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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Dec 2015
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    16,337

    If Sexual Harassment and Assault Were Treated Like Terrorism

    https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11...ike-terrorism/

    While the many critiques surrounding sexual predation are largely reasonable, all of them sidestep the central issue: male violence as a structural core to our society. And these structures are riddled with the problems of male violence—from top to bottom, and then back again, to include the media collaboration in Weinstein’s case being driven away by the The New York Times years ago. And then paradoxically, NPR ran a story this week about how the Times reporters, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, “broke” the Weinstein story. But this is the story that their very paper had driven underground thirteen years prior. It is almost comic how NPR gives The New York Times credit for “breaking the story” when this is a quaint reversal as to what actually occurred in 2004.
    Where the media has played a role, as we now know, in covering up for Weinstein, the story was finally broken with several journalistshaving already spoken out about being threatened with lawsuits by Weinstein’s peeps. The more time that goes by with all these newly revealed cases, what is clear is that everyone knew what was going on and that there is a “culture of silence” in Hollywood that keeps this culture of predation in vigor. Skip to Kathy Griffin who recently famously eye-rolled when referring to a reporter’s statement that George Clooney “had no idea”. She goes on to say, “I can’t believe this guy didn’t know. I knew. And I’m not in the movie business.” Griffin goes on to say that every single studio head “behaves this way and everyone covers for them.” And uncomfortable silence fell over the soundstage. One of the journalists changed the subject to Kim and Kanye.
    And this is where my mind starts to reel with the daily revelations of sexual abusers, the vast majority who unlike Kevin Spacey, predate upon women. How is it that violence against women has been given such a low priority by governments, the police, judicial systems, and so forth, that it means that women have to come together en masse to reveal some (not nearly most) of their sexual abuse stories in that brief window of time before they are called “whores” or “liars.” It really is as if women do not exist except as a chapter in men’s lives. That chapter where, like the prodigal son, these men come to the recognition of their own humanity with women as the playing ground for their youthful oat sowing.
    While I am more than happy that the issue of sexual harassment is being highlighted, I worry that the structural reasons for sexual predation are being buried deeper beneath the stories of pedophilia. Certainly, pedophilia is a social issue to confront, but the predation of young children and women are simply not collapsable into one unit, as if structural sexism did not exist. And thus the many men who are pulling an #AllLivesMatter on women through the #MeToo social pile in recent weeks and the interviews with men like Hugh Grant to comment upon sexual predation of women. It is almost as if women should be grateful to pedophiles so that our issues might be highlighted. How little females actually matter, it would seem.
    And then I remembered 9/11 and how the media coverage was non-stop–for months! And I wasn’t even in the western hemisphere during 9/11! Day in and day out, non-stop coverage of that horrific event continued for weeks, months. We were given story after story of what everyone saw, heard, and heard that someone else saw. If they were walking to the deli, standing on a subway platform, or sharing memories of a deceased colleague, for literally months the world was shown the full effect of terrorism on the lives of people in New York and beyond. Almost 3,000 people died that day and the news was absorbed in its coverage for months.
    Skip over to females and the language of urgency is diminished. According to 2015 United Nations estimates, there are 101.8 men for every 100 women. That makes just under 50% of the planet, which is currently at 7.6 billion, which experiences sexual harassment to outright sexual violence. Given that all females experience sexual discrimination of one form or another throughout their lives and that conservative estimates calculate that 35% of females have been either physically or sexually assaulted, the urgency of tackling the grave structural problems of patriarchy need to be addressed more urgently than the Global War on Terror.
    Hadley Freeman wrote this recently about the state of women’s rights today: “By the time harassment stories were emerging from journalism, politics, the arts, it felt like maybe this wasn’t about a single industry, a few bad apples here and there. This is about men.” She suggests that men stay at home and take a break from public life. While I chuckled reading Freeman’s piece, the reality is that not only is what Freeman jokingly suggests needs to happen to end the sort of work place harassment and rape of women, but sadly, because of the power of males in every industry on the planet, the confinement of men to the home would simply never happen. Sadly, for all the predictive policing that exists today, the resources we have to address male violence and structural patriarchy are not being being utilized to make a more just world for females.
    Let’s face it, when Bernie Madoff fleeced billions of dollars from investors, reforms were quickly enacted to prevent future fraud and to amplify fraud reporting mechanisms. And the means of keeping business practices and the Securities Exchange ethical are no more difficult, in practical terms, than ensuring that women can go to work, ride public transport, or be tipsy at a party without being sexually aggressed. What would it take to end forever the sexual harassment, exploitation, and violence against women? Could such structural abuses be ended through a business model approach? For instance, what if marketing services paired together a team responsible for rethinking strategy, as if restructuring a company? Then a plan could be set for to re-educate males around issues of violence, rape, consent, economic equality, and education? Then, I wonder, is the business model effective and robust enough.
    This led to me ponder if sexism, in all its cultural embodiments—from the street harassment, to the in-office sexual harassment, to the telling of girl children that their humanity matters less than their bodies, to the rapes, to the sexual trafficking, to the many who plaster over the inherently sexist structures in calling sexual enslavement “sex work”—were actually treated as a national emergency? ...What would it look like if sexual assault were treated as terrorism?


  2. #2
    Join Date
    Mar 2006
    Location
    General Sherman's Favorite City
    Posts
    35,141
    Literally unreadable in your color/font.

    Should be good enough to call Mtngirl back up from the ban list depths though.
    I still call it The Jake.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Dec 2009
    Location
    in a box on the porch
    Posts
    5,212
    Didn't you get divorced spoke?
    How could that happen to such enlightened male?
    You're such a champion of female rights, what gives?

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Jul 2014
    Location
    TennesseeJed
    Posts
    10,988
    Spook got divorced?

    Where do all the women that are fucking underage boys at school fall into this?
    "I don't pretend to have all the answers, and I think there's something to be said for that" -One For The Road

    Brain dead and made of money.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Nov 2007
    Location
    Eburg
    Posts
    13,243
    what if parking tickets and shoplifting were treated like terrorism?

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Dec 2015
    Posts
    16,337
    Quote Originally Posted by flowing alpy View Post
    just build some kind of wall to put the pervs behind
    it'll be free labor like the u.s prison system! but with lots of white people!

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Dec 2015
    Posts
    16,337
    yeah nobody's perfect but bit by bit people get the picture if they're not invested in actively resisting it

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