The Missing Space Between "Believe All Women" And "Believe Women"

I was seriously considering writing a rejoinder to the silly claims that #BelieveWomen didn't in fact mean #BelieveAllWomen coming from Susan Faludi in the NYT and Monica Hesse in the Washington Post. We are to believe these days that, apparently now that Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee, Tara Reade's accusations meet with condemnation and contempt if they aren't outright ignored.

Luckily for me, Cathy Young in Quillette wrote a fair piece examining Reade's accusations. She found them as vaporous as I do, unearthing a trail of exaggerations from a "serial fabulist", while noting Biden's hypocrisy in endorsing the convict-upon-accusation standard implicit in the "Dear Colleague" letter.) Excerpt:

Even leaving aside general questions about Reade’s credibility, some of which are discussed below, her specific story about Biden never made much sense. Reade has offered several iterations of what happened to her in 1993, when she was a staff assistant in then-Senator Biden’s office. According to the most recent and damning version, first made public less than two months ago, Biden pushed her against a wall, kissed her, got his hand under her skirt and jammed his fingers inside her—all this in a public space in the Russell Senate Office Building, in a hallway where she had seen him talking to someone else moments earlier. (She claims that Biden steered her to a “side area,” but no one has been able to find an alcove or other space in the building’s hallways that would offer the required level of privacy.)

 

Time For Another Links Post

• The case of Katie Hill bothers me at multiple levels, not least because I largely think whatever people decide to do with their genitals in their private lives is their own affair. Yes, it was gross that her vengeful ex-husband leaked photos. Yes, it violated House ethics rules for her to sleep with an underling — but is that reasonable? Is the presumption now that all consensual sex between subordinates and supervisors is intrinsically unfair and coercive? I find myself agreeing, in part, with Jessica Valenti’s assessment of the situation (she was taken down by “revenge porn”), but this is the #MeToo world Valenti and her compatriots designed. Arguably, Hill created a #MeToo victim in the staffer, and those are the stakes here. For Valenti, women can only ever be victims, which says a great deal about her thought processes.
• Remember when Wired didn’t suck? It has to have been 20 years ago or more. The only reason I can think of for them to write this disingenuous, lazy piece, “Trans Athletes Are Posting Victories and Shaking Up Sports“ is to garner hate-clicks:

  Transgender athletes are having a moment. At all levels of sport, they’re stepping onto the podium and into the headlines. New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard won two gold medals at the Pacific Games, and college senior CeCé Telfer became the NCAA Division II national champion in the 400-meter run. Another senior, June Eastwood, has been instrumental to her cross-country team’s success. At the high school level, Terry Miller won the girls’ 200-meter dash at Connecticut’s state open championship track meet.
  
  These recent performances are inherently praiseworthy—shining examples of what humans can accomplish with training and effort. But as more transgender athletes rise to the top of their fields, some vocal opponents are also expressing outrage at what they see as transgender athletes ruining sports for cisgendered girls and women.

  “Training”, I suppose, which equals “going through male puberty and then simply declaring yourself to be female”. The question of motive inevitably arises, and while, yes, it’s easy to impute the urge for easy podium places and trophies as the primary draw of this cheating approach, it also is irrelevant. (CeCe Telfer particularly strikes me as mercenary enough to be in this class.) Biological males are stronger than women, on average and especially at the right side of the bell curve. This is not hard. Bending over backwards to cater to the delusional, narcissistic, and even sociopathic is absolute nonsense.
• Deadspin was at its best when pursuing stories other sports media wouldn’t touch. I seem to recall they were unafraid of the Joe Paterno fall to earth caused by his covering for Jerry Sandusky and the latter’s buggering of young boys, and they likewise went after Ray Rice (though that story broke on TMZ Sports). Now comes the news that editor Barry Petchesky has been fired amid a “stick to sports” edict from new owners G/O Media (the second rebranding since they were spun off the old Gawker Media in bankruptcy court). I have a hard time mustering much concern for him and those who quit in sympathy, mainly because a site that feels it meet to give airtime to a grown-ass woman rape-shaming her pre-sexual son has not only lost its way, it has gone insane.
• A free press is only interesting to people who work in it if they can get paid, apparently, so former Time editor Richard Stengel is penning stupid op-eds in the Washington Post claiming we need to gut the First Amendment, because, reasons.
• Emma Sulkowicz is now fun at parties because, libertarian, or something. Protip: apologize to Paul Nungesser, then I might believe some of this stuff is anything other than a stunt to get your name back in the news.
• First Circuit Court of Appeals to John Doe in Doe v. Boston College, scheduled for argument next week: sorry, Jeanne Suk Gearson, your attorney whom you have paid for many weeks if not months of preparation, may not defend you in court, because, reasons. This is the court putting its finger on the scales of justice, and if I were a betting man, I would put money that this is a politicized punishment.

