Liberals, don't defend Al Franken with the same arguments used by Trump, Moore, and Cosby

There are a few arguments that are continually used in defense of people accused of sexual harassment or assault. Since Leean Tweedon accused Al Franken or forcing a kiss and put out a photo of Franken humiliating her, arguments primarily used by assaulters and/or their right-wing supporters have been put forth by Franken's defenders. Suddenly the left is attacking the accuser in words used to attack every previous accuser. I find that disturbing.

I'm not arguing that Franken's actions are equivalent to those of a child molester like Roy Moore or a rapist like Bill Cosby. I'm simply saying that people should not change their evidentiary standards based on how much they like or dislike the accused. A sleazy defense of a murderer or a shoplifter is still a sleazy defense.  If you don't accept an argument put forward by Trump or Weinstein then don't use the same argument to defend anyone else.

So here's a handy table comparing the defense of Franken with the defense of various other men in hopes that this will make clear why these arguments are always bad.

The typical defense	The Franken defense	Just like ...
The timing is suspicious	Franken's Republican accuser was trying to create a distraction from the Roy Moore scandal. Why else would she come out with this now?	If the "why now" argument sounds familiar, it's because Moore just used it, asking why his accusers have come out a month before the election. Trump expressed similar suspicions when the Hollywood Access tape came out. Trump actually had a better argument than Franken or Moore, because sexual harassment wasn't a big part of the national discussion until Trump was accused of it. With the Harvey Weinstein-inspired #MeToo movement convincing women that their accusations might finally be taken seriously, this is exactly the time one should expect a flood of these reports. Yes, Tweedon could be making a calculated political move, but by that logic don't we have to dismiss the claims of Trump's liberal victims as well? Are we going to have a rule that we'll only believe victims who are politically aligned with the accused?
She was friendly afterwards	Hey look, here's a picture of Tweedon sitting next to Franken smiling! How upset could she have been?	This is a big defense in the Hollywood cases. Weinstein and Cosby have both trotted out examples where their victims had lunch with them later, or sent them a friendly email, or worked for them again. I wanted to post a link explaining the psychology behind this phenomenon, which is quite common, but my google-fu is failing me at the moment.
It was long ago	He wasn't even a senator!	The Franken photo is about as old as Trump's Hollywood Access tape. Moore apparently hasn't trolled the mall for teenage girls in years.
She's not so innocent	On the same tour, Tweedon goosed a guitarist. So who is she to talk?	This is pretty much every defense for every sexual crime or misdemeanor ever. Sexy clothes, raunchy behavior, kinky tastes, any sexual history whatever is used as a reason to dismiss the victim's claims. Even if you have evidence that a woman is raunchy and inappropriate and sexually charged, it doesn't in any way prove she wasn't assaulted.
It's fake	Social media is flooded with people claiming it was a joke Tweedon was in on, that she was pretending to be asleep, or that the photo was altered. They're saying this even though there's photographic evidence and Franken has admitted to posing for the picture.	Disputing evidence is very popular. Moore signed the yearbook of a victim but denies he ever met her and claims the signature is a forgery. The main difference between Franken and people like Moore and Trump is he didn't start making the bullshit lies some of his fans are making for him.
It's not so bad	Franken didn't do much. He's not really touching her breasts, just posing as though he is, and a forced kiss isn't like grabbing a woman's breasts.	The tough thing here is everyone has a different line. You have a right to your opinion that Franken's photo was no more than a tasteless, ultimately harmless joke, but others have a right to believe that there's nothing wrong with a guy in his thirties hitting on teens or a celebrity feeling entitled to grope every woman he meets. I think it's fair to say any line Franken crossed was crossed further by Trump, many, many times, but if the victim feels a line was crossed, who are you to tell her it's a stupid line?

The Video Game Gender Wars Explode!

