Getting a Handle on What Sexual Misconduct Actually Means

I think everyone except white-wing evangelicals agrees that a forcible sex act is rape.

But what about a coworker looking at another and saying “Damn, she’s fine”?

Stealing a kiss in what you think is a romantic moment to find out she/he isn’t that in to you? I mean, in the old movies, that always seemed infamously to lead to slap a la Cary Grant and Doris Day.

Trying to force a coworker into a sexual encounter? No question this is wrong.

Can a woman be accused of sexual misconduct in attempting to coerce an unwilling male?

So where exactly are the lines?

And what can we do as a society to make sure everyone is on the same page? What is and is not acceptable is rapidly changing. As well as out view of “who” is believable. Misconduct isn’t going to be swept under the rug (unless you are a Republican).

 

What Does ‘Sexual Misconduct’ Actually Mean?

The almost infinite shades of creepy misbehavior on display are challenging the legal and cultural categories used to describe them.

“Enough is enough,” proclaimed Senator Kirsten Gillibrand at a December 6 press conference. Whatever the details of her colleague Al Franken’s sexual misbehavior, said Gillibrand, who has been aggressively pushing for Congress to tackle its harassment problem, he needed to step down. “I think when we start having to talk about the differences between sexual assault and sexual harassment and unwanted groping, you are having the wrong conversation. You need to draw a line in the sand and say: None of it is OK. None of it is acceptable.”

It most definitely is not. But as the public outrage over sexual misconduct gains force, it is swallowing up an increasingly diverse range of allegations, from the relatively petty (such as those lodged against Franken) to the truly monstrous (such as the claims regarding Harvey Weinstein and Roger Ailes). In between those poles exist almost infinite shades of creepy—which, sadly, will necessitate a great many discussions about how to deal with, and even talk about, the different types of offenses and offenders.

This is, in some ways, uncharted territory. In the past, questions of culpability were largely left to the legal realm: As long as a man didn’t get arrested or lose a lawsuit—and sometimes even if he did—he could get away with an awful lot while suffering little more than a bad-boy reputation. But the current reckoning is different, a rising tide of public shaming driven in part by shifting attitudes and expectations among younger women. Going forward, it’s hard to tell how the new lines will be drawn, much less where.

Women should be respected. Period. But not all offenders are created equal. The pattern of coercive harassment of employees allegedly perpetrated by chat show host Charlie Rose or former Representative John Conyers is not the same as the fumbling, drunken stupidity of which The New York Times’ Glenn Thrush stands accused. Thrush may or may not deserve to lose his current job for having made booze-fueled passes at, and subsequently talked smack about, female colleagues at his previous job. But his alleged offenses pale when compared to, say, ex-ABC pundit Mark Halperin’s alleged practice of groping, rubbing his erections against, and even masturbating in front of junior staffers—and then threatening to kill the careers of those who rebuffed him. (Like many of the men caught in this whirlwind, Halperin disputes at least some of the allegations against him.)

Some of the misbehavior being detailed is flat-out bizarre. Comedian Louis C.K. admitted to being a nonviolent but nevertheless intrusive exhibitionist-masturbator. It remains a public mystery precisely what Garrison Keillor did to get his radio show killed. (Something about touching a woman’s bare back when her shirt fluttered open?) Representative Joe Barton had every right to text naked pics of himself to one of his girlfriends, but threatening to use the Capitol Police to keep her quiet about their relationship was a no-no. As for former Representative Trent Franks, who felt it appropriate to pressure multiple young aides to serve as surrogate mothers for him and his wife: Someone needs to explain that The Handmaid’s Tale is dystopian fiction, not a how-to guide.

Then, of course, there are the many and varied accusations circling President Donald Trump, not to mention his own boasts in this area—none of which he has addressed in a remotely coherent, much less persuasive fashion. (The Access Hollywood tape is empty locker room talk! No, wait, it’s a fake! He has never met these women! Not even the ones he’s been photographed with! Or the one who was on his show!) But that, alas, is a special topic to be saved for another day.

It is precisely because this movement is so powerful that it’s important to avoid (through frustration or disgust, exhaustion or confusion) sweeping every bad act and actor into the same mushy heap. That kind of sloppiness breeds excess and backlash. Right now, even our language is inadequate to the moment. Shoving Weinstein and Ailes under the same umbrella of sexual “misconduct” or “misbehavior” as Franken or Thrush renders such terms all but meaningless. Weinstein terrorized scores of women—psychologically, professionally, and physically—for multiple decades and is currently under investigation for rape. That’s not “misconduct” or “harassment.” It’s an atrocity, possibly wrapped in multiple felonies. Both genders need to find a way to address some of these qualitative distinctions without sounding like anyone is being let off the hook.

This may sound obvious, until, for instance, you wander into an angry Twitter mob of John Conyers supporters demanding to know why the ex-congressman’s sins are seen by many to be worse than Franken’s. Well, for starters, Franken didn’t use tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to secretly settle an aide’s harassment claim. As for the underlying misconduct, if one believes the accusations, Conyers’s transgressions—committed repeatedly against his own employees in direct abuse of his power over them—were empirically more egregious and revolting. (Asking an aide to touch his junk or else find him another woman who would? Come on.) This isn’t to say that Franken didn’t behave like an entitled pig. But, until the drip, drip, drip of low-level grope-and-slobber stories accumulated, the case for his being pushed from office was not nearly as clear as the one against Conyers….More...

