This story just boils my blood. This guy is supposed to be a moral leader, not whatever the fuck he thinks he is. For him to rail on about divorce, homosexuality, pornography, and “sexual atheism”*, to basically get all up in everybody’s sex life, and then have something like this in his background? What, was it like Ell Oh Ell, true love waits but I just needed a blowjob, or was his outlook on sexuality completely destroyed by his religious beliefs? Probably some mixture.
*No clue, but I’m imagining someone crying out “OH NONEXISTENT DEITY” in bed.
Fortunately there’s an easy fix. Expose creeps like this for who they really are. Then expose sex-negativity for the societally backward morally repugnant practice it is. It is designed to keep people in the dark, to the point where they don’t know the proper names for their sex organs, how to use them properly, or even what their purposes are. It’s a way of controlling people and making them ashamed of their natural impulses. Otherwise, what’s the harm in teaching people about reproductive and non-reproductive sex? The vast majority of people will have sex, so they should learn how to do it properly while minimizing abuse, disease, and unplanned pregnancies.
I don’t know about you guys, but I have never mistakenly had sex with anyone. These aren’t mistakes, they’re conscious decisions made as the result of having a fucked up moral compass. They should own it, then figure out why their morality is guiding them to do very immoral things, then address the issue.
Then again, this comes from being introspective, rather than relying on a book written in a very different time and place to supply the unambiguous answers to any and all of one’s moral conundrums.
Yeah, I know that English is a dynamic language, but “mistake,” to me, primarily implies an error made out of ignorance, or perception, or execution. For instance: I thought that this was my stop, but I was mistaken. I thought I had caught all of the typos, but I was mistaken. I thought that I knew you from somewhere, but I was mistaken. You did something wrong, but only because you didn’t do exactly what you were intending to do.
An error in judgement or from a moral failing isn’t a “mistake.” You’re doing exactly what you intend to do; it’s just the wrong thing to do.
Again, that’s a rather prescriptivist use of the word, and I’m trying to stop holding others to my standards of what words mean (especially when their meaning comes across), but I agree with you that consciously using the word “mistake,” instead of something indicating moral culpability, is probably an effort to reduce the failure in the audience’s mind from a moral one to a simple matter of ignorance.
Before we actually started listening to women, before monsters were being held accountable for their actions, we had the whisper network, informal private washroom conversations between women at events warning each other to stay away from certain persons, see The Missing Stair for details (http://pervocracy.blogspot.ca/2012/06/missing-stair.html)
Several years ago one woman put together a spreadsheet of this whisper network and sent it to her friends in media, she called it the Shitty Men in Media list. Her friends filled in blanks, and sent it to their friends who filled in more blanks, and so on and so on. It went viral. The list got reported on. It went offline. And all the women who participated went into hiding. Because five years ago outing abusers got women fired, doxxed, driven from their home, threatened, and so on.
Harpers is about to publish an article by Katie Rophie outing the progenitor of the list.
This is an article by the original author of the list, because fuck Katie Rophie and fuck Harpers.
But Franco apologized to Violet Paley, or admitted that he shouldn’t have done what he did. But it wasn’t “illegal.” A thing can be horribly wrong, but not illegal in the United States.
Denying the holocaust is not illegal. Calling a woman a whore in a crowded theater is not illegal. A range of abusive and harassing behaviors are not criminal. And lot of borderline date-rapey behavior is in a gray area of legality- and that’s what Franco is arguing.
He shouldn’t be allowed to move the argument there from where it should be. His behavior is wrong and social consequences should be imposed. I’ve come to appreciate him as an actor over the last few months, as I had not before. It gives me no pleasure to see him in this situation, but he needs to fully admit and not hide behind the lawyers hiding behind the law.
The difficulty is that the U.S. prides itself on all its Freedoms. The only way to stop ‘bad’ behavior is if it can be shown to be illegal. On the whole – not including specific subgroups like the Amish or even some industries – we don’t shun people. We sue them.
You are more right than I had realised. It seems neither country wins in the global litigation stakes.
US - 1 lawyer per 300 people
UK - 1 lawyer per 401 people
D - 1 lawyer for every 593 people.
So it’s Germany that has half the lawyers per head of the US.
But now this:
D 123 cases per 1000 people
US 74.5/1000
UK 64.4/1000
Thus Germans are far more litigious than Americans, but each German lawyer gets through far more cases - roughly 3.25 times as many as the average US lawyer. This probably reflects the way the German legal system was rewritten to be simple and clear after WW2. English lawyers are slightly more efficient than US ones.
