Has the #MeToo movement become a witch-hunt to a significant degree?

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DarkLight said:
You can’t act like working at a job that involves being alone with men, or even wanting to have a private conversation with a man you thought you knew, is equivalent to getting black-out drunk in a bar.
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There are a lot of people who talk as though it’s obviously incredibly dangerous to ever be alone with a man under any circumstances, and if a woman is sexually assaulted when alone with a man, it’s her own fault.

I don’t think that the people who say this actually believe that dating/engaged couples should never be alone, or that the married ones conducted courtships where they had chaperones 100% of the time. It’s normally a recommendation that’s given without the expectation that the advice will be followed. In the contemporary world, it would take immense amounts of family manpower to provide a dating couple chaperones all the time, and in the case of the modern families that actually do it (the Duggars, for example), there are some real questions as to how well the couples wind up knowing each other before they get married, or whether it isn’t more dangerous to marry a near stranger than to go for a drive or a hike with a fiance. (See, for example, Josh and Anna Duggar, as an example of a couple where one spouse is a pig in a poke.) As the line goes, character is what you do when nobody is around to see it. So a woman doesn’t really know if a man is safe if external restrictions mean that he never has the opportunity to be unsafe.

I personally see it as extraordinarily risky for couples to get married without seeing each other in varied settings, and ideally having the chance to do a lot of normal life-type things together.

I also think that in practice people don’t blink an eye when couples do things alone. The “never be alone with a man!” stuff is only pulled out if something goes wrong–I think it’s very ad hoc.

Also, I have to point out that people’s character is much more important than external circumstances. For example, I spent a lot of time alone with my future husband before we got married and not only did he not rape me (despite many opportunities), we conducted a 99.44% pure courtship. The reason he didn’t rape me is that he’s not a rapist–and it was actually very valuable information to know that about him, and continues to give me confidence in his good character and self-control.
 
ChunkMonk said:
Anyway, this is literally a foreign language to women so I’m done. Have fun changing the world with a hashtag.
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Your pontificating on how women should behave doesn’t do any good for me or the other ladies here. Most, if not all, of us are practicing Catholics. We’re not jumping into bed with random men or encouraging illicit behavior (a fair number of us are either married or still virgins), and yet we each have a “me too” story. Then you come in, dismiss our concerns out of hand, and say, “well, if women would just give up their rights then men would act better.” BS: we already did what we were supposed to do, and it still didn’t protect us.
 
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TheAmazingGrace said:
Most, if not all, of us are practicing Catholics. We’re not jumping into bed with random men or encouraging illicit behavior (a fair number of us are either married or still virgins), and yet we each have a “me too” story. Then you come in, dismiss our concerns out of hand, and say, “well, if women would just give up their rights then men would act better.” BS: we already did what we were supposed to do, and it still didn’t protect us.
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Consider how conservative men typically feel about being told, “Give up your rights and we’ll keep you safe.” That’s notoriously unpopular (see, for example, gun control), and it shouldn’t surprise conservative men if women are also uninterested in that deal.

Come to think of it, “never be alone with a man” just isn’t practical at all. Just for practicality and basic life needs, I’ve taken many rides with male taxi drivers. I’d sign up with a female-only version of Uber if it was available, but I don’t believe it’s available in our area, and in many areas, there might be legal challenges. Likewise, I often need to deal with tradesmen by myself when my husband is at work. Am I supposed to think that I’m letting lions into my home/playing with fire/or playing Russian roulette every time I let the Orkin man or the plumber into our home when I’m alone?

Theoretically, we could have my husband wait at home for tradesmen, but it would represent a substantial decrease in his productivity, and given that I’m a SAHM, it’s one of my basic duties.

Again, I think that never-be-alone-with-a-man! isn’t intended as real world advice, but as a stick to beat women with when men behave badly.
 
Yup. I live alone. “Never be alone with a man” wouldn’t exactly be practical for me. And sometimes you can find out things you couldn’t have known in advance. (Easy example: I had a landlord who let himself into my apartment while he knew my roommates were out. He just wanted to yell at me, but if he had wanted to assault me there probably wasn’t a lot I could have done. I did call the cops but I recall they took some time to arrive, and by the time they did he had left and swore up and down that he had never been there and I was just lying to get him in trouble.)
 
