Am I To Understand That Men Are No Longer Allowed Our Traditional Rape Allotment?
by uhhhhhhh not Boobie that’s for sure
In an era where every political news story seemingly gets devoured, analyzed to death, forgotten, reminisced about, and forgotten again with 48 hours, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh being accused of rape has had rare staying power. The accusation, which meets a more widely sympathetic audience than Anita Hill’s accusation of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas in 1991 given the #MeToo movement’s exposure of famous and powerful men throughout the political and entertainment worlds, has dominated the discourse because of two controversial components. The first is: did he do it? The second is: should it matter?
If the first part is unclear, the second part renders it meaningless anyway. Men in the United States have existed under an unwritten social contract for generations: you get to do a couple rapes and no one gives you any guff for it. It’s both illegal and unsporting to change the terms of a contract in the middle of the period of time it covers, yet people now are acting as though Brett Kavanaugh should have known all along that he wasn’t allowed even a single rape. How it that fair?
Consider the NFL. For years, the league has been attempting to update its rules to eliminate unnecessary violence, from outlawing hits on “defenseless” players (wearing pads and helmets renders you pretty dang defended, but that’s an argument for another day) to making it illegal for a defender to land on a quarterback with their full weight. Forget about whether these changes are good for the sport; the fact that defenders who have been playing the game one way their whole lives have to change the way they’ve always played to tiptoe around soft new rules is completely unfair, and leads to issues like this past Sunday, when what appeared to be a clean hit was controversially ruled dirty because no one is sure what’s OK anymore.
Now imagine that, rather than just playoff home field advantage implications, that hit affected the highest court of the United States of America. That’s the kind of jolt to expectations we’re dealing with here. Just as it’s ridiculous to expect Clay Matthews to suddenly know, after decades of playing experience, that what appears to the average viewer to be a textbook tackle is now a penalty, it’s ridiculous to expect a man who’s lived the majority of his life pre-#MeToo to not have raped a couple times.
Thomas was allowed to become a Supreme Court Judge despite sexual harassment claims. The Academy Awards, a show highlighting the industry most affected by #MeToo, hypocritically wheeled out accused rapist Kirk Douglas to give a “speech” and gave an award to Kobe Bryant in this very year. Hell, the presidency has a long and storied history of rapists, from Thomas Jefferson to Donald Trump, and probably literally every single man in between them. Traditionally, only when the amount of rape gets out of hand, like it eventually did with Bill Cosby, do we expect a man to be held accountable. Short of that, it was clear sailing. Honestly, it was weirder for a guy in power not to have a couple sexual assaults under his belt — it spoke to a shortcoming of determination, a loser’s attitude, a lack of sticktoitiveness. How can any man of ambition who grew up in under that set of assumptions be expected to pass this new purity test where the acceptable number of rapes is apparently down to zero? It’s simply unrealistic. Just ask Senator Chuck Grassley:
Here is a proposal for dealing with sexual assault accusations in this transitional era: moving forward, rape is off the table. Any sexual assault or harassment from this day forward is disqualifying for future career prospects, because women are considered full people now. However, anyone born before 1997 gets blanket amnesty for any number of rapes up to 5. The date and number are arbitrary, and could be moved a couple years in either direction without my protestation, but the amnesty is important, as it will help avoid long, drawn-out news cycles like the one we’re in currently, and will allow people to be judged on their merit rather than on whether they are a rapist or not. Just as we forgive the Founding Fathers for having slaves and Mark Twain using the n-word in so much in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, we have to acknowledge that our current views now don’t reflect what was generally accepted for prior generations. Just as there was no way for anyone to know that slavery or racism were bad until Martin Luther King came along, there was no way for men to know rape was bad until Ronan Farrow started reporting about it.
It’s a shame that male culture will lose some of its roguish, boyish charm due to men having to try not to forcibly have sex with women who do not want to have sex with them, that cannot be denied. But if that’s the decision our culture has made — and I pray that such intolerance is not a permanent shift — then our culture must at least concede that the unspoken rape allotment that men took advantage of until now should be ignored when it comes to hiring men for powerful jobs.