There is a huge battle of the sexes going on right now in the world of video games. Two battles in fact, one between the developers of Tomb Raider and some angry women, another between a blogger and some hostile boys and men. In both cases there is a target – the blogger, Tomb Raider – in both cases there are attackers – angry males, angry females – and in both cases the attackers are reacting less to what their targets are actually doing and more to their own underlying fears and concerns.

Case 1: Tropes vs. Women in Video Games

Let’s start with the blogger.  Her name is Anita Sarkeesian, and she recently started a Kickstarter project to raise money for “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,” which is to be a series of videos “exploring female character stereotypes throughout the history of the gaming industry.”

The series is a follow up to “Tropes vs. Women,” which dealt with certain common film stereotypes of women, like the “evil demon seductress” and the “manic pixie dream girl.” The video game version will include such game staples as the “damsel in distress,” the “fighting fuck toy,” and the “sexy villainous.”

Sarkeesian figured she could make her series for $6,000. She raised that quickly. But she also raised the fury of male gamers who posted savage comments on the kickstarter video’s youtube page mixing rage, sexism and a big dose of anti-semitism. Sarkeesian encountered a lot of hostility elsewhere, including the hacking of her wikipedia page.

The hostility was particularly extraordinary because her proposal was so mild. She said she wanted to look at clichéd female video game characters. Anyone who’s not a complete idiot would have to readily admit that these are quite common. But the attackers acted as though she were going to single-handedly destroy all they hold dear with her series of feminist videos. True, many of the attackers were certainly just sullen 13-year-old boys, but sadly, there are a lot of asshole gamers of every age. On the bright side, this nastiness resulted in a strong counterpunch; Sarkeesian’s project received almost $159,000, and will now have over twice as many videos with higher production values. 

Case 2: Tomb Raider

Around the same time this was going on, a trailer for the upcoming Tomb Raider game and an interview with its executive producer created a massive feminist backlash against the game, which, like the Sarkeesian’s video series, does not actually exist yet.

Tomb Raider aims to be a “reboot” of a series that has been rebooted several times before. The game, to be released next year, focuses on Lara Croft before she became the self-assured adventurer of previous games. In the trailer we see a young woman lost in the jungle and terrified, desperately trying to make her way to safety and getting bruised and injured in the process. She is far more vulnerable (and less endowed) than previous incarnations.

There is also a scene where she encounters armed bad guys. While her hands are bound, one of them corners her and does something you’ve seen in dozens of films, he leers at her and runs his hand down her thigh. Then, in a less common occurrence, she bites his ear, gets his gun and shoots him.

At the same time this trailer came out, the game’s executive producer, Ron Rosenberg, was interviewed by Kotaku. During the interview, as he was explaining how the game makes the player feel for Lara, he said “they try to rape her.”

That created a huge explosion. Tomb Raider would be a game in which Lara Croft is bruised and bloodied, almost raped, tortured for the pleasure of male gamers. The developers quickly declared that there was no attempted rape, that what you saw in the video was all there was, but by then all hell had broken loose. It didn’t help that Rosenberg had also said that players see Lara not as an extension of themselves but rather as someone to protect, which suggested that he thought all gamers were male (and that all males could not emphathize with women).

The irony is that one of the purported goals of the game was to create a less sexualized, cartoonish Lara Croft, a goal furthered by choosing as lead writer is Rhianna Pratchett, who has been working on the game since “it’s early inception” and whose game Mirror’s Edge contains one of Anita Sarkeesian “all time favorite female characters.”

What is Going On?

So, a woman says, I’m going to talk about sexism in video games and she is met with outrage, an outrage that seems to have bypassed her previous series on film sexism. A game’s few seconds of sexual menace becomes a huge controversy, even though movies have shown far worse.

What’s going on?  Here’s my take on it:

In the early days of video games they were primarily a male pursuit. In fact, they were primarily a nerd male pursuit. But over the years they became more mainstream and less geeky. While at first only the nerd females were joining the nerd males, eventually gaming was a huge part of the culture, and as women became more and more interested in video games, they began to ask to be treated as something more than interlopers.

