Quote:
Originally Posted by goofyballer
idk, kind of a bold proposition that if only we communicated better with the deplorables they'd become lefties cheerfully coexisting in a coalition with people of color
I'm assuming the audience here isn't irredeemable deplorables but the wider audience of women willing to accept Kavanaugh did more or less what he was accused of but sincerely think Boys Will Be Boys and Sexual Assault Just Happens Gotta Deal With It, Go Along to Get Along, God's Plan type of thinking.
As I said, if we assume there really is a systemic rape culture and we think rape is critically underreported, we need a framework as to why. I can imagine a dozen or more reasons why rape is under-reported, but this is one. We have to assume this mentality or something adjacent to it is floating around out there for a lot of women, that sexual assault is bad but just something we put up with, like traffic.
And I do think the left bears some responsibility here. Underlying what is being communicated isn't QUITE utter deplorableness, like the systemic rape culture is justified, but it's just something women have to learn to deal with and accept, something to work around. Because it happens a lot. When you see people explaining away their own victimization like that, defending deeply patriarchal frameworks like that despite the fact they recognize it's both wrong and they have nothing to gain from it, it's because practical alternatives seem very unappealing, that the system of patriarchy is entrenched and can't be defeated and so it has to be dealt with rather than combated.
I think that's a failure of the collective left to offer a world where combating it seems hopeful, seems realistic, seems achievable.
Put differently: If we accept prima facie that women who grudgingly say stuff like What Boy Hasn't cannot be redeemed into seeing that as a changable thing, then I don't know what we're doing here. Who's really the defeatist, the hopeless, the cynic in that scenario? To me, it seems like the obvious, the most malleable potential converts to a better, more just world for women are to communicate with people who express that kind of sentiment ("gosh this is everywhere, but don't complain about it") in a good faith way. I'll reiterate not *these* specific Republican operatives but like the normal people in your life or in public spaces who say stuff like that.
I mean, again, dismiss for a moment we're dealing with highly motivated partisan professional Republicans. Remember what brought me here; wheatrich saying the most absurd quote is "what boy hasn't done this in high school". My point: that's not absurd, it approaches a genuinely decent reading of situation, that a ****load of men are guilty here and this is deeply systemic and common. People who say that shouldn't be treated as if they're saying something absurd but coached into believing that doesn't have to be a persistent state of the world. It's not the most absurd quote, in my mind it's sort of the most hopeful thing you could hear from someone who wants to defend Kavanaugh. It's scores better than "she's lying why'd she wait so long" or "STERLING REPUTATION BOY SCOUT JUDGE, can't have done it." That seems far more irredeemable, far more deplorable, far more absurd, and some of those women said precisely that kind of stuff. "Boys do this all the time," on the other hand, is like half-way toward getting it!
Last edited by DVaut1; 09-22-2018 at 02:12 PM.