By David Futrelle
UPDATE: 6/17 Mistrial
As I write this, I am awaiting what I hope will be a guilty verdict in Bill Cosby’s sexual assault trial.
Meanwhile, on Philly.com, columnist Christine M. Flowers is wishing “we’d never come to verdict on this case.” Because, in her mind,
Bill Cosby is an easy target, able to stand in for all the men who might have mistreated us in a distant past … it’s as if the tidal wave of feminist history is set to engulf that one man as some kind of vindication for all the women who’ve been wronged.
Let’s see if you can follow her, er, logic here, as I sure can’t. Even before the verdict, Flowers writes,
The greatest damage has already been done, and that is the shattering of beloved myths and comforting relationships by the proxy of television and nostalgia. Bill Cosby is Cliff Huxtable, regardless of what the critics say. … It is ridiculous to argue that a man who was capable of creating the character that fathered a generation did not, at some deep level, possess those nurturing characteristics.
Er, what!? It’s not ridiculous. The world is full of charming abusers, able to hide their true nature from the public. And it’s full of men who treat some women well and others horrifically.
Oh sure, Flowers knows that Mr. Huxtable Cosby is far from perfect.
And yes, he is an adulterer who admitted to giving women drugs for sex. He has confessed in a secular confessional to betraying the trust of his wife, and perhaps of the women who considered him a mentor before he moved them to another spot on the sliding scale of human interaction.
Seriously? Before he moved them to another spot on the sliding scale of human interaction!?
That’s one way of putting it, I guess.
But I am allowed to refuse to believe that it includes rape.
That you are. And the rest of us are allowed to believe that you’re full of shit.
As Flowers sees it, there are
Too many people willing to pull down a man who, because he happened to say the taboo things that shamed young black men for living down to expectations, is considered a traitor to the race. Too many women who see in this an opportunity to exorcise the ghosts of all the meanness in the world, the assault on their presumed dignity, the Trump effect.
I’m pretty sure that no women think that putting Cosby behind bars will “exorcise” all the evil in the world.
This, I think, is the real reason so many people want to see a conviction: It will confirm that the world is a dangerous place for my gender, and get a condemnation, by proxy, of the patriarchy.
No. But it will bring some small measure of justice to a woman that a lot of us strongly believe is telling the truth about what he did to her.
And that’s my problem with this prosecution. Bill Cosby is an easy target, able to stand in for all the men who might have mistreated us in a distant past, and a cautionary tale to those college frat boys who might take advantage when we lie supine and drunk on the floor in the future.
And why shouldn’t a guilty verdict against Cosby provide a cautionary tale to frat boys “who might take advantage” — that is, rape — women too incapacitated to consent? That is one of the biggest fucking reasons we put people in jail in the first place, to provide “cautionary tales” to other potential criminals. Obviously Flowers, as an adult human being, is aware of this; it;s not clear why she’s decided it’s somehow inappropriate in rape cases.
After a year of leaked commentaries and conversation, evidence and prognostication, we are left with the words of one woman and one man, and yet it’s as if the tidal wave of feminist history is set to engulf that one man as some kind of vindication for all the women who’ve been wronged.
The jury isn’t deliberating feminist history; they’re looking at evidence.
The 50 other accusers, like a finger-wagging Greek chorus in the back of the courtroom, stand in for the wronged women of the past. Gloria Allred leads them in righteous chant, and we look on.
Yes, by all means, reduce the other women who have also accused Cosby of rape to a bunch of “finger-wagging” onlookers.
I do hate these trials that pit an evolving societal ethic against a flawed human being, one person, albeit a person greatly privileged, to make a point that “we’re better, because now we get it.”
This type of proceeding, with breads and circuses and wailing choruses, shows we really haven’t, after all.
Cosby isn’t being tried for violating “an evolving societal ethic.” He’s on trial for rape. Rape was as wrong, and as illegal, in 2004 as it is today. The only “wailing chorus” here is in Flowers’ head.
H/T — @EyesOnTheRight
I’ve never seen The Cosby Show, or any of his other major works. My only real exposure to Cosby was that a local radio station used to play some of his older standup material – including his (from memory – it’s been a while) “Crazy Mary/Spanish Fly” routine, about drugging and raping vulnerable women. So, my reaction to the news was something like “oh, geeze, he was serious about that?”
@THE_SAMURAI
Welcome! And hugs too if you want them.
Kimstu says:
I think the term you’re looking for is “respectability politