The Wind Is Only Violence If You Resist It


I happened to see this first thing this morning.  It's very much worth reading in full, but I was particularly struck by these two observations.





There are probably an infinite number of applications of this that you could come up with, but the one that jumps out to me is in reference to the statement by President Trump that, if the accusers of Brett Kavanaugh are believed, it will be "a very scary time for young men in America."  It doesn't take a deep thinker to suss out what he is getting at--men should be afraid that their careers, livelihoods, and even freedom, will be at risk from some sort of random, intentionally false sexual assault allegation.

On a surface level, that's not a particularly credible threat.  The National Sexual Violence Research Center, collecting research, says that the rates of false sexual assault allegations are no greater than between 2 and 10%, and likely much lower given the ways that "unsubstantiated" reports (i.e. one's that law enforcement cannot come up with sufficient evidence to pursue) are often lumped in with "false" reports, when they are clearly not the same thing.  The FBI's uniform crime report for 2012 says that there were a little over 61,000 forcible sexual assaults of women reported to law enforcement in the US.  If we assume, for simplicity's sake, that each of these events involved a different alleged perpetrator, and the 2% false reporting rate, that works out to a little over 1200 false reports.  There are about 75 million men between 19 and 55 in the United States, and if we assume that these false accusations are going to be randomly distributed through the population (unlikely, but let's go with it), a given man in a given year has a 1 in 62,140 chance of being falsely accused of sexual assault.  To put that in perspective, you have a far greater chance (1 in 44k) in any given year to be killed in an automobile accident in which you were a pedestrian than to be the falsely accused of a sexual assault.  Being the victim of a false accusation is the equivalent of being hit by a bus while crossing the street and killed, even assuming that all of this is completely random, which it is not.  Life is random and unfair sometimes, and if we don't worry overly about the possibility of being hit by a bus, then men shouldn't worry about being the victim of a false accusation. 

But let's pretend for a moment that this is a real threat, and examine the notion of men (here, in this context, straight men) being scared of women and what women might do to their careers and livelihoods.  Any women reading this are no doubt thinking, "what, you mean like the way women have to be afraid that men will ruin their careers and livelihoods (or threaten their lives) in any one of a number of ways?"  And that's the point.  No one is saying that it's OK for men to be wrongfully accused of something they didn't do, especially something that speaks so directly to character like sexual assault.  But being placed in a position where one is vulnerable to false accusations is to be in the place that most of the non-straight male population already is, and has been for a very long time.  It's not like this is some weird, unique singling out of straight dudes for some heretofore unprecedented punishment.  It's just becoming like everyone else.

And that's before we talk about the other dimension of this, which is race.  Men might be punished for false sexual assault allegations?  You mean like Emmett Till?   Since I know I have some non-US readers who might not know the story, Emmett Till was a 14 year old African-American boy who was lynched in 1955 in Money, Mississippi, ostensibly for whistling and harassing a white lady.  Turns out the white lady made the whole thing up, but in any event two men beat Till to death and dumped him in the river.  The point is that men being afraid that women will make up sexual assault allegations is certainly not some new or revelatory experience to African-American men in the United States.  And now that you have a President who calls Mexicans "rapists," it's not exactly news to Latino men, either.

What Trump and his ilk are really crying over is the idea that white, straight men might have to worry about false sexual assault allegations, in the same way that all other people in the country have been worried about related issues for a very long time.  You will forgive me for not having tremendous sympathy for the other members of my tribe on this one--"being just like everyone else" is not actually a punishment.  People like me being a little more uncomfortable than we have been in the past is not some catastrophic injustice, but a bit of growing pains surrounding the birth of something new and better.  It may mean that some folks will be accused and treated unfairly and unjustly while the pendulum swings a bit too far the other way.  Those individual, discrete events should be called out when the occur, but that in no way invalidates or calls into question to basic project overall.  As Martin says, the wind is only violence if you resist it. 

What does it mean not to resist the wind here?  Well, it means that white, straight men like me should be more conscious of our behavior, especially toward women.  We would be wise to talk less and listen more.  We would be wise to be more conservative in our romantic interactions--if we find ourselves in a situation where we are not entirely sure of the intentions of the woman we are with, it's best to default to the answer being no.  Does that mean that we are going to get laid less often?  Yup, probably, but it's not like that's some world-historical tragedy or anything.  It means deferring, falling back, taking a lesser place.  That, too, is not going to kill us, either individually or collectively. 

We are not as fragile as the behavior and constant pissing and moaning of many of our number would indicate.  It's all going to be OK.  So long as we don't try to stand in front of the wind and try to make it stop.     

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