Here are my takeaways on this interview with Rebecca Traister.
To start with, as a curmudgeonly middle-aged white male, I found the experience fascinating to listen to this extremely articulate woman explain so much that is outside of my experience male.
Ok, here are the points she made that I found most noteworthy:
Bill Cosby might have been cut some slack in the early years of his accusations because he was known for defending the white status quo against black activists.
To start with, as a curmudgeonly middle-aged white male, I found the experience fascinating to listen to this extremely articulate woman explain so much that is outside of my experience male.
Ok, here are the points she made that I found most noteworthy:
Bill Cosby might have been cut some slack in the early years of his accusations because he was known for defending the white status quo against black activists.
That Bill Clinton was given a pass is seen as a mistake that feminists paid for later because it undermined their claims to being unaligned politically.
Matt Damon was slapped down appropriately for mansplaining how to respond to sexual aggression. He didn’t lose his job, in fact he appeared shortly afterward to public acclaim, and so the punishment fit the crime.
Charlie Rose was fired appropriately. His life didn’t end, he wasnot sent to jail, also appropriately
The flattening and mindless approbation of the perpetrators of sexual abuse is happening, not by the accusers, but by the accused.
Her point is not that power can’t harm and powerful people or doesn’t harm them, which is what the less awake people on Reddit seem to think, her point is instead that when disenfranchised people exert their influence or power, it is considered violence, but that when powerful people exert their influence and power, it doesn’t even register.
The thing I appreciate best about this is her point that powerful people on the left do in fact survive their excoriation by angry feminist when they strike the wrong note, and that Matt Damon warning of a flattened response to sexual harassment to women resulted only in people being mean to him on Twitter. But then ironically this is flattened into the tale that he has been walked to the guillotine.
To his last point that the excesses of the mob are driving doubters to trump, she points out that not all objections are punitive, many are correcting. And that going too gently is why the previous waves of feminism ultimately failed. And that this is a difficult conversation, that even she has trouble with it sometimes.