“Never be alone with a man” is totally impractical for a moderate income single woman making her way in the world in 2018, but in practice, the “rule” functions primarily as a justification for bad behavior from men. If a woman is alone with a man for any reason, some people treat that as automatic consent for whatever. And you may ask yourself–isn’t that idea that vulnerability constitutes consent basically the logic of a rapist? And I think that’s right–it is the logic of a rapist to think that whatever is possible is OK.

A non-rapist is going to have instincts more similar to that of the consent-and-tea video (which I cannot recommend highly enough):


With regard to the common remark that “good people already know this stuff,” I would answer:

–They may have good instincts, but without having a concise verbal formula that would allow them to share ideas with others.
–Having stronger ideas about consent helps good people more effectively identify and mobilize against bad people.
 
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DarkLight said:
I’m noticing how the minute we object to being the ones supposed to “take responsibility” for our own safety, the conversation immediately shifts away from the examples we’ve been using of doing things like going to work, to getting passed out drunk.
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You’re a champion of selective memory aren’t you? When did the conversation turn toward 'peotecting oneself?" Was it after you talked about work? Nope.

It was after you talked about a girl getting into bed with a boy and then being ‘raped’. So actually, getting into bed with a random boy is on the same spectrum of ‘not protecting yourself’ as getting sloshed at a bar.

Farbeit for me to expect honesty from you though.
 
Which is my point. Literally everyone on Earth has a story about some bad thing happening to them because bad people did unfair things to them. I’ve been punched multiple times by random people for no reason, my brother was 15 and 6 gang-bangers jumped him outside a house party for no reason and beat him to a pulp. My mom was routinely sexually and physically abused as a child. One of my friends was run over by a drunk driver. Bad things happen. We can’t take every bad thing, lump them all together as some example of systematic instititionalised -ism and expect anyone to take it seriously.
 
Xantippe said:
Consider how conservative men typically feel about being told, “Give up your rights and we’ll keep you safe.” That’s notoriously unpopular (see, for example, gun control), and it shouldn’t surprise conservative men if women are also uninterested in that deal.
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Yes, I couldn’t have been the only one thinking I would rather assume the risk of getting raped than live under the type of rules that could keep me safe. At least the rape would be over in 30 minutes whereas living in a benevolent prison to stay safe never ends.
 
ChunkMonk said:
We can’t take every bad thing, lump them all together as some example of systematic instititionalised -ism and expect anyone to take it seriously.
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We’re not “taking every bad thing” and using it as evidence. It is a fact that women as a whole have been the victims of systemic oppression throughout most of history, with their worth as people being very much determined by their sexual market value, and their bodies treated as commodities by a not insignificant number of men. Society doesn’t change overnight, so it follows that traces of these attitudes would still be present in our day and age.

You’ll refuse to understand, and that’s okay. You never confirmed that you’re not a teenager, so assuming that my guess about your age is roughly accurate, you have plenty of time to develop into a more compassionate person.
 
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Werbenjagermanjensen said:
Yes, I couldn’t have been the only one thinking I would rather assume the risk of getting raped than live under the type of rules that could keep me safe. At least the rape would be over in 30 minutes whereas living in a benevolent prison to stay safe never ends.
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Amen.

(cool beans)
 
Werbenjagermanjensen said:
Yes, I couldn’t have been the only one thinking I would rather assume the risk of getting raped than live under the type of rules that could keep me safe. At least the rape would be over in 30 minutes whereas living in a benevolent prison to stay safe never ends.
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And even worse–there’s no guarantee that giving up freedom will result in safety.
 
My guess is this:
DarkLight said:
An example I saw not too long ago was a guy saying he didn’t force the woman to have sex, he just made it so she couldn’t get up until they had sex, and now she was falsely accusing him of rape.
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Fauken said:
My guess is this:

DarkLight:
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I’m not seeing a bed anywhere in that quote. Not saying there wasn’t a bed (although it could just as easily have been a sofa or a futon or a car or sitting on a bed rather than being tucked into it), but where did ChunkMonk find a bed in that quote?
TheAmazingGrace said:
Yarp. Just look at countries that follow Sharia law.
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One of life’s mysteries is why some people who think Islamic law is the Worst Thing Ever and that fighting militant Islam is the great crusade of our day are in such a big hurry to replicate as much of Islamic law and social mores as they can in the US.
 
Xantippe said:
I’m not seeing a bed anywhere in that quote. Not saying there wasn’t a bed (although it could just as easily have been a sofa or a futon or a car or sitting on a bed rather than being tucked into it), but where did ChunkMonk find a bed in that quote?
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Your guess is as good as mine.
 
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