Kavanaugh/Blasey Ford Sexual Assault Allegations Hearing

[fraurosena]

13 minutes ago, AmazonGrace said:

I have been thinking back about my younger days when I hung out at night clubs and parties. There were several young men who groped or tried to kiss me without consent but I never even thought about reporting any of that because it was so common and you learned to think it was nothing. I couldn't report any of that now because I don't remember any names or faces specifically, it wasn't something that stood out from the normal, so to speak, there was usually at least one who  grinded on women on the dance floor.

It never occurred to me to call the cops on the dude who showed me his dick  in the underpass because it was common knowledge that he did it all the time and nothing ever happened to him as a consequence. I don't remember his face just the dick.

I didn't report the man  who followed me in his car and offered me a hundred to have sex with him because he drove away eventually and I wasn't hurt. I don't remember his face or what his car was like. 

I talked to  my  husband for the first time in the corridor in front of the bathroom I'd just been hiding in  to get away from a drunk guy who asked me to come read him bedtime stories, grabbed my waist and lifted me up so I hit my head on the ceiling. It never occurred to me to report him either. And I couldn't anymore, I don't remember his name or his face or what else he said, other than that his girlfriend was out of town

I'm sure they don't remember me at all

Men have been getting away with a lot of this shit because women have been conditioned to shrug and keep quiet and let it go.

And it was so common that there must be a lot of male coworkers and relativesvand neighbors and clients and friends and fathers of young sons and daughters who did this shit at some point in their lives and thought nothing of it afterwards because they got away with it

 

This is a really good article explaining why most people didn't really think much of it.

The rape culture of the 1980s, explained by Sixteen Candles

Quote

When a third woman accused Brett Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct this week, Kavanaugh supporters immediately stepped forward with a familiar defense: It couldn’t have happened, because surely if it had, someone would have said something at the time.

In a sworn declaration delivered through her lawyer Michael Avenatti, Julie Swetnick avowed that she witnessed Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh drug girls at high school house parties where the girls were later “gang raped.” Swetnick further says that Kavanaugh was present at a party where she herself was drugged and raped, although she does not directly say that he participated in her rape.

In a statement released by the White House, Kavanaugh (who has denied all three allegations against him) called Swetnick’s statement “ridiculous” and “from the Twilight Zone.” His denial was widely echoed by supporters to whom the idea that such terrible things could happen on a routine basis, and that no one would do anything to stop them or even avoid the parties, seems absurd.

If a crime happened, this argument presumes, surely everyone involved would have recognized that it was terribly wrong and someone would have spoken up at the time.

But if there’s one thing we can take away from the popular culture of the 1980s, when the alleged events took place, it’s that a sexual assault at that time might not have been immediately clear as what it was, for participants and observers alike. Some of the most popular comedies of the ’80s are filled with supposedly hilarious sequences that portray what in 2018 would be unambiguously considered date rape.

As long as everybody involved is acquainted with each other, these movies tend to treat those rapes as harmless hijinks. They don’t really count. They’re funny — even in movies as sweet and romantic as Sixteen Candles.

The cultural understanding of rape in the 1980s was fundamentally different from how we understand it today

“I have a difficult time believing any person would continue to go to – according to the affidavit – ten parties over a two-year period where women were routinely gang raped and not report it,” tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) after Swetnick came forward with her story.

“One obvious question about this account: Why would she constantly attend parties where she believed girls were being gang-raped?” asked National Review editor Rich Lowry.

“Please someone help me with this,” wrote conservative writer David French. “Georgetown Prep boys frequently committed gang rape. Lots of people knew they were committing gang rape. And despite this common knowledge no one has talked publicly for three decades, until the day before a crucial Senate hearing. What?”

This argument has been a common response to accusations of sexual misconduct over the past year of #MeToo discourse: It couldn’t have happened, because if it had, someone would have said so at the time. But as German Lopez has written for Vox, there are plenty of issues in our criminal justice system that prevent survivors of sexual violence from reporting.

Survivors who come forward are likely to be harassed and blamed for not keeping their mouths shut, they are likely to face a hostile response from police officers, and the process of investigating the crime can be so traumatic for the survivor that it’s sometimes called “the second rape” — and after all that, odds are low that the attacker is ever likely to face legal consequences for their actions.

It’s worth noting another reason that Kavanaugh’s accusers in particular wouldn’t have been comfortable coming forward about what happened to them in the early 1980s. The way our culture thought about rape at the time was fundamentally different than it is now.

In the 1980s, “rape” meant an attack from a stranger in a dark alley, not something that acquaintances did to each other at house parties where everyone knows each other. In 1982, it would have been difficult for women like Swetnick and Christine Blasey Ford to find the language to describe what had happened to them.

“I completely reject that notion,” said French on Twitter when presented with the argument that the way our culture talked about rape in the 1980s was different than it is today. “I was in high school in the 1980s. Gang rape was viewed as a horrible crime then, too.”

It’s true that gang rape was considered a horrible crime in the 1980s — but in the abstract, when thought of as a crime perpetrated by a group of strangers on an innocent, sober, virginal good-girl victim in a dark alley. But it’s simply not the case that the mainstream culture at large in the ’80s had the same ideas we do today about sexual assault — especially when it’s perpetrated by people who know each other, at parties, around alcohol.

We can tell that it’s not the case because there are many beloved, iconic movies made in the 1980s that built entire comedic subplots over what we can better recognize today as rape scenes. And in those movies, rape wasn’t a horrible crime. It was supposed to be funny.

Sixteen Candles’ Jake Ryan is the dream boy of the 1980s. He’s also an accessory to date rape.

The ’80s were a decade of film comedy hugely informed by the recent success of 1978’s Animal House, which features a rape fantasy scene filmed in what critic Emily Nussbaum describes as “the perviest possible way.”

It was the decade that gave us Revenge of the Nerds, which, as Noah Brand put it at the Good Men Project, “has so much rape culture, you could use it to make rape yogurt”; it gave us Police Academy and its “nonconsensual blowjobs are a fun and light-hearted prank” ethos. And perhaps most disturbingly, it gave us the comedic rape subplot in Sixteen Candles, John Hughes’s much beloved and iconic 1984 teen romance.

Sixteen Candles isn’t a college sex romp like Revenge of the Nerds or Animal House. It’s a high school love story. It’s been celebrated for 34 years for its sweet, romantic heart. Yet it is entirely willing to feature a lengthy, supposedly hilarious subplot in which a drunk and unconscious girl is passed from one boy to another and then raped.

The drunk girl in question is Caroline (Haviland Morris), the girlfriend to romantic hero Jake Ryan, and if you know one thing about Sixteen Candles, it’s that Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling) is perfect. He is the impossibly cool, impossibly beautiful senior guy who is dating the impossibly beautiful senior girl — and yet as soon as Jake Ryan hears that gawky, awkward sophomore Samantha (Molly Ringwald) has a crush on him, he immediately begins to like her back, defying all the laws of God, man, and high school popularity.

Jake Ryan is the embodiment of a fantasy so compelling it instantly made Sixteen Candlesiconic: What if the object of all your romantic high school dreams decided to pursue you without you having to expend any effort whatsoever, just because they could see that you were, like, deeper and more special than the rest of the school? What if they somehow saw that without you ever having to have a conversation or interact with them in any way?

