"The accusations against Ellis portrayed him as a familiar sort of figure. The story of the important, inappropriate literary man is so common and entrenched as to feel depressingly unremarkable. Women often circulate warnings about them in private, never sure what to do: they talk about incidents that are disturbing but often shy of criminally reportable, and they distribute warnings via hearsay, and they tell you they wish they, or their friend, or their friend of a friend, had known to stay away...
one of the most fungibly interpreted aspects of this informal pursuit of justice [:] Why are women talking about, and accusing, the important and inappropriate literary man? To ruin his reputation? To remove him from employment? Not as a priority, Stoeffel concluded, and to my eye accurately. “What it seems most women want,” she wrote, “is to warn other women about a category of jerk courts have no name for: a guy who can’t be trusted not to exploit his power over her...
“strength” for something I’m still trying to figure out. “Strength” can work as both a feminist and literary tautology for the plain act of speaking. But the logic involved can get imprecise. When we’ve called women strong for speaking out about trauma, it’s often been because doing so has traditionally, and unfairly, been as difficult as (or more difficult than) enduring the trauma itself...
What we’re encountering here, however, is a sea change. It is a new thing that a woman could type out her story anonymously, attach it to a public figure’s name, and know that an organization with a respected platform would accept it without context and publish it like this...
Our awareness of the prevalence and magnitude of sexual assault has outpaced the systems that expose and adjudicate it. It’s incredibly difficult to match these two things up. But for activism to carry the authority of journalism—or for journalism with an activist conclusion to work—there are basic practices that can’t be set aside. Noble goals can be quickly rendered immaterial: Rolling Stone should’ve been enough to teach us that good intentions—that “believing women”—can end up hurting them dramatically in the end."
I think we need a new model of justice for sexual harassment, a model of restorative justice that really asks: what are the desirable outcomes here? How can we heal the people involved and
There is this tension, which maybe exists whenever a class of previously acceptable behavior becomes criminalized, where these men /fundamentally/ do not seem to understand the harms of their behaviors, where they are still being socialized to perform those behaviors and so feel blindsided when they are accused and punished. So there is a narrative about over-sensitive, exploitative women who take advantage of new laws; men are told not to develop close relationships with female peers or employees because that puts /them/ at risk for a lawsuit. So now, under our current system, men are taught to be afraid of lawsuits - they are not being taught not to sexually harass or assault.
(Meanwhile, these lawsuits are very hard to win and people are actively discouraged from pursuing them; they require a lot of time and money for a good lawyer and even a win can damage the reputation of the person who brought the suit, exposing them to a lot of negative notoriety. Thus, the anonymous public outing - which still isn't easy or assured success).
So, I want a new way to deal with this, focusing on the actual desired outcomes:
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