 

Domestic Terrorism – Minnesota Mosque Bombing

If a Muslim threw a rock at an evangelical church, do you actually believe the white-wing press, from Faux News on down would be screaming “hate crime”?

They would be screaming Islamic Terrorism at the top of their hyperventilated lungs.

Knowing it is Session’s DOJ investigation surely warms the perps hearts.

Remember the pictures back during Katrina where the MSM described black people taking food and water from stores as “looting”, and white people doing the same thing as “foraging”?

 

 

High school student schools teacher on what Racism really is

Sometimes it is the students who educate the teacher…

This Student Expertly Schools Her White Male Teacher On Racism

Teaching students about the reality of racism is important, and one video has gone viral showing what can happen when a student believes it hasn’t been taught right.

The video, which was shared to Facebook on Thursday and has since received nearly 5 million views, captured a snippet of one student’s reaction to her teacher’s lesson plan on “What is racism?”

The student effectively schools the teacher, a white man, on some of the ways racism is perpetuated today beyond the discrimination against one’s skin color.

“You’re trying to say that it’s just race. No. Racism is based on the systematic oppression of people. White people have never suffered that,” the student said in the clip, highlighting the ways racism is also reflected through various social and political institutions.

“It’s kind of like you, as a white man, saying what is and what is not racist. And that’s what’s been happening throughout this century,” she added.

Meanwhile, the teacher, who is briefly shown in the video, stands silently and listens as she speaks. Moments later, when she’s done, the classroom erupts into applause praising the young woman for her commentary.

 

Cornel West’s Ego

Cornel West has increasingly made himself less and less relevant in his campaign to own the definition of blackness in America. Wish the guy would get back to the sort of intellectual work he did 15 or 20 years ago, before he self-anointed himself the guardian, and gatekeeper of all things black.

West’s tirade is utter bullshit. It’s bullshit because it’s based on his damaged ego, instead of any fair attack o President Obama’s policies.

This one from MSNBC –

This one from the Ed Shultz Show, which includes a counter by Melissa Harris-Perry –

Think it would be amusing to have “Free Black Man” Cornel West and “Real Black Man” Herman Cain in the same room with a no holds barred verbal hoedown.

Blacker than thou… Indeed. I’m putting this one under the category…

Giant Negroes.

 

The History of White People – Nell Irvin Painter

Nell Irvin Painter is a professor at Princeton who has written several books. Her most recent foray is entitled “The History of White People“. and examination of the changing definition of whiteness starting with the Greeks through today.

Nell Irvin Painter's New Book - "The History of White People"

A sample of the book can be read here. It is available through Amazon Books. In America, we have seen this metamorphosis from “not white” to white as each successive generation of immigrants, starting with the Irish prior to the Civil War fought for their place in America – and eventually were rewarded with “whiteness”. The last major group to successfully make the transition in the American context being Jewish people.  Asians appear to be the leading non-white group which are in “transition” based on the Model Minority stereotype.

So how does this impact the racial dynamic in “Post-racial” America?

History reveals multiple classifications of whites, ranked by power, privilege, and physical characteristics

Race, Nell Irvin Painter writes, “is an idea, not a fact.’’ Painter, a professor of history at Princeton, has written several books chronicling African-American history, but the story she tells here mostly sidesteps the dichotomy of black and white. This terrific new book spins a less familiar narrative: the “notion of American whiteness,’’ an idea as dangerous as it is seductive.

Painter’s tale begins in the ancient world, where Greeks and Romans wrote about the mysterious, warlike people they encountered to the west and north. In antiquity there was no notion of race — what mattered was geography, language, culture, clan. The tribes living in what is now Georgia and Ukraine were called Scythians by the Greeks, whose great historian Herodotus described them as being fond of hemp and not in the habit of regular bathing. Romans ventured even farther west, meeting and conquering people they classified as Celts, Gauls, and Germani (the classifications morphed over time, as racial categories always do). Roman observers found much to admire in these men, ancestors of today’s Germans; in writings later embraced by race scientists (and then by Nazis), Tacitus praised them as “a distinct and pure people’’ with “fierce blue eyes, tawny hair, bodies that are big but strong only in attack.’’

Professor Nell Irvin Painter

The violence of ancient white peoples, lauded by the Greeks and Romans, was also attractive to those who claimed them as ancestors. Ralph Waldo Emerson, father of American transcendentalism, saw himself as a son of these Saxons (who, in the goofy myth-making this book so ably mocks, were said to spring from Germany and Scandinavia but bestowed their manly beauty and superiority on American whites by way of the early English settlers). In his 1856 book “English Traits,’’ Emerson writes of the qualities passed on by such virile white stock, including “good sense, steadiness, wise speech, and prompt action,’’ but also “a singular turn for homicide.’’ Strangely, he means this as a compliment, though observers from different backgrounds saw the same quality less favorably. Black Bostonian David Walker, in his famous Appeal of 1829, pointed out that “whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority.’’ Painter avoids taking sides, but she wields a withering deadpan when delivering such quotes.