“Jake stands the test of time,” wrote Hank Stuever in the Washington Post in 2004. He quotes a 34-year-old woman who grew up on Jake Ryan: “Oh, gosh, Jake Ryan. Just thinking about it now, I get … kind of … It’s all just too good to be true.”

Jake Ryan’s reputation as the ideal dream boy of every teenage girl’s deepest fantasies has lasted for decades. Jake, writes Stuever, “is Christ, redeeming the evil sins of high school. Jake as the ideal. Jake as the eternal belief in something better.”

Yet Jake Ryan cold-bloodedly hands a drunk and unconscious Caroline over to another guy and says, “Have fun.”

In 1984, you could be a perfect dream boy and also be an accessory to date rape. They were not mutually exclusive ideas. In fact, they reinforced each other.

In Sixteen Candles, Caroline’s rape is presented as her fault — and as funny

In the moral universe of Sixteen Candles, Jake is allowed to be callous to Caroline without losing his dream boy status because, Sixteen Candles briskly assures us, Caroline is not the right kind of girl. She has breasts, and she drinks. She’s potentially a little bit slutty. “She doesn’t know shit about love,” Jake explains. “The only thing she cares about is partying.”

The fact that Jake casually despises his longtime girlfriend doesn’t reflect poorly on him because it doesn’t affect the fantasy at the heart of Sixteen Candles. What Sixteen Candles is selling is the dream of the unattainable guy falling in love with the everygirl. So for the fantasy to work, Jake must prove his deep and abiding love for Sam. Ignoring and degrading Caroline is an easy shortcut to that goal, because in the moral universe of Sixteen Candles, the more you degrade one girl — the whore — the more you can exalt the virgin.

So Caroline gets drunk at a party and passes out in her boyfriend’s room, where presumably she believes she will be safe. Jake, disgusted, comments that “I could violate her 10 different ways if I wanted to,” but now that the pure and virginal charms of Sam are in his sights, “I’m just not interested anymore.”

Instead, he passes her over to Ted (Anthony Michael Hall) — who is listed in the credits only as “the Geek” — reasoning, “She’s so blitzed she won’t know the difference.” The poor Geek has had no luck with girls, so Jake illustrates his generous magnanimity by installing the Geek in his own fancy car, with his own fancy unconscious girlfriend next to him, and says, “Have fun.”

In the car, Caroline regains consciousness long enough to ask who the Geek is, and Jake assures her that the Geek is, in fact, him, a casual manipulation that Caroline is too drunk to register as false. The pair drives off into the night, and Caroline climbs into the Geek’s lap and purrs, “I love you,” disoriented and out of it. The Geek looks straight into the camera lens and grins, “This is getting good.”

The next time we see Caroline, she’s unconscious again, and the Geek is having his friends photograph him next to her unresponsive body. “Ted, you’re a legend,” they gush.

The next morning, a newly sober Caroline and Geek conclude that they had sex the night before. The Geek asks Caroline if she enjoyed herself. “You know, I have this weird feeling I did,” Caroline says.

“She had to have a feeling about it, rather than a thought,” wrote Molly Ringwald in the New Yorker last year, in a long, empathetic reexamination of her work with John Hughes, “because thoughts are things we have when we are conscious, and she wasn’t.”

The camera lingers on the mismatched pair — the beautiful cheerleader and the Geek, who we all know never, ever would have had sex if the cheerleader had anything to say about it in her right mind — and waits for us to laugh. The joke is that they had sex despite the fact that the cheerleader didn’t want to. It’s funny.

The Geek’s culpability here is muddy. He is ostensibly relieved of responsibility for the encounter because Caroline is the one who came onto him — although he was sober enough to recognize that she wouldn’t do so if she weren’t drunk. And like Caroline, he was drunk enough to black out the next morning, throwing his own ability to consent into question — although he was sober enough to drive, and unlike Caroline, he wasn’t fading in and out of consciousness all night.

This is how rape culture was perpetuated in the ’80s — and still is today

Whether or not the Geek is directly responsible for committing date rape, the fact remains that Caroline had sex she didn’t consent to, and the movie expects its audience to respond to that development with righteous glee. Jake — perfect, dreamy, too-good-to-be-true Jake Ryan — orchestrated the situation while in perfect control of his faculties. The movie expects that fact to make him only dreamier, because every time Jake degrades Caroline it proves more firmly that he considers Sam to be special and above degradation.

Here are the basic ideas embedded in this plot:

• Girls who drink are asking for it. Girls who have sex are asking for it. Girls who go to parties are asking for it. They are asking for it even if they only drink and have sex and party with their monogamous boyfriends. Whatever happens to that kind of girl as a result is funny.
• Boys are owed girls. A good guy will help his nerdy bro to get a girl. Her consent is not necessary or desired.
• To avoid being the kind of girl who gets raped, you need to earn male approval. If you earn male approval, other girls might be raped, but you won’t be, and that will prove that you are special.
• Once you earn male approval, it can be taken away — as Caroline’s goes away once Jake tires of her — and then you’ll go from being the kind of girl who doesn’t get raped to the kind of girl who does.
• A good guy can participate in this whole system and remain an unsullied dream guy.
• The kind of girl who gets raped has no right to complain about what happens to her. Also it isn’t rape.

That’s how mainstream culture presented rape, and thus affirmed rape culture, in 1984.

On many levels, it’s not far off from how large parts of our culture think about rape today — but we bury those values now. In 2018, we no longer enshrine these values in stories of unambiguous rape that are embedded into beloved romantic classics. We offer alternative narratives and are capable of having conversations about date rape.

In the 1980s, though, alternative narratives were few and far between. They were mostly offered only by feminism, and in the 1980s, mainstream culture considered feminism shrill and unfashionable.

That doesn’t mean that people went to see movies like Sixteen Candles and immediately thought, “Wow, that looks like fun, I’d better go get a bunch of girls drunk and have sex with them without their consent.” Sixteen Candles is not single-handedly responsible for the rape culture of the 1980s. But like all popular culture, it does both reflect and help to shape the social context in which it exists.

The dominant cultural narrative at the time of Brett Kavanaugh’s high school experience was the one offered by Sixteen Candles. And it taught any girl who went to a party and got assaulted by an acquaintance that whatever happened to her was surely her fault, that it proved she was the wrong kind of girl, that it was funny, that she had nothing whatsoever to complain about, and that it absolutely wasn’t rape.

Under those circumstances, the mystery is not why “any person would continue to go to … ten parties over a two-year period where women were routinely gang raped and not report it,” as Sen. Graham argued. The mystery is why anyone ever came forward with their story at all.

 

[laPapessaGiovanna]

Crediting @hoipolloi with finding this interesting article that I can't read cos I'm in Europe ?. Would anyone be so kind to look for the interesting bits? Tia

[fraurosena]

6 minutes ago, laPapessaGiovanna said:

Crediting @hoipolloi with finding this interesting article that I can't read cos I'm in Europe ?. Would anyone be so kind to look for the interesting bits? Tia

Here it is:

Here's what experts who study sexual violence say about the credibility of Christine Blasey Ford's testimony

I've bolded the interesting bits.