Women started asking questions like, why if I choose a female character in a MMORPG do I have to wear a bikini? Why do so many games feature heroic men and simpering women? Why can’t we have games where women are cool, smart, tough, and properly dressed for being shot at?

And when they asked those questions, men who thought of video games as their thing heard, “we are going to ruin games. We want them to be really easy and full of unicorns with pink saddles. We want to get rid of foul language and blood and have lots of games with Barbies. We are going to ruin the thing you love most, because we are terrible bitches who don’t want boys to have any fun.”

And that is the subtext underlying these reactions. Furious boys look at Tropes vs. Women in Video Games and see women coming to take their toys away. Women hear talk of rape in Tomb Raider and think, those men are doing it again, turning us into pathetic torture-porn mannequins.

What is really happening is: video games are evolving. It’s an inevitable process in any art form, but it’s a very messy process, action and reaction, steps forward and backward. And the final irony of these two controversies is that those under attack are essentially on the same side. Sarkeesian wants a dialogue about how women are portrayed in games. Tomb Raider is attempting to portray a tough and resourceful human being rather than a buxom cartoon. Both want games to evolve.

There is something very personal about video games. You do not watch them, you inhabit them, and the video game gender wars are not just about what we play, but what we want our second world to be like. Video games have a pre-feminist quality, and women are fighting battles in the video game world that their mothers fought decades ago in the real world.

Expect the yelling to continue.

how to be unpersuasive

I've been trying to get more reading done lately, grabbing the books I've collected off my shelves and actually looking at what's inside. The latest book I began to read was Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape.

It's a famous feminist book, but what struck me about it is how little it bothers to actually try and persuade anyone at the beginning. First there's an interesting intro in which Brownmiller says she herself once didn't take rape too seriously. That's a nice, disarming way to start. Then she spends a couple of pages pointing out how thoroughly ignored rape was by people like Freud and Krafft-Ebbing, which is well worth noting. But within a couple of pages she wanders into pure conjecture, using the phrase "must have" repeatedly in sentences like "one of the earliest forms of male bonding must have been ... gang rape ...." She ends with a remarkable blanket statement, stating rape is "a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women[/i] in a state of fear" (her italics).

I have two problems with this. As a reader I just don't like sweeping statements and generalities, because I feel they are almost invariably false. But I have a greater problem with the book as a writer, because for me this book represents a soft-headed preaching-to-the-choir approach that will resonate with those who already agree with Brownmiller while alienating everyone who doesn't.

Great feminist literature like The Second Sex or Backlash (two of the most elegantly reasoned, insightful and persuasive non-fiction books ever written) makes a case the way a lawyer does, introducing evidence and drawing conclusions based on that evidence. To refute a book written like that, one would have to do research, find flaws in the evidence and holes in the logical approach to analyzing that evidence. It's not that it can't be done - you can pick holes in anything - but it would be a lot of work. But it is no work at all to pick apart a book that keeps saying this "must have" happened or that is "probably" the case. If you say, "prehistoric man must have learned to flavor meat with garlic early on," I can say "prehistoric man probably believed garlic was poisonous." We would both just be talking out of our asses if we couldn't offer evidence to support our positions.

There's probably something of interest and value in Against Our Wills. It's almost 500 pages long and it's a famous book, so I will give it that much. But by tossing away all pretense at objectivity or scholarship by the end of the first chapter, Brownmiller fails to make a case for herself as the person qualified to analyze the place of rape in civilization, and thus failed to convince me that it was worth slogging through her seemingly baseless opinions to find what was of value in her book.

For the angry feminists of the 1970s, the book was probably great, because there was a lot of justifiable resentment at the way women had been (and continue to be) treated in society. But that's the problem with the book; if you're not angry already, you are going to instantly notice that Brownmiller is talking out of her ass. And that is no way to convince anyone of anything.