Posts

Showing posts from May, 2020
Whenever an incident of rape or sexual harassment triggers widespread public anger and discussion, many men tend to respond in one of two ways: (a) Join in with narrowly focused outrage directed just at the specific perpetrators of the incident, call for extreme punishments such as hanging them or shooting them, often suggesting that the proper judicial process be bypassed. (b) Get into conspiracy theory mode, dig up some small inconsistency or incompleteness with the narrative of the incident being discussed, or dig up some parallel incident where a woman supposedly made a fake accusation, and use this to discredit the entire narrative and suggest that it is all some kind of media/feminist/leftist conspiracy. Note that (a) and (b) are quite contradictory kinds of response. While (b) is ostensibly seeking to resist a rush to judgement, and warn against the dangers of trusting the mainstream narrative, (a) is seeking to promote and intensify such a rush to judgement, and take the m