Quote

What Christine Blasey Ford remembers best about that night 30-plus years ago is the laughter.

It came, she said, from Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge — two high school boys who drunkenly locked her into the bedroom of a friend’s house where she was sexually assaulted by Kavanaugh.

In testimony Thursday to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ford described it as “uproarious laughter” shared by friends who were “having fun at my expense.” The memory of it is “indelible in the hippocampus,” she said, channeling her training as a research psychologist.

Other aspects of that night are seared in her memory as well: the bed on the right side of the room where the alleged attack occurred; the sound of the boys “pinballing” their way down the stairway after Ford had locked herself in the bathroom; the sparsely furnished living room she passed as she exited the house.

Yet there are also significant gaps in her memory, including how she made her way home in her traumatized state.

To some members of the committee, those missing memories cast doubt on all of Ford’s allegations. But should they?

In an effort to assess her credibility — and by implication, that of Kavanaugh — The Times asked experts in sexual trauma whether Ford’s testimony was consistent with the research findings and clinical observations they have made or encountered in their own work.

Here’s what they told us.

Patricia Resick, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, Duke University

Who she is: Resick is a leader in the field of sexual trauma. Her research focuses on the lasting effects of traumatic events, particularly on women. She has worked with rape victims for more than 40 years, and since the 1980s, she has been developing and testing cognitive process therapy as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

What’s your overall reaction to Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony?

I am not her therapist and have not met with Ford personally. I am reacting based on my experience with sexual assault survivors.

She said she doesn’t remember where it took place. That rings true because until you know you are in danger, there is no reason to remember everyday details.

Another thing that rings true is that Ford was clearly emotional when talking about the details of the assault. She says it drastically changed her life, and that she was too embarrassed to tell her parents that she was at a house drinking with boys.

Do you find it strange that she didn’t report the assault at the time?

She says that she tried to ignore the assault because it made her anxious. Avoidance is a typical response and part of PTSD. She tried to push the event away and not think about it.

Were there details that stuck out to you?

The discussion about Ford and her husband going to therapy because she wanted two front doors was a unique moment. It actually is corroborating evidence about the impact of the assault on her life. I mean, who else needs two front doors?

There were several emotional moments during her testimony. What did those say to you?

When Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) congratulated her on her bravery, she looked like she was going to cry. The same thing happened when Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) praised her. When Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) called her testimony “powerful,” again, she looked teary. After lunch Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) talked about her sacrifice and bravery. She cried again.

In all of these cases, she was overwhelmed by the praise she was receiving. Given how hard this has been for her to do, I think she was surprised by the praise. I expect her self-esteem has been so damaged that she has trouble taking in all the positive statements praising her.

Although there were gaps in her memory, there were things she recalled with extreme clarity. Does that signal anything?

Her strongest memory of the event was the boys’ laughter. She remembers “two friends having a really good time with each other.”

This speaks to the humiliation and shame that sexual assault victims feel. The shame and humiliation are often more important than the fear and speak more to why she stayed silent for so long.

Tracey J. Shors, distinguished professor of behavioral & systems neuroscience at Rutgers University

Who she is: Shors is a neuroscientist who studies memory and its role in overcoming trauma, including sexual violence. She has devised neuroscience-based treatments for PTSD. Her work also examines how stressful events in the past affect behavior and mental health in the future, especially in women.

Were there aspects of her testimony that are typical of sexual assault survivors?

In our studies, we show that women with sexual violence experience often have many symptoms of anxiety and depression and trauma. Clearly, Ford is a poised and intelligent person with sophisticated knowledge and insight into her own mind. But you can also tell that this is not easy for her.

Did anything strike you about the things Ford remembers from the night of the alleged assault?

It is interesting to me that Ford says she remembers the context and the layout of the bedroom, the bathroom where she hid and the stairwell to the room. We just published a study showing that women with sexual violence history experience vivid memories of the spatial and temporal context of their most stressful life event.

What else does her account tell you about memory?

The brain is always encoding memories, most of which we could not necessarily be able to recall years or decades later. Otherwise, we would remember every time and every place we ever parked our car.

But we do tend to remember stressful events. We do this because we need to use those memories to help us survive now and in the future. Memories are not there just for reminiscing — they are vital for our survival.

It is also important to realize that the people at the party who were not assaulted or stressed by the event are not as likely to remember it. For her, it was a memorable event; for them, it may have just been another time hanging out with few friends hanging at a house. This applies to the people downstairs but perhaps even for the two boys, especially if they were intoxicated.

Sherry Hamby director of the Life Paths Appalachian Research Center

Who she is: Hamby is a licensed clinical psychologist who has studied violence for more than 20 years. She helps conduct the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence for the U.S. Justice Department. She is also a research professor of psychology at the University of the South.

In watching this testimony, what resonated for you and why?

There were many powerful moments in her testimony, but one that will stay with me is the way, with quavering voice, she described them laughing at her while they were violating her consent. It fits a textbook definition of callousness and objectification.

What do you make of the gaps in Ford’s memory?

Humans don’t record events the way that cameras do. Most days we might commit few events to long-term memory.

Traumatic memories are different. Our brains are being flooded with chemicals such as cortisol and norepinephrine that can “sear” events in the way that Ford described.

We remember dangerous and traumatic events better than other events because it has survival value to remember them. However, she didn’t know beforehand that an assault was going to happen, and so there’s no reason to think that the earlier events of the day — or even what happened once she had gotten away — would be seared in her memory the way the assault itself was.

I have seen a few commentators express surprise that she could remember details such as having his hand held over her mouth but not remember the date or the time. That is truly ridiculous. Victims are in survival mode during these events. Dates and times are irrelevant constructs when you are fighting for your life.

These factors are also the reason why no one else at the party would remember it in any detail. It was just “normal time” to them — no norepinephrine, no cortisol, no danger. This whole event may have been pretty routine for Kavanaugh in a lot of ways, and it may not have been seared in his memory in the way it was in hers.

What about the fact that she remembers the laughter so clearly?

The way she said that the laughter stuck in her mind makes sense. Shaming and humiliation can be just as damaging as physical assault, and linger long past when bruises and broken bones are healed.

Did you find her account believable?

She gave one of the most credible accounts I have ever heard from a victim.

The “victim” label is very stigmatizing and associated with stereotypes of passivity and weakness. Ford departed from those stereotypes in important ways. She is an accomplished psychologist, professor and researcher, and I was glad to see those accomplishments presented at the beginning of the hearing. Not only that, but you could also see her expertise throughout her comments. She was very brave and a role model for all survivors.

Despite her strength, you can see the lingering effects of her victimization — how it has affected her for years, and how, even more than 30 years later, it is difficult to talk about.

Any other reactions?

I would also say one more thing regarding this memory issue. If the reports about Kavanaugh’s extensive binge-drinking are true, then that would raise questions about his ability to assert what he did and did not do while he was drinking. That could also explain why he might not have specific memories of these events.

Kevin Swartout, associate professor of psychology at Georgia State University

Who he is: Swartout is an expert on the social attitudes and behaviors that contribute to sexual violence, especially against women. Among other things, he studies how alcohol, drugs, peers and social attitudes can fuel aggressive behavior. One of his specialties is understanding how young men — those a year or two older than Kavanaugh was at the time of the alleged assault — negotiate the transition to college.