Aziz Ansari And The Wild Ride Down At Babe.net

You will read few weirder things this week than this story at TheCut.com about the self-immolation of Babe.net in the wake of their Aziz Ansari story that went explosively viral. Excerpt (emboldening mine):

Every internet era gets the insurgent women’s site it deserves. Jezebel broke new ground with an article about a tampon stuck up a writer’s vagina; xoJane, a microgeneration later, outdid that with a cat hairball found in the same cavity. The Betches defended their right, as feminists (or not, who cares), to Brazilian-wax their vaginas, via sorority-girl screeds. Like the Betches, babe.net certainly wasn’t built to be feminist in any kind of traditional sense (after all, Murdoch was a funder and anarchic page-view-getting was the ethos). And yet babe.net was created during an era when to be a woman saying just about anything online was now, theoretically, classified as feminist. When I asked them about it, the site’s writers described theirs as “not the brand of feminism where we have to unconditionally support every woman no matter what she does. Because women can be problematic too.”

Unusually, the final quote in that graf shows a surprising amount of self-awareness in an era when the brand is, shall we say, a bit tarnished. Of course, no salacious story like this, one in which “28-year-olds managed 24-year-olds who managed 20-year-olds” and sloppy after-work drinks led to hookups led to professional and sexual jealousy, would have any ending other than

And so, a group of five staffers — including three writers who produced much of the site’s content — decided to organize their rage, which had boiled over, at last and all at once. They weren’t just mad about the after-work drunken sloppiness that had seeped into the professional groundwater. They were mad about a lot. They were mad about the whole power imbalance inherent to working for a website that translated their most intimate experiences and identities and beliefs into clicks. They were mad that their female managers didn’t better protect them. When Aburto was asked to star in a video series called Fight Me, she told her managers that the content they wanted her to produce forced her to perform as a caricature of a black woman. Her managers apologized and told her she didn’t have to, but the damage was done. Even now, some former Babe staffers talk about their grievances in the language of raw betrayal; they can’t quite express what was different about the site or the office environment, but the workplace had become, they all make clear, a catastrophe; $30,000-odd a year just wasn’t worth it.

This latter sum is really head-scratching: who signs up to live in famously expensive New York, even Brooklyn, at such a sum? Are these daughters of privilege churning out article after article of drunken sexual liaisons? But no, in the next sentence, we learn that one writer, the pseudonymous Chloe, “would have quit, but financially ... couldn’t”. The stillborn strike amounted to naught, and eventually the grand Facebook ad retooling claimed them. Somewhere, a screenplay beckons.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg On #MeToo

A remarkably even-handed interview at The Atlantic of Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the subject of #MeToo. Of interest here:

Rosen: What about due process for the accused?

Ginsburg: Well, that must not be ignored and it goes beyond sexual harassment. The person who is accused has a right to defend herself or himself, and we certainly should not lose sight of that. Recognizing that these are complaints that should be heard. There’s been criticism of some college codes of conduct for not giving the accused person a fair opportunity to be heard, and that’s one of the basic tenets of our system, as you know, everyone deserves a fair hearing.

Rosen: Are some of those criticisms of the college codes valid?

Ginsburg: Do I think they are? Yes.

Rosen: I think people are hungry for your thoughts about how to balance the values of due process against the need for increased gender equality.

Ginsburg: It’s not one or the other. It’s both. We have a system of justice where people who are accused get due process, so it’s just applying to this field what we have applied generally.

Late Friday Links

• Traditional Male Roles Are Awful, Except If You Want To Date Me Dep't: Nonscientific poll of OKCupid users shows a significant minority (45%) wants to be pursued in dating. 75% of female members responding identified as feminists, opposite 23% of women in a 2013 poll.
•  Finally, SciAm gives some editorial space to rational views on sexism in science.
• Pussy hats are so 2017.
• Kamala Harris Is A Monster, Part 3236: her fake feminism problem.
• Sorry, Conor, Moira Donegan Is An Amoral Monster. Sully explains:
  

  The essay is, to my mind, eloquent, beautifully written, even moving at times, but baffling. I read it waiting for the moment when she took responsibility for what she did, or apologized to the innocent people she concedes may have been slandered. But it never came. It’s worth recalling here exactly what she and others did. They created an online forum in which anonymous people could make accusations about men whose careers and reputations would potentially be destroyed as a consequence. There was absolutely no attempt to separate out what was true or untrue, what was substantiated and what was not. “Please never name an accuser” she advised upfront in the document. And then: “[P]lease don’t remove highlights or names.” No second thoughts allowed. The doc openly concedes its grave claims should be “taken with a grain of salt.” In her essay, Donegan actually cites this as exonerating evidence, as if reckless disregard for the truth were a positive virtue for a journalist, and not actually a definition of libel.

  It's garbage, the ultimate confession from an apparent proponent of "believe the victim" ideology that assumes the presence of a vagina makes the speaker somehow immune to self-deception, narcissism, or vanity.
• Defund The Women's Studies Departments, #3,645 in a series.