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I See We've Reached the Stage Where the Accusers Are No Longer People, Just a Narrative that Can Be Picked Apart

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | September 25, 2018 |

By Dustin Rowles | Politics | September 25, 2018 |


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Ask anyone who has been to law school, and they’ll probably tell you that the worst week of their first year, from a class perspective, is the week spent on the elements of rape in criminal law. After much of the year learning about things from which we are all very detached — offer, acceptance and consideration; the Rule in Shelly’s case; Goldberg v. Kelly — we finally hit upon something with which people in the class have had experiences, and the conversation about rape invariably spins out of control when one or two assholes in the class decide to debate the nature of consent, and what is and what is not rape. Two or three women are triggered by this, for obvious reasons, and the conversation devolves into chaos, madness, and hurt feelings. The assholes refuse to see it any other way but their own; there are conversations about the nature of the word “No,” and two or three people don’t show up to class the next day.

It fucking sucks.

It’s basically what’s going on with social media right now. Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez have alleged that they were sexually assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh in high school and college respectively, and there is a whole world of assholes (called “Republicans”) debating about 1) whether they believe the accusers; 2) what the nature of the crime was; 3) whether it can be proven; 4) the role of alcohol; and a new one, thanks to Brett Kavanaugh’s interview on Fox News last night, 5) whether a “virgin” can sexually assault someone. Any regard for the victims here has been thrown out the window.

And the thing about law school is, you’re expected to understand both sides of these debates because law schools don’t teach you to be just prosecutors or just defense attorneys, you have to understand both sides of the argument and be willing to argue each side. I’m not in law school so I have no interest in that anymore, so all I see here is a guy who drank a lot in high school; called someone who he says was his friend a slut in the yearbook; hung out with a guy who admitted to his ex-girlfriend that he gang raped a girl (this being the same guy who was with Kavanaugh when he assaulted Blasey); hung out in fratty circles where drinking and sexual assault was par for the course, according to Kavanaugh’s own roommate; and that Kavanaugh is trying to suggest that he was a goddamn choirboy who was a virgin until after college, so he couldn’t have sexually assaulted these women who are clearly somehow profiting off of these accusations.

But there’s always the asshole in the class.

See what that motherfucker is doing here? He’s erased Christine Blasey and Deborah Ramirez from the story. This is not about them. This is not about their trauma, trauma so intense they both ended up in careers trying to remedy situations similar to their own …

McConnell has turned this into a story about those sleazy Democrats versus a “good man,” and even though McConnell is taking their names and faces out of the equation, it’s Ramirez and Ford’s accusations, and their reputations that are being dismissed. When McConnell says the allegations are “unsubstantiated and uncorroborated,” he is saying, “these goddamn women are lying.”

And I don’t know if that’s better or worse than the other asshole in the class — GOP Rep. Kevin Cramer, who is currently running for Senate in North Dakota — who argues that hey! Even if it did happen, they were “drunk teenagers” and it was “supposedly an attempt that never went anywhere.” Because, hey! If you hold a knife to a woman’s throat, hold your hand over her mouth, and threaten to kill her but she escapes, that’s not attempted murder, because the “attempt never went anywhere,” right?

Fuck off.

I don’t know what the point of what I’m saying is, except that I hate that the entire nation is talking about Ramirez and Ford as though they’re not in the room, that they have been reduced to accounts that everyone else picks apart and dissects without any regard to the women sharing those accounts, and that we’re all stuck in a law school where this guy is the professor:

Zendaya is Meechee.




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