How do you assess the credibility of the claims made by these two witnesses?

First of all, let me caution that it is impossible for me to determine how credible the accusations are against Kavanaugh. All I can do is speak to the match between the details that were presented during the hearing and what we know about sexual violence perpetrators from the research literature.

Having stated that, there were several moments from Kavanaugh’s testimony that especially caught my attention.

He demonstrated a great deal of hostility during the hearing, especially toward some of the female senators on the committee. He had a contentious exchange with Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) at the outset, where he cut her off mid-sentence numerous times. There was also the exchange with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn), which he later apologized for, where he seemingly tried to flip the power differential by turning the question back on her.

The results of hundreds of studies to this point suggest that levels of hostility toward women, which includes a drive to exert power over women, are positively related with levels of sexual violence.

Do attitudes like that, and their ability to predict behavior, remain pretty stable over a person’s lifetime?

Across several studies, I have found consistent evidence for a group of young men who perpetrate the type of sexual violence described in these allegations, but only at a relatively young age — about 14 to 20 years old. These men then stop perpetrating altogether either before or shortly after they begin college.

This is part of a more general trend researchers have identified regarding adolescent antisocial behavior that disappears once an individual reaches adulthood.

Based on my research, 70% to 75% of young men who perpetrated sexual violence only do so during a relatively limited time frame. Very few of the men who commit sexual violence are serial offenders, so I was not surprised by the idea that these behaviors were limited to adolescence.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

 

[Howl]

4 hours ago, luv2laugh said:

Great article. The Kavanaugh hearings are a commentary on Mormonism according to this article: https://rewire.news/religion-dispatches/2018/09/28/kavanaugh-hearings-are-a-commentary-on-mormonism/

Wow!  Thank you for posting this article.  I'd been following the Sam Young excommunication (not in depth), but everything in this article dovetails into other things I've been reading and gives some serious insight into Orrin Hatch's indignant incandescent rage.  Don't forget also that über Mormon Mitt Romney came (relatively) close to the presidency. 

[Briefly]

My take is that if anyone does not believe her, then they are choosing not to believe her.  For the record, I 100% believe her and I am not surprised that she is being treated like she is.

[louisa05]

On 9/27/2018 at 7:27 PM, HarryPotterFan said:

 

I don’t want to hear another man’s opinion on Kavanaugh unless it’s moral outrage. I don’t want to hear sympathy, give him the benefit of the doubt, or what some douche posted “if you’re not watching the hearing you’re missing out on history.” It’s like telling women their trauma doesn’t matter. And these guys don’t get how much all of this opens up old traumas, then pours salt and lemon juice in the wound. Talking about Kavanaugh is just casual conversation.

 

I think that at the end of the day, the message is that women don't matter, period. We are useful accessories as long as we know our place. The moment we ask for a voice and to be valued as equals, to have our rights and ourselves adequately legally protected or "interfere" in the running of the nation by calling out powerful men (Dr. Blaisey Ford) or running for President, we have crossed the line and must be pushed back down. 

I'm extremely cynical about all of this. And depressed. 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Spoiler

 

June 29, 1997

By MICHAEL NEWMAN

WASTED
Tales of a Gen-X Drunk.
By Mark Gauvreau Judge.
Hazelden, $21.95.

ark Gauvreau Judge has written a naive, earnest book that might have been subtitled ''I Was a Teen-Age Alcoholic'' if weren't so, well, naive and earnest. Judge's youth in suburban Washington was rich in all the usual adolescent traditions, like drinking large amounts of beer, engaging in wordless arguments with his father and passing out on the beach. He attended Roman Catholic schools, and most of his experiences are straight out of the parochial school playbook. Like most everybody else, he alternated between deception and rebellion in school, and he recounts the obligatory run-ins with nuns (he stole pens!) and, later, priests (he dressed up as a priest and tried to cover someone's house with toilet paper!). This is well-traveled territory, and Judge's writing does not allow for any interesting detours -- especially when he starts dropping phrases like, ''Only years later would I understand what was happening.'' What was happening, he later reveals, is that he was becoming an alcoholic. The last third of ''Wasted'' is devoted to this realization and his response to it, and while his candor and perseverance are admirable, his experiences here are even less interesting than his thin yarns of Catholic-school shenanigans. Like most new converts, Judge is a zealot, and his proselytizing style becomes tiresome. In the end, ''Wasted'' does stand as a cautionary tale -- not necessarily for alcoholics, but for anyone who wants to write about alcoholism.

 

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/29/bib/970629.newman.html

[Rachel333]

9 hours ago, fraurosena said:

This is a really good article explaining why most people didn't really think much of it.

The rape culture of the 1980s, explained by Sixteen Candles

That was good, but honestly I've seen and experienced the exact same things @AmazonGrace describes at nightclubs and parties this decade and people still didn't think much of it. In that respect it's not an 80s thing at all.

Now what I haven't seen are the gang rapes that have been described, and it's incredibly disturbing to see so many people say that kind of behavior was common in that environment at the time.

[Maggie Mae]

I'm cynical and depressed as well, Louisa. 

[SassyPants]

I believe Ford's account.

I think perhaps Kavanaugh does not remember the event because he was very intoxicated.

 

Regardless, there are questions about this candidate with no clear answers, so...this candidate should be denied this lifetime appointment. Since his position can not be proven, there is no place in the US SC for a person with a potential for these kinds of behaviors in his past-

Does it suck? Do many of us have less than healthy behaviors in our pasts and especially during later adolescence? Yes and Yes, but a USSCJ has to be the BEST candidate, not someone with this very probable past-

Too bad, so sad.

Find a better candidate.

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The roots of male rage, on show at the Kavanaugh hearing"

Spoiler

Martha Nussbaum is a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Chicago and author of “The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis.”

A wave is sweeping across our nation: a wave of fear-driven male rage. We see it not only in the hysterical outbursts from Republicans during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh (Kavanaugh himself, suddenly shrill, as well as committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham), but also more widely in the dark allegations of women “weaponizing the #MeToo movement,” as if masculinity itself were under attack. We are even told that good parents should tremble for the future of their sons when women can make claims against them. And, indeed, men are trembling. At the Kavanaugh hearings, as many remarked, Christine Blasey Ford’s acknowledged fear was matched and even surpassed by quivering in the voices and gestures of Republicans. What is going on?

American men do have genuine reasons for anxiety. The traditional jobs that many men have filled are disappearing, thanks to automation and outsourcing. The jobs that remain require, in most cases, higher education, which is increasingly difficult for non-affluent families to afford. We should indeed tremble for the future of both men and women in our country unless we address that problem, and related problems of declining health and well-being for working-class men.

But our public discussion does not stay focused on such genuine issues. Fear and anger have found ways to displace themselves onto other targets, above all women and their unprecedented outspokenness. Misogyny takes the place of serious deliberation.

