#MeToo is fascinating, like a geode or another multi-surfaced crystalline object - fascinating and facets, by the way, both come from the same root word, meaning 'from a side' or 'perspective' - it has a lot of angles from which you can stand back and look at it. A lot of subjects are like that, which makes it really important not to get hung up on looking at it from one side. You can't see the whole thing if you do that. Consider emotional investment in a particular side and that's when people get nasty.
First of all, I'm absolutely thrilled a lot of the dark filth in Hollywood is getting exposed. Like a dirty, rotten onion, there's a lot of layers here and I'm not convinced we've seen the end of the revelations just yet. Thus far it's been mostly confined to creepy guys coming onto women and using their power in the industry in order to get away with it. With Harvey Weinstein's story already cliche in fiction long before his misdeeds came to light, "Come on baby, I'll get you this film gig if you do me..."
What's weird about that situation was how tolerated it was for decades by both men and women. Heck, Bryan Singer and Roland Emmerich's proclivities are well documented... literally. There's a documentary called An Open Secret which details their sordid interest in cocaine, meth, and barely legal teenage boys. Corey Feldman's allegations are famous, older men preying on young actors, stealing their innocence, and traumatizing them... that's all tip of the iceberg level stuff too.
So when I think about #MeToo, I think about children being abused which makes me furious. Case in point, Eliza Dushku came out and revealed that she was abused by 35 year old professional stunt guy on the set of True Lies. She was 12 at the time. Her story was corroborated by multiple people involved.
Then I read about Aziz Ansari's bad date... wait, what? Somehow this weird, consensual interaction between two awkward and clearly immature adults ends up on the internet associated with #MeToo and I'm asking myself how? Grace sees herself as some sort of victim, but if you read her account, there's not one moment where she's forced to do something she didn't want to do and by her own admission most of her signals were nonverbal.
Granted, there was a bit of backlash. I enjoyed Ashleigh Banfield's take where she demonstrated that Grace's story was not one of rape, or sexual assault. Grace had a bad date and yet somehow thought it was worth ruining Ansari's career over it. The thought that a bad date could ruin your career, or at least cause a nasty black mark against you in your field, certainly would scare the hell out of me if I were a straight guy.
Thankfully, I'm a gay man in a monogamous relationship and my boyfriend is the most amazing hot gay nerd ever. My gay-monogamous privilege means I'll never have to deal with a woman accusing me of sexual assault, at least not in the context of a bad date.
Shortly thereafter I stumbled across an article from Vox entitled, "I'm a sexual consent educator, here's what's missing in the Aziz Ansari discussion." Her professional input and experience as an author on the subject made her insight unique, but there was one glaring problem I had with her analysis. It's this pesky concept called affirmative consent.
Affirmative consent is the idea that anything less than mind-blowing enthusiasm during a sexual encounter is lack of consent. It's been presented as a series of verbal contracts where the users progressively agree to a more intimate encounter. Obviously there's a problem using that as a legal standard, but she makes a great point as how we as individuals can use it as a rough guide. Jaclyn Friedman, the author of this piece, has written 3 books on the subject and hosts a podcast about sexual liberation.
She opens relaying an anecdote where an interviewer asks her, off the record, about how to know what she wants in bed. From there she makes the point that women were never properly educated about sexuality to the point that they don't know what they want or how to even discuss it with their partners. It's a sorry state of affairs, especially for the women in this position and the men that they date. Even most of the men are poorly educated when it comes to sexuality, most men these days learn from pornography which is flat out tragic.
What we have here is a recipe for disaster, especially when you take poorly educated young women and hormone-driven young men and mix them together at university. A dash of alcohol, a little weed, and these kids take their clothes off in a flash. They even have underwear runs across campus, I shit you not. In that context, it may be difficult to understand consent.
In my experience, not all men and women suffer from this lack of education. Women are perfectly capable of telling men what they want and what they don't want. Perhaps that is my Italian-American privilege? Our women don't tolerate bullshit from immature men. They'll smack you, or conversely tell you exactly what they want. That's what makes the rest of Jaclyn's article impotent, she's addressing a group of women who don't know what they want in bed as if that's representative of all female experience.
The idea of progressive verbal contracts of clearly articulated consent is just plain silly. Act it out with a partner. It's ridiculous, and so I said so on my friend's wall not realizing the awful anger I was about to incur. I also suggested that we step back and see the problem as an overall lack of education and access to healthcare - and not specifically the result of not-teaching women how to properly utilize their hoo-hah's for funtimes. There's also intergenerational trauma to contend with and the overall tragedy of life. Mix in intentionally aggressive individuals who enjoy causing pain in others and the issue becomes quite nuanced.
Immediately I was accused of mansplaining. This fellow friend-of-my-friend told me that I had no expertise in the field and should just 'shut up and listen.' This seems to be a favorite battlecry of the modern social justice warrior, if they don't agree with you, they'll attempt to silence you. After that, every comment was twisted and reinterpretted for maximum offensive potential and then I was attacked for it.
I was called a douche, a shitstain, she made fun of my soul patch - I could have been offended, but instead I was intrigued. I suggested she go browse my wall for something else that was damning according to her personal narrative and completely off the subject. She followed through, twice. Each time I kept calmly pointing out she wasn't discussing the issue, instead she was hurling insults. Reddit nerds know this as the infamous ad hominem attack - a classic logical fallacy.
Ever try to discuss a tough subject with someone while constantly insulting them? I have. It doesn't bring folks around to you way of thinking. In fact, it turns them off. You would think after the election of Donald Trump the nation would have figured that out by now. You can't run around insulting people and then assuming a position of moral superiority because your politics tell you so.
Coincidentally I watched the very same thing happen to Jordan Peterson during his interview with Cathy Newman a day before all this went down. Both incidents were similar: the politically correct party restates or reinterprets whatever point their opponent has said in a way that let's them become incredibly offended by the notion. It doesn't matter that the mental gymnastics required are cheap verbal tricks. If you can repackage your opponent's point for maximum offense you can win the moral high ground (the emotions) without having to bother with their point (the intellect).
Tragically it deludes the PC person or SJW because it only works on them and people that think like that. The rest of us just sit here looking at them like they're crazy.
Thus it proceeded for pages and pages. I would rationally restate my point, she would call me names, slur my name, slur my sources of data, logical fallacies flowed like GHB at a gay circuit party. I genuinely tried to reach her, but apparently I crossed into no-man's land, pun intended. Eventually it degraded into her attempting to paint me as a fundamentalist christian men's rights activist and the digital spittle she spewed onto the screen made me feel compassion for her.
I can't imagine what lead to her interacting with me in such a manner, but I'm gonna guess it was harsh. That's giving her the benefit of the doubt that she wasn't full on trolling - always a possibility in 2018.
Regardless, I wanted to share the experience of having or attempting to have a difficult discussion and immediately getting lambasted because my ideas were deemed heretical by someone else. In a moment, I understood how people could kill one another in bloody revolutions. When you have someone who's never met you degrade you into a 'piece of shit,' because your idea was heretical to their groupthink, it becomes very easy to see guards in the gulags proudly sporting their uniforms.
I try not to get too attached to my ideas, I've been attached to ideas before and it's not healthy. We should always remain open to new information, a new perspective, someone else playing an antagonist to our mentations. Ideas have many sides and many perspectives.
We should consider and compare them all before presuming any of them are complete and true. We can't see anything objectively without considering all the different perspectives you can view it from, in order to access and share those perspectives we have to speak and we have to listen.
Promise I'll keep doing both to the best of my ability and I encourage you to do the same. :-)