Can the Law prevent a specific type of harm regardless of the power or influence of the person doing it? No. But the law can punish those who do harm and such punishment can be proportionate to their power or influence.
Martha Nussbaum, in a Huffington Post piece on sex abuse by male celebrities, took a different view-
Law cannot fix this problem. Famous men standardly get away with sexual harms,
so do poor men who aren't famous at all.
and for the most part will continue to do so. They know they are above the law, and they are therefore undeterrable.
If they are above the law, why do they not make themselves tyrants? Why confine yourself to rape when you can become the Emperor of America?
What can society do? Don’t give actors and athletes such glamor and reputational power.
Most actors and athletes have none. I haven't worked in Hollywood since Julia Roberts took the part meant for me in Pretty Woman. Also, I still haven't completed the 100 meter sprint I commenced in 1977.
But that won’t happen in the real world. What can women do?
Become Lesbian. Also get plastic surgery so as to look more like me.
Don’t be fooled by glamor. Do not date such men, unless you know them very, very well.
Ban dicks. Dicks cause RAPE! Why has Biden not undergone gender reassignment surgery?
Do not go to their homes.
Or into the gents toilet after drinking a lot of Tequila.
Never be alone in a room with them.
Come to think of former Vice President Pence would never dine with a woman alone- unless it was his wife. His Mummy was not pleased.
And if you ignore my sage advice and encounter trouble, move on.
Martha thinks she is a sage. How sweet!
Do not let your life get hijacked by an almost certainly futile effort at justice.
Why did the British police refuse to investigate my charge of historic sex abuse I suffered at the hands of Queen Victoria?
Focus on your own welfare, and in this case that means: forget the law.
Sadly, you need proof of your allegations to present to a court of law.
Amia Srinivasan writes-
Now, Martha’s exhortation to women to ‘forget the law’ and to be, as she says, ‘selfish and self-protective’, might be misread as an instance of victim-blaming,
Amia's job is to misread everything.
a kind of old-fashioned pragmatism that obscures the fact that the responsibility for rape lies with the men who rape, not with their female victims.
even if the rape was imaginary.
But I read Martha as offering a radical condemnation of not only liberal legal systems,
or any legal system which demands proof
but also of the liberal faith that the institutions of liberal justice will be sufficient to address real oppression.
by which Amia means imaginary oppression.
I see, in other words, a flash of the same, deep scepticism that motivates so many feminist, Marxist, black and post-colonial theorists to reject the liberal worldview that Martha usually exhorts us to adopt.
Why is Martha white? Should she not at least have black stripes- like a zebra? Failure to have black stripes is totes triggering for bleck peeps. That's why we hate 'liberals'.
Moreover, I think it’s striking, in this connection, that Martha’s seeming departure here from her usual liberal optimism is driven by her personal experience of sexual assault.
She had consented to sex but the dude hurt her. Not cool, dude. Still, there may have been a legal remedy. Consent to sex does not mean consent to physical harm. I suppose the cost of going to law may prevent some people from doing so. But that is a personal choice and may not be 'eusocial'.
For it’s precisely personal experience of class-, gender- and race-based oppression that drives so many critics of liberalism to their pessimism.
I wasn't selected as Miss Teen Tamil Nadu. This makes me a critic of the politics of that State. So what? Who actually gives a fuck?
So I wonder first if, extrapolating from her own personal disillusionment with the law, Martha can sympathise with those who are more generally disillusioned with the power of the liberal state to address the ravages of race-, sex- and class-based oppression?
e.g. my not getting crowned Miss Teen Tamil Nadu.
My second thought is this.
It is shit.
While it is no doubt vital,
By 'vital' Amia means 'shite that doesn't matter at all'.
as feminists have long pointed out, to take seriously the role of first-personal experience
or first-person fantasies of having been raped and tortured by Mother Theresa while Margaret Thatcher and Queen Victoria looked on approvingly
and understanding in our political theorising, it is also vital, as especially black feminists have been arguing for decades, to
paint black stripes on white peeps.
ask ourselves whose experiences we are taking into account.