Three emotions, all infused by fear, play a role in today’s misogyny. The most obvious is anger — at women making demands, speaking up, in general standing in the way of unearned male privilege. Women were once good mothers and good wives, props and supports for male ambition, the idea goes –but here they are asserting themselves in the workplace. Here they are daring to speak about their histories of sexual abuse at the hands of powerful men. It’s okay for women to charge strangers with rape, especially if the rapist is of inferior social status. But to dare to accuse the powerful is to assail a bastion of privilege to which men still cling.

Coupled with anger is envy. All over the world, women are seeing unprecedented success in higher education, holding a majority of university seats. In our nation many universities quietly practice affirmative action for males with inferior scores, to achieve a “gender balance” that is sometimes dictated by commitment to male sports teams, given Title IX’s mandate of proportional funding.

But men still feel that women are taking “their” places in college classes, in professional schools. A few years ago, top law schools endured an ugly envy wave, when a site that purported to give advice on law school admissions quickly became a porn site in which named female law students were woven into fictional and grossly false pornographic narratives by anonymous males, suggesting their utter unsuitability for the practice of law (despite their fine scores and grades).

Envy, propelled by fear, can be even more toxic than anger, because it involves the thought that other people enjoy the good things of life which the envier can’t hope to attain through hard work and emulation. Envy is the emotion of Aaron Burr in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” (and in history), who longs despairingly to be “in the room where it happens.” Cheated of their automatic gender passport to being “in the room,” many men have become toxic enviers.

And then, beneath the hysteria, lurks a more primitive emotion: disgust at women’s animal bodies. Human beings are probably hard-wired to find signs of their mortality and animality disgusting, and to shrink from contamination by bodily fluids and blood. But in every culture something worse kicks in: the projection of these feared and loathed characteristics onto a vulnerable group or groups from whom the dominant group wishes to distance itself. In the United States, we observe this dynamic in racism, in homophobia and even in revulsion toward the bodies of people who are aging. But in every culture male disgust targets women, as emblems of bodily nature, symbolic animals by contrast to males, almost angels with pure minds.

Disgust for women’s bodily fluids is fully compatible with sexual desire. Indeed, it often singles out women seen as promiscuous, the repositories of many men’s fluids. As with the shunning of sex workers until the present day, as with the apparent defamation of Renate Dolphin in Kavanaugh’s infamous yearbook, men often crow with pride over intercourse with a woman imagined as sluttish and at the same time defame and marginalize her. As the great philosopher Adam Smith observed about post-coital disgust, “When we have dined, we order the covers to be removed.” Disgust for the female body is always tinged with anxiety, since the body symbolizes mortality. Disgust is often more deeply buried than envy and anger, but it compounds and intensifies the other negative emotions. Our president seems to be especially gripped by disgust: for women’s menstrual fluids, their bathroom breaks, the blood imagined streaming from their surgical incisions, even their flesh, if they are more than stick-thin.

How can women combat this onslaught of fear-driven rage? Ford gave an example: with courage, dignity and truth. I believe that if we have courage (and I myself did not have courage until 2015 to name the man who assaulted me in 1968), we will ultimately prevail and reshape our society.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"The case against Kavanaugh isn’t just about sex. It’s about sexual humiliation."

Spoiler

As accusations fly about Brett Kavanaugh’s high school and college exploits, most women recognize the basic excuses deployed by his defenders. It didn’t happen; she’s lying. It might have happened, but it couldn’t have been him. Maybe it happened, but if it did, it was just horseplay. She was drunk, so she must be confused. He was drunk, so he shouldn’t be held responsible.

But there’s an equally familiar, and equally disturbing, thread through the allegations facing Kavanaugh, who has strongly denied committing assault. In each alleged incident, the woman at the center was not just a victim but the butt of a joke between men. 

“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter, between the two, and their having fun at my expense,” Christine Blasey Ford testified Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, recounting what she says was an attack by Kavanaugh when she was 15 years old and he was 17.

What she and Kavanaugh’s other accusers describe feels deeply familiar to many women. As for too many of us, my introduction to sexual norms and mores came from movies, television shows and real-life behavior that all modeled, with varying degrees of malice, the notion that good, clean teen-boy fun isn’t just about objectifying women. It’s also about laughing at them and mortifying them in a sacrifice to the larger cause of male bonding and group identity. 

A male classmate dared another one to loudly snap your bra strap in front of the whole social-studies class? Just a joke, calm down. A casual soccer game became a one-sided competition for boys to chase female players and pull down their shorts? Boys will be boys, so don’t take it personally. Rumors that are baroque in their sexual specificity about the new girl, or the fat girl, or the girl unlucky enough to develop breasts a year or two earlier than others? Is that really such a big deal?

So many of us either knew that girl or were that girl, which makes me consider that perhaps Kavanaugh is telling the truth when he professes not to recall these alleged incidents. In the rarefied milieu of elite prep schools and Ivy League colleges that nurtured him, jokes like these wouldn’t have been shocking or even particularly remarkable. They were the unacknowledged collateral damage of male bonding, blithely enacted on young women who didn’t have the luxury to forget about it.

 So while the tale of a 17-year-old boy chasing a 15-year-old girl into a bedroom, pinning her down and clamping his hand over her mouth as he inelegantly tugs at her clothes is bad enough, the real animating cause is the other boy in the room, egging him on and laughing. For women who’ve experienced something like them, the stories of Ford, Deborah Ramirez, Renate Schroeder Dolphin and Julie Swetnick don’t sound like simple youthful indiscretions, but rather like sickening visceral reminders of a time when our fear and pain were compounded by the snickers and cheers of those who witnessed it as entertainment. The smarmy references to “Renate Alumnius” on the yearbook pages of Kavanuagh and his friends; the laughter surrounding Ramirez, already an outsider among her Yale peers, as Kavanaugh allegedly wagged his penis in her face — these stories have been resonant for many women who have had their own bodies, fears and struggles to get away witnessed as entertainment.

If you grew up immersed in the popular culture of the 1980s, it was entertainment. There were countless teen comedies, blurred together in an almost indistinguishable mass, about horny, unfulfilled boys whose journey to manhood inevitably included the sexualized humiliation of their female peers. Peeping at girls in showers and locker rooms was a recurring theme (“Porky’s,” “Private School,” “School Spirit”), as was filming them without their knowledge (“Getting It On!”). John Hughes’s 1984 comedy, “Sixteen Candles,” had a teen girl at its center, but it also featured a handsome jock handing off his passed-out girlfriend to a younger nerd after musing that he could “violate her 10 different ways if I wanted to.” (That jock was the film’s romantic hero, by the way.) That same year, “Revenge of the Nerds,” billed as a triumphant comedy about the brainy underdogs outwitting the jocks who tormented them, suggested that the best way to exact payback against the popular kids was by installing secret cameras in a sorority house and distributing naked photos of a jock’s girlfriend.

Kavanaugh even blamed the yearbook reference to Schroeder Dolphin on the movies, in his testimony Thursday: Georgetown Prep students “wanted the yearbook to be some combination of ‘Animal House,’ ‘Caddyshack’ and ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High,’ which were all recent movies at that time. Many of us went along in the yearbook to the point of absurdity.” (Less convincingly, he also said the line had nothing to do with sex: “That yearbook reference was clumsily intended to show affection and that she was one of us.”)

