FBI? No. Would I worry about false accusations from a girl down the street or the high school gender rights monitor? Yes.
My son was a teen in the mid oughts… and I worried about it. Girls were shockingly provocative and “forward,” as we used to say. Now? It’s off the rails worse. I am acquainted with some twenty something young women who really have zero awareness that dressing like a hooker communicated something. Or sitting like a hooker. They really believe that they can carry on with their boobs hanging out, get shitfaced drunk, accompany a guy to a hotel room, and get a rape kit the next day. I have seen it happen, 3 x. I tried to push back with the mom of said young woman, from a guy’s point of view, saying, “why is it that only men are responsible for what happens in a drunken encounter?”
And then— that story of Olivia nuzzi targeting rfk jr— the blithe ruthlessness with which she uses her sexuality— is just House of Cards-esque. So yeah, I think men are at much greater risk than ever before, at least until women completely squander their credibility, which seems likely.
"If you living on this earth..."
"...that ain't the way we going to live."
If only he were a woman, he might understand contractions.
In management there is something called FMEA for Failure Mode and effects Analysis.
It looks at every potentially bad thing that can happen and rates them my how likely they are and how serious they are.
A one hour power outage may be fairly likely to occur from time to time. But it is not very serious and you may not need to do much about it other than figure out how to live with it. So maybe a 10-1
A fire that destroys the plant is pretty unlikely but if it does happen may kill the company. so perhaps a 1-10
Getting trafficked at the mall might be a 1-10. Unlikely but very serious.
False accusation might be a 3- 9. More likely than being trafficked but marginally less serious.
John Henry
I applaud you for that, Birches. But it is no protection against a false accusation.
It does if you're Mike Pence.
Ok, I've managed to make it through most of the transcript. I'd recommend more people read through the thing. Althouse is right, there's a lot there, including sympathy for parents worried about giving their kids the Covid vaccine.
My response to this idea that men are shielded from accusations comes from women, like me who have high self esteem, who would never put up with an abuser for years. They brought up Brad Pitt as someone that might be an abuser who has escaped any negative repercussions. And it's because healthy people cannot imagine having 6 kids with someone who was beating you on the regular, especially someone who had their own millions, their own ability to buy another house and fly away. And marry him years after the fact.
I think most of us have far too much self respect to make it in Hollywood or the music industry. So yeah, we're skeptical that people tie themselves to awful people.
A return to expected Judeo/Christian observance would be a big help.
And what exactly is "expected Judeo/Christian observance"? Slaughtering each other because one is either Catholic or Protestant? Blaming the Jews for every bad thing that happens to Christians and banishing or outright killing the Jews?
If I were a mom of a teenage boy, I would be more worried about him getting saddled with child support - I think the odds of that happening are higher.
We needed the visual evidence because, I think, at this point, people do sort of, like, lump all criticisms of wealthy and powerful men into this bucket of 'Well, we can’t ever really know,' and 'I think #MeToo went too far,' sort of thing.
Sure, that was the NYT's reaction to E. Jean Carroll's claims ...
"...the high school gender rights monitor..." Does a sash come with that position?
Freder prefers Muslim observance.
At least I have only one grandson to worry about. Depressing thought.
Well she did have that LinkedIn guy and his billions backing her.
This is why Pious Pence is not safe.
Don't forget the whole Kavanaugh fiasco.
So “Eyes Wide Shut” was actually a documentary film.
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