More especially if they are imaginary.
Rape and sexual assault here form an object lesson.
Why does nobody care if people are raped by carrots and other such vegetables? Is it because of all the glamour and prestige that salad enjoys?
In the U.S., college rape has become something of a national obsession. 1 out of 5 college women report being sexually assaulted,
by vegetables?
and as Martha points out, there are serious issues raised by the in-house handling of these assaults,
that is a justiciable matter.
especially when university administrators are often more interested in protecting their brands and endowments than in ensuring the safety of their students.
University administrators should regularly examine the orifices of the students to ensure vegetables are not sexually assaulting them.
There is no doubt something very worrying about the sexual culture of American university campuses.
More particularly, ever since radishes have been appointed Vice Chancellors.
The same could be said of British university campuses.
But not Saudi university campuses.
But sexual assault and rape rates are lower on university campuses than some other places in the U.S. – being a university student in the U.S. is less of a risk factor for becoming a victim of rape than being a sex worker, or being Native American.
Unless you are a Native American Professor of Prostitution at a university which is actually a truck stop.
Being poor, non-white, trans, mentally disabled, or homeless are also serious risk factors for being raped.
Environment is incessantly being raped. This is because it is trans and non-white (except in Antarctica)
Indeed, an American college student is 20% less likely to be raped than a woman her same age who didn’t make it to university.
Why go to College if you have already been raped in High School?
Why then the contemporary focus on the college rape epidemic?
College students are infantilized. Also they are very very stupid. Teechur said he had a nice little mouse in his trousers. He asked me to pet it and then said my pussy should eat it. Later I came to know that teechur didn't have a nice little mouse. Actually, it was a dick. When a man puts his dick in your pussy- he is RAPING THE ENVIRONMENT!
Part of the reason no doubt has to do with the fact that powerful people – generally, middle-class white men – are likelier to care about rape when it is their daughters who are the potential victims.
Middle class white women don't care if their daughters are fucked to death by orangutangs.
But mainstream feminism has also contributed to and colluded with this focus on young, relatively privileged women,
rather than elderly prostitutes belonging to a different species
out of a pragmatic realisation that a college rape crisis will be an easier sell than a Native American rape crisis, or a poor black women rape crisis.
in both cases, the perpetrators are likely to belong to the same community.
In short, while first-personal thinking is indispensable in understanding the horrors of sexual assault, we must also find a way to move outside our own particular vantage points, in order to think about rape and sexual assault not only individually, but structurally.
What good with that do? Blaming everything on Neo-Liberalism doesn't change anything more particularly if everybody ends up voting for Trump.
This takes me to my third and final thought.
Amia uses the word 'thought' loosely.
What sort of structures
Paranoid ones
should we appeal to in order to make sense of the phenomenon that particularly worries Martha, namely the phenomenon of famous men getting away with sexual assault?
Did you know that many famous men have dicks? Dicks cause RAPE!
Why did it take so long for Bill Cosby to be charged with rape, given that the allegations against him date back to the 1960’s?
Because the drug Cosby used was legal at one time. Still, he should have been more careful about what he said under deposition. Attitudes to drugs had changed. Also as more and more women came forward, his plausibility diminished.
Why did Donald Trump’s celebration of his own sexual assaults not make him an electoral pariah?
He didn't say he was a rapist.
And in this country, why was no action ever taken against Jimmy Saville, despite the widespread rumours of his serial sexual abuse against children?
The police say they had insufficient evidence.
Martha suggests that these cases are outliers, what she calls ‘unfinished business’ in the law’s ability to hold sexual predators accountable.
that 'business' took a knock during the permissive era when there was a notion that all sex was good sex.
The forward march of the law, she argues, has done much to transform the misogynistic beliefs that make men feel entitled to women’s bodies.
Sadly, there are still plenty of women whose bodies are controlled by vicious gangsters.
While private citizens, she says, are ‘typically, or at least frequently, held accountable’,
They may be if there is evidence or they have a crappy public defender. But some innocent people have been convicted on that basis.
celebrities are ‘shielded by glamor, public trust, and access to the best legal representation’.