Another standard storyline in these movies was punishing beautiful, haughty girls for the crime of not being interested in our heroes: In 1982’s “Zapped!,” Scott Baio plays a nerd gifted with telekinesis when a lab experiment goes wrong. He wastes no time using it to strip clothes off his popular, stuck-up crush. “Screwballs” in 1983 centered on a group of boys who plot to deflower, and thereby disgrace, a classmate named Purity Busch (yes, really), because she got them sent to detention.

The prevalence of sexual assault and humiliation in spaces where masculine dominance is prized has been documented and tracked for decades. Anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday’s 1990 book, “Fraternity Gang Rape” documented the dynamics of privilege and dominance acted out in hazing and rape rituals in the Ivy League. Less rigorously, Camille Paglia made her name as a provocateur with pronouncements like this one, from 1990’s “Sexual Personae”: “Feminism with its solemn Carrie Nation repressiveness cannot see what is for men the eroticism or fun element in rape, especially the wild, infectious delirium of gang rape.” Some of the most indelible media accounts of sexual assault involve communities that so prized the status and the potential of the perpetrators that they actively contributed to the secondary humiliation of the victims. 

Brushing off the allegations against Kavanaugh as bogus political gamesmanship downplays the ubiquity of sexual humiliation — of women, but also of lower-status men or those perceived as insufficiently masculine — baked into the tribalistic cultures of athletics, fraternities, the military and more. It also ignores an obvious question: What does it mean for a man who is accused not only of violating his female peers, but also of finding those violations hilarious, to fill a crucial vacancy on the Supreme Court?

The effort expended to portray Kavanaugh as a good man, a trustworthy coach to the girls basketball team at the Blessed Sacrament School and a dependable carpool dad seemed performative from the start. The alleged ugliness now seeping from the past plants a bright red flag on all that. I imagine those ponytailed, plaid-jumpered girls struggling to reconcile the “Coach K” they know with the boy being described by a growing number of women: one to whom girls were fodder for dirty jokes. And I imagine new generations of boys, already conditioned by a culture that rewards them for conforming to a narrow masculine ideal, looking to men who secured their leadership roles despite — and possibly because — they knew that strong bonds can be made stronger at the expense of women. 

Kavanaugh’s 2015 remark that “what happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep ” nods to the protection afforded powerful men by institutions that prize their potential and hope to share in their successes: College football rape scandals bank on the silence of coaches and athletic directors. An epidemic of sexual harassment and assault in the military persists with the help of higher-ups who look the other way. And a Supreme Court nominee can arrogantly believe that his past won’t surface because he’s confident in the structure that supports him — built on and by men who believe that women’s bodies and freedoms are just throwaway pawns in a game that’s rigged in their favor.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Hell hath no fury like an entitled white man denied"

Spoiler

“I’m so sick of white entitlement,” said a friend at dinner recently. It took me aback because of who was saying it. Like me, on the spectrum of African American activism, the friend swings more Martin Luther King Jr. than Malcolm X. And it surprised me, because the comment voiced a frustration whose grip has tightened around me of late.

Displays of white entitlement have been around us since before the founding of the republic (see: slavery and the Trail of Tears). But since the election of President Trump, said exhibitions of privilege have been more brazen. “BBQ Becky,” “Permit Patty” and “ID Adam” joined other absurd situations in which living while black was questioned by whites. And then there’s the case of Botham Shem Jean, a black man killed in his own apartment by a now-fired off-duty Dallas police officer.

That’s why Thursday’s wretched display of white (male) entitlement was especially galling. I can understand why Brett M. Kavanaugh erupted with anger. It was the lack of humility and decorum and contrition that canceled any human emotion I could have had for him as he fought back tears during the hearing over his imperiled Supreme Court nomination.

Kavanaugh’s words of rage in his opening statement were very similar to those uttered by Justice Clarence Thomas when he sat in the hot seat in 1991 over allegations of sexual harassment from Anita Hill. But the situations weren’t the same. Back then, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of empathy for Thomas. As an African American, I understood Thomas’s controlled fury. He was a living example of the admonition relatives gave me about successful black folks: There’s only so far “they” will let a black man rise. Keep your nose clean, lest you give “them” an excuse to tear you down. I didn’t want Thomas to ascend to the Supreme Court, but his humanity came through when he sternly said, “From my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves.”

To be sure, Thomas was defiant. But what we got from Kavanaugh was sputtering, tearful grievance. Even worse was his audience-of-one belligerence, his talking over senators, his smug, rude and petulant behavior overall, not to mention his bald partisanship. The entire spectacle was one long “but you promised” tantrum of a grown man denied what he seems to believe is his. And after Kavanaugh got jammed up by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on his refusal to support or call on the White House to request an FBI investigation into the allegations against him, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) came through with his own galling display of entitlement.

“Boy, you all want power. God, I hope you never get it. I hope the American people can see through this sham,” said an animated Graham. He went on to say, “To my Republican colleagues, if you vote no, you’re legitimizing the most despicable thing I have seen in my time in politics.” This from the man who supported the unconscionable and destructive strategy of denying Merrick Garland even a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing when he was nominated by President Barack Obama in 2016.

Imagine if Thomas had acted out as Kavanaugh did. Imagine if Christine Blasey Ford had behaved the way Kavanaugh did. You can’t. Thanks to the racism and misogyny tightly woven into our national DNA, both Thomas and Ford knew they couldn’t get away with it and wouldn’t be believed if they had. Their dilemma is one faced by untold millions of Americans hourly. But the histrionics of Graham and Kavanaugh showed once again how hell hath no fury like an entitled white man denied. No humility. No contrition. No humanity beyond his narrow interests.

Strong words broadly brushed, I know. But I’m done tiptoeing around powerful men like Kavanaugh and Graham when their bruised, tender feelings will have an impact on my life and my country.

 

[Rachel333]

SNL parody:

I enjoyed "Kavanaugh" crying about his calendars. 

[TuringMachine]

So I found this Reddit post which I think is relevant.

Spoiler

 

 

 

Fact Checking False Rape Accusations and Why We Shouldn’t Fear a False Rape Epidemic:

One of the main resistance to changes in how police and society handle Rape, Sexual Assault and even Harassment is the counter argument that men then would be plagued by False Rape accusations. The fear is always that we crossed some line that no longer allows reasonable doubt and that one man life can be sent to jail by one accusation. We of course have seen stories of such things in the news and everytime we question wither these are isolated stories or a sign of a larger epidemic we don't get to see. When does the drive of combating rape go to far? Is it an issue to fear? 

So how common is this issue? Is it really a threat to men? How many false rape accusations are there?

How Many False Rape Accusations are there?

Most experts agree that false rape accusations make the total of 2-10% of the total accusations of rape. As quoted from the handbook

A multi-site study of eight U.S. communities including 2,059 cases of sexual assault found a 7.1% of false reports (Lonsway, Archambault, & Lisak, 2009).

Link to it here --> http://www.scirp.org/(S(i43dyn45teexjx455qlt3d2q))/reference/ReferencesPapers.aspx?ReferenceID=1238871

A study of 136 sexual assault cases in Boston from 1998-2007 found a 5.9% of false reports (Lisak et al., 2010).

