Weinstein’s presence at a New York bar is the latest in a string of increasingly brazen returns to public life by men who were credibly accused of sexual assault
In the two years since #MeToo reshaped the public conversation around sexual assault, my friends and I have begun to whisper among ourselves – what if the exposure of predatory behavior by Harvey Weinstein had not raised our standards for men’s behavior, but actually lowered them? After all, Weinstein was routinely held up as an example of what kind of sexual abuse was unacceptable, but not in such a way that acknowledged the prevalence of his sort of exploitation and abuse of power, but in a way that seemed to suggest that anything short of his level of high-profile, organized, serial rape and assault wasn’t really so bad.
“He’s no Harvey Weinstein,” we were told of the men who “merely” harassed, or “merely” groped. “He’s not that bad.” How bad does he have to be to be worth talking about? The threshold kept rising. “There is a difference between a Harvey Weinstein and an Aziz Ansari,” we were repeatedly warned by critics of the #MeToo movement, and yes, there is. But the implication seemed to be not that there was a difference in the quality of the harm these men did, or a difference in the ways we should seek justice for the women they hurt. The difference, these critics seemed to imply, was between what women could reasonably complain about and what they should be expected to just shut up and endure.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2onROjs
via
0 Comments