Not if there is damning evidence against them- e.g. DNA results or CC camera footage.
She recommends that rather than waiting for the law to find its grip on these men, we should embrace our roles as consumers, refusing to send our money their way.
When it comes to crime, evidence is what matters. New technology should lead to new types of evidence being made admissible for both the prosecution and the defense.
I want to offer a somewhat more pessimistic reading of the situation. Despite legal progress, rape culture is alive and well.
Only in the sense that murder culture is alive and well.
Donald Trump wasn’t elected despite his confessions of sexual assault,
there was no such confession. He said famous people could grab a woman's pussy and the lady wouldn't mind.
and Jimmy Saville wasn’t popular despite the rumours of sexual predation. Part of what makes these men admired by many other men, and objects of attraction for some women, is precisely the way in which their worldly power extends into the sexual realm, the way in which the official sexual rules do not apply to them.
Amia thinks there are 'official sexual rules'. That's sweet.
We might have made progress in holding rapists legally accountable, but the vast majority of sexual assaults by even ordinary citizens go unreported, and the conviction rate for rape remains well below the conviction rate for other crimes, at around 6% in this country.
A lot of crime isn't reported at all because the Police will do nothing. To be fair, they haven't the resources.
1 out of 3 people in the UK think a woman is partially to blame for being raped if she flirted with her rapist.
Or even if she got drunk with him.
Moreover, rich, powerful men get away with sexual assault not because rape law can’t quite get a grip on them, but because rich, powerful men get away with all sorts of things.
So do poor, powerless men.
They get away with not paying their taxes,
Nope. They get away with avoiding, not evading, taxes. But that is perfectly legal.
with not being held accountable for the financial crises they cause,
they don't cause financial crises.
with not having to be as smart or talented as their poor or female counterparts in order to succeed,
Poor females may think they are talented when the truth is they are as stupid as shit.
and with buying unearned advantages for their children.
If they are bought, then somewhere along the line there was earning- unless we are speaking of the pickpocket who puts his son through Medical School.
And they get away with any number of criminal offences, both because of the legal representation they can afford, but also because of the systematic biases of jurors and judges.
Poor people committing crimes against other poor people in under-policed poor neighborhoods are more likely to get away with crimes for a longer period. Gangsters can intimidate witnesses and bribe police officers or even judges.
To give just one recent example, an 18-year-old Eton student was found with nearly 2000 graphic images and videos of babies and toddlers being sexually abused.
He was 17 when he offered to share such images with an undercover policeman.
The judge in the case decided to spare the defendant jail,
because he had previously sought psychiatric help on his own.
saying, and I quote: This defendant Andrew Picard was a privileged young man. His family are clearly wealthy enough to send him to school in Eton…Quite how you found your way into this unpleasant world Mr Picard, the world of chatrooms and exchanging this material, is not clear to me…Why you did it doctors and others have sought to explain - the emotional difficulties you had, issues around your sexuality.'
The Judge didn't want the young man to spend time being sodomized behind bars. How very strange!
It’s very hard to imagine a black or brown student from an inner city comprehensive getting the same exonerating treatment.
In that case, nobody would care. All we ask is that those kids stick to knifing each other rather than turn to knifing us.
No doubt the aura of celebrity makes some rich men particularly privileged with respect to the law. But it is a mistake, I think, to think that they constitute some sort of special case, discontinuous with what happens everywhere else.
Dicks cause RAPE! Ban them NOW! Did you know that President Biden had scheduled gender reassignment for himself when Neo-Liberalism phoned him and ordered him not to go through with the procedure?
In light of this, it seems to me that what we really need is not consumerism, as Martha recommends, but solidarity – solidarity against not just rape culture, but against
dicks. Also, ban carrots and other such vegetables.
the systematic racial and socieconomic inequalities that give so many rich white men, and not just the famous ones, a free pass.
In Amia's country of origin there are no rich white men. That is why there is no rape there save such as is perpetrated by randy carrots.
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