Using qualitative and quantitative analysis, researchers studied 812 reports of sexual assault from 2000-2003 and found a 2.1% of false reports (Heenan & Murray 2006).

And why not add some more papers to the mix. 

2017 Study into the FBI Database found that between 2006 to 2010 the Average number of false rape accusations or baseless accusations was 5.55%, and robbery had a higher false and baseless accusation rate of 5.76%

Another metastudy by Claire E. Ferguson, and John M. Malouff published in December 17th, 2015 put the number of False Rape Accusations at 5%

Now I know that 2-10% is alot and enough to give anyone pause considering how epidemic sexual assault is. But consider a few things.

1 in 6 of women report they have been sexually assaulted.

Only a 1/3rd of sexual assaults are reported to police. So at its 2-10% of 33% 

This statistic covers if or not an accusation is false, wither or not a specific suspect is named which I will show below is a more interesting stat. The majority of false rape accusations are made against non existent strangers the victims claim they don't know. 

Soo how many false rape allegations lead to false arrests and convictions then? 

How many people Falsely Accused of Rape actually go to Jail?

Thankfully we found that the answer is very low. 

National Registry of Exoneration who keeps track of how many innocent people have been... well... exonerated found that since 1989 in the US 52people have been exonerated for sexual assault that they didn't do. People exonerated on false accusations of Murder was 790 people.

Note: Innocent Project has listed 276 exonerated with Sex Crimes, this is the highest number I can find. Thanks /u/MealReadytoEat_

British Home Office did a detailed study and report on the issues of false rape accusations in 2005 and found that out of the 216 cases of rape that was false in the UK, 126 of them have a formal complain filed by the accuser, 39 of them had a named suspect and only 6 of them were arrested. Out of the 6 arrested only 2 have charges and 0 of them had a conviction.

Another Study by the University of Pittsburgh found that only 18% of False Rape Accusastions name a suspect

Fact is that the majority of false rape accusations don't even name a suspect. And throwing this into the picture of the total of the numbers of rape really proves how rare false rape Convictions are. Vast majority of false rape accusers always accuse a non existent stranger who raped them and usually not someone specifically. Which means that beyond wasting time and resources majority of false rape accusations are harmless to the general public because no one person is accused.

When you take these studies and add them to what we already know about rape a more complete picture forms: 

1/6 women claim to have experience sexual assault, follow by a 1/3 reporting the assault to police, then worst case scenario 1/10 are false. Out of those false rape accusations 9/50 name a suspect, out of false rape accusations that accuse someone 15/100 get an arrest and, out of those who are arrested for a rape they didn't do only 1/3 have charges placed against them. 

So 1/6 x 1/3 x 1/10 x 9/50 x 15/100 x 1/3 = 0.00005

Which mean out of all the women you meet you have a 0.005% chance of being falsely charged of Rape.

Compare this to the fact that 6.4% of men openly admitted of committing the strictest possible definition of rape and 23% of that 6.4% admitted of multiple rapes. 

Why False Rape Accusations happen?

Many people who fear False Rape Accusations claim that women in the work force will make a False Accusation against a man in a higher position, or a student who is going to fail an exam will accuse a professor, or rape or that a vengeful ex, or a woman who regretted sex later. 

But the realities of this is very surprising. 

According to a review done by the LAPD found the reasons for a False Rape accusations is unwanted pregnancies or more commonly "Missed Curfews" by young teenagers. It turns out that 55% of False Rape Accusations according to this review are for hope of getting medical care or psychiatric medication by the very poor and destitute

Also it is noted that half of the False Rape Accusations are made by Parents of children. Either by pressuring the child to go to the police or accusing someone of rape without the child knowing. It is also important to note that the rare Serial False Rape Accusers tend to have a history of being a legitimate victim Sexual Abuse as a child.

As this shows that the False Accuser the majority of the time aren't the serial accusers we hear on the media nor are in tech jobs, nor college students who regret sex. Instead it is usually either the very poor looking for free medication, teenagers trying to get out of trouble and parents of children who make the vast majority of False Rape Accusations. 

Also there are no corolations with the age of the accusation or the number of sexual partners of the accuser and wither their accusations are true or not. Add this to the fact that most legitimate victims lie to themselves and others saying that they weren't sexually assaulted when they really were. This denial often is due to the fact that the majority of victims know their abusers personally before the assault and often change their stories or denied that they were as a way to cope the trauma. I can personally attest to that.

Special thanks to /u/ILikeNeurons

Why didn't you include those other "Studies"?

Since I am from the future I know this will be bring up sooo I will nip it in the butt before it shows up in the comments. And if they still show up without talking about this section of my effort post you have my permission to shame them. 

People who fear the False Accusation "Epidemic" that is supposedly happening like to point to the "other studies" on these issues. What are these other "studies" and why don't I use them in my analysts? Well because they are bad. Flat out bad or rely on a misconception of the nature of sexual assault. And there are alot of them. Lets take sample out of the list Wikipedia provided. 

In basic rules of studies is the more the better. Anything that are in the low 100s are meh, anything under 100 is a meme. Seriously 18 people?!? Andrew Wakefeild was able to claim Vaccines cause Austim with 12. When you have that small of numbers then you can say anything is possible. 

Also these studies expose a much larger issue when it comes to research into sexual assault.... What is Sexual Assault and what is False Sexual Assault. When you look at studies the older ones tend to have uhhhhhh questionable views of what is and isn't sexual assault.

For example Stewart said one of the victims were lying because: 

‘‘was disproved on the grounds that it was totally impossible to have removed her extremely tight undergarments from her extremely large body against her will’’

Maclean also came to the conclusions that 47% of victims were lying if the victims didn't look "Dishevelled" enough or didn't have bruising. As time goes on the number of estimated False Rape Accusations decrease because we learn and evolve in our understanding of trauma and how people respond. What the police knew about trauma in sexual assault in the 1960s is much lacking compared to the modern day, hense they are outdated and shouldn't be involve in these discussions. 

Then if you look at other higher studies like Kanin and Jordan you figure out that they are working on the police definitions of False or Not. Unfortunately that means that they consider a story false if the victim:

Failed a Polygraph Click here if you wanna know why the Polygraph is bullshit

If the victim delayed reporting their rape

If the victim was "Intellectually Impaired"

If the victim has signs of mental illness

If the victim was intoxicated 

If the victim withdraw the complaint 

And if the victim was determined by police to be a "Slut"

These studies don't show or prove who many accusations there are really, it just shows how many cases police view sexual assault cases as false and more importantly aren't evidence of a massive epidemic of false rape convictions but epidemic of sexist and misguided beliefs that prevent real sexual assault victims from reaching justice. As Jordan said about his own report:

While false complaints do occur, approximately three-quarters of the incidents concluded by the police to be false appeared to have been judged to some extent at least on the basis of stereotypes regarding the complainant’s behavior, attitude, demeanor or possible motive.Suspicious file comments were made by the detectives regarding a woman who laughed while being interviewed, others who were seen as ‘attention seeking,’ and some who were said to be ‘crying rape’ for revenge or guilt motives.

