There is no biological reason, societal sure (we call that “The Patriarchy” round these parts).
And add a dash of “no repercussions” and “power corrupts” and “entitlement” and you get this tidal wave of revelations we see today.
What I still don’t understand is WHY this is happening now. We have known about this stuff for years, decades, and no one listened then, so why are they listening now? Thats what I want to know. What happened recently to make this pivot? I keep hearing about this “watershed moment” and I’m like “what is it, where was it, when did it happen?” Because the powers that be have been killing these stories for centuries, so whats changed?
When I started knitting (around age 5) in the 70s, the only other person I saw knit regularly was my grandmother. We would go get yarn at Eatons, but often we world be the only other shoppers in that department.
In the 80s I discovered the boutique stores and even worked part-time at one, but besides the Christmas rush we were never exactly busy. 3 shoppers at once was “busy”.
Then starting in the mid-90s mailing lists started. They were huge – 1,200 knitters on one mailing list. Even reading the digests meant skimming.
A large number of people on the lists had learned from books, had never seen another person knit before. So people started organising stitch ‘n’ bitches, resurrecting social structures from WWII. Meanwhile, blogging came into its own.
There’s been steady growth ever since. All these fragments of a movement were able to bridge geography and realise that added up, there were a lot of them.
I think it’s the same thing with these harassment cases coming forward, and the same thing (unfortunately) with the Nazis. (Although with the Nazis, the anti-Nazis are finding it easier to counter-protest, so there’s that.)
It’s a watershed because all the drops have found a way to coalesce.
I agree.
People now have an unprecedented ability to get together on single issues in a way that has never happened before. One person goes public and it comes up in Google search results. Laws of libel can’t keep up. Of course there are downsides - I think Trump is the first Internet president. I venture to think that the Internet is killing off religion pretty fast in Europe, which has upsides and downsides. But abusers can no longer be sure that someone will not out them - anonymously perhaps - beyond their ability to silence the media.
My exact first thought in answer to @MissyPants’ question. I have sometimes wondered whether things like Twitter & FB are the first external signs of the massive sentience of our society. I started to say “massive intelligence” but clearly this sentience is completely insane. But I wonder if parts of whatever it is is starting to decide that some things are impermissible. Look at the confederate flag thing, and the statues thing.
Clearly the parts that are evil are also expressing themselves. I guess all we can do is hope. This is the singularity, by the way; it’s been here for a while, but people just haven’t noticed.
Trends can have single underlying drivers, but abrupt breaks tend to be chaotic, where little things start cascades. Also, I’ve talked elsewhere about how the greatest disasters turn out to be from odd coincidences of problems, simply because single problems would have been handled. Something like this may well be the mirror of that – after all, this is a disaster from the perspective of some abusers in power.
Just from the timing, I wonder if Trump hasn’t been a…not a help, ever, but a sort of immunostimulant. Again, mirroring how Obama and then the Syrian refugees sadly helped trigger the white supremacists coming back into the spotlight. People have been gearing up to resist, to not put up with their abuses, and maybe some of that energy spilled over into not putting up with other harassers? A guess, anyway.
But I also agree with @gadgetgirl and others the net looks key. It does cut both ways, and has been a powerful tool to attack people. But those who care to can see more. Some men are starting to see what an epidemic they so easily help conceal, and women are starting to see more options to stand up to it. There are places where you see the old secret-warning networks become less secret, and more and more that a woman who comes forward might nevertheless find support from someone. The old ways of shutting victims down have been cracking, and the new ones aren’t such givens.
I think you’re all right, it is “the 'net” - but its more than that. Its social media and its smart phones.
I’ve been online since 1995. And these types of abuses have been around longer than that. But we never had this sort of outpouring before, and we could have, easily.
But what changed is how we access and share information. Twitter and Instagram wouldn’t exist without smart phones (I did briefly use twitter on my old Nokia 3210 but I’m a weirdo). The instantaneousness of it all is thrilling and terrifying. (and fascinating)
Oh, did I not mention that one of the pens is hex-shaped (to help prevent it rolling) with ruler marks on the sides, and it also has a built-in stylus (opposite the pen end, to avoid screen accidents) that reverses into an eyeglass sized screwdrivers, and a built-in spirit level.
Because we just witnessed a more-than-credible woman candidate for the Presidency get torpedoed by decades of targeted sexism, including the fact that somehow she’s the one who must be punished for the sexual harassment/abuse/etc. her husband committed against other women.
She torpedoed herself, but the decades of sexism didn’t help. There were still people talking about Monica Lewinsky in 2016, and Hillary had nothing to do with that!
What if the person trying to take your daughter away was your own father and the one trying to take your granddaughter was your own son? And what if one of them had a badge and a gun? It’s a case of how Georgia’s new “Grandparents Right Law” has torn one family apart.
Act 1 in the recent This American Life was well worth a listen:
Kind of shocked at how deaf he is to the stats she quotes to him, and wonder if an environment which better promoted women’s voices would better let him see how nonsensical his self-justification was.
The ghetto boys are catcalling me
As I pull my keys from my pocket
I wonder if this method of courtship
Has ever been effective
Has any girl in history said
Sure, you seem so nice, let’s get it on
Still, I always shock them when I answer
Hi my name’s Amanda
Democrats were not planning to aggressively contest Mr. Barton’s conservative-leaning seat: His best-funded Democratic challenger, Jana Lynne Sanchez, had only $16,440 on hand as of the start of October.
Ugh, why??? I know there’s tactics to these things, but if you don’t contest huge regions of the country how are you supposed to give people even the opportunity to change their politics?