That's right. 75% of False Rape Accusations labeled as such by police were not because they were proven false but on the gut feelings of the police. Which means we get plenty of false false rape accusations. This is probably a bigger issue then men being falsely accused of Rape. There have been plenty of documented cases of police pressuring victims to sign false confessions claiming they made up their sexual assaults. Its why one of the major reasons why out of 1000 rapes only 6 rapists will go to jail while for robberies 20 will go to jail and 33 of assault and battery. 

Using Fear as a Weapon

Why do we talk about False Rape Allegations all the time, and how its used as a political weapon.

Though most rational people don't see this as such a major issues within far conservatism and the Manosphere you tend to see false accusations be pushed as the major issue against men. In fact I decided to do my own study where I went to /r/MenRights typed it "Rape" and look at the 102 top posts by /r/menrights on the subject. I only accepted posts of two categories, male victims of sexual assault and stories on false rape accusations. As expected /r/MenRights had more posts about false rape then male victims of rape.

Here is the data broken down by total number of posts

Here is the data broken down by total number of karma

As you can see despite the fact that men are 1 in 33 in odds of being raped, that 1 in 10 rape victims are male, and as stated before only 0.005% of rape accusations lead to a man being arrested as stated above. MRAs post more about and care more about false rape accusations then male victims of sexual assault. Why is that? Why do we even talk about false rape so much if its more rare than males being raped? I get a suspicion that plenty who champion this cause are arguing disingenuously. 

False Accusations are rampant enough that only segregation can solve it

Yeaaaa... This covers harassment as well. Plenty of people have been using the fear of false rape accusations against men as proof that women should be "isolated". They also openly brag to each other that they "won't hire more qualified women because I am too scared of a lawsuit". As stated before the case of someone falsely accusing someone else in the workplace environment is ultra rare as most false rapes come from children or the homeless, and the vast majority don't name suspects. If anything men should be worried about sexual harassment from coworkers as it is way more statistically likely that men will be a victim of sexual harassment then falsely accuse of harassment themselves.

So the people who say that this is a measure that must be taken to protect men are flat out Neo-Segregationists. Flat out they don't really care about false accusations but want to use it as an excuse to treat women as second class citizens at work or to push them out of the work force entirely. If you truely fear false accusations have a third party witness. Simple enough, its common practice within the medical profession to have a third party for sensitive treatment so both sides are calm. A third party benefits both those who fear harassment and false accusations of harassment and assault. Jumping to pushing women out of the workforce is straight up sawing your foot off over a hangnail. 

False Rape Accusers should get same length sentence as Rapists

This is a common cry for those within the MRA movement is that these false accusers are getting off to easy. That they ruin countless men lives and only get slap of the wrists. But that shows a great error in their thinking is the trust that the criminal justice system gives just punishments to rapists in the first place. If we are going to punish false accusers the same way that we do punish rapists then false accusers should get:

10 Years of probation

3 Months of Jail

5 Years of probation

That of course doesn't count the countless who have sexually assaulted and get away with it. If MRAs called for this guideline I can't help to feel they would be even more disappointed in the sentencing expecting 20 years but IRL only getting a few months. If we treated false rape accusers the same as rapists then we as a society wouldn't take them that seriously.

Also I want to quickly address the other MRAs call for those who have been falsely accused to be placed on the Sex Offender Registry Lists. Uuuuuuuhhh What?!? This is improper use of such a list number 1, and 2 that publicly available list would then create a public list of people you can rape without repercussions. Think about it. If you publicly branded people as "False Rape Accuser" then which people would rapists target? 

Putting extra laws and punishments on this mush smaller issue of False Rape Accusations put more pressure on legitimate victims of sexual assault. Under the existing law there are cases of legit victims being classified by police as false victims. If you add additional punishment then we will punish legitimate victims of rape 20 years in prison for just reporting their rape and police not believing in them. And that will have a chilling effect on the rest of victims of sexual assault out there. Its hard enough as is, but if you are unable to prove it and you "act like a slut" then you could face jail time. 

Conclusion

To me this ultimately proves why these issues come up in groups like /r/Menrights more often then male sexual assault. Because its being used as a weapon to try to push society and law to a more regressive state then before. Men Rights Movement is a Regressive Wolf in a Progressive Sheep clothing. They don't really care about victims of false allegations. More its a means to justify "Moving the burden of proof to a reasonable level" that makes it impossible for many legitimate victims to seek justice. For Tucker Carlson and other ultra conservatives its just a means to justify removing women from the workforce and back into houses. That's what this whole issue is to the far right, just a vehicle to push for radical and extremist policy. 

That's why /r/MenRights and Reddit as a whole under reports on male victims of rape. Because admitting that rape of men is a common thing only helps prove that rape in general is a very common affair and that the 1 in 6 statistic was right the whole time. That Rape is a real problem in western society and forces them to stop ignoring it. 

So remember this TL;DR when you think about False Rape Accusations.

There are a lot of places on the internet that are insisting that we shouldn't let this accusation "ruin" Kavanaugh's life without a conviction.

As far as I'm concerned, why shouldn't I assume that Ford is one of the large number of women who are assaulted and don't report it in favor of assuming that this angry prick who spend his testimony evading questions is one of  the incredibly small number of men falsely accused?

Link for the text from Reddit:

Spoiler

https://www.reddit.com/r/MensLib/comments/9hraly/fact_checking_false_rape_accusations_and_why_we/?ref=share&ref_source=embed&utm_content=body&utm_medium=post_embed&utm_name=091a232aa60f42b7b59d4c4cab663645&utm_source=embedly&utm_term=9hraly

 

 

Edited September 30, 2018 by Jellybean
Reddit formatting

[AmazonGrace]

His life is not being destroyed. If he doesn't get this job he still has a cushy job he is very difficult to fire from.

If you don't want your past rape attempts and drinking problems examined don't accept a damn SC nomination.

[thoughtful]

Matt Damon was great, but even he can't make the weird faces that Kavanaugh did.

[SassyPants]

3 hours ago, TuringMachine said:

So I found this Reddit post which I think is relevant.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

There are a lot of places on the internet that are insisting that we shouldn't let this accusation "ruin" Kavanaugh's life without a conviction.

As far as I'm concerned, why shouldn't I assume that Ford is one of the large number of women who are assaulted and don't report it in favor of assuming that this angry prick who spend his testimony evading questions is one of  the incredibly small number of men falsely accused?

And this is it in a nutshell. We likely will NEVER know, so it's best to find err on the side of decency and safety, and find a BETTER candidate, because neither of their accounts can likely be proven- 

In fact, if Kavanaugh is such a good and decent person, he should do the right thing and decline the nomination.

 

[AmazonGrace]

Here's somebody analysing several different demonstrable lies Kavanaugh uttered

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/09/how-we-know-kavanaugh-is-lying

[AmazonGrace]

 

[candygirl200413]

Dumb question but while I was walking to church this morning I thought about if Kavanaugh was the only one that promised orange fuck face his loyalty regarding an investigation. Like organizations like the ABA have had issues with him and we know his record is most likely suspect so how did he get through based on orange fuckface's short list?

[AmazonGrace]

Lindsey Graham as good as  says FBI could prove that Kav is a rapist and it wouldn't matter to him.

https://www.rawstory.com/2018/09/minds-made-lindsey-graham-says-will-vote-kavanaugh-even-fbi-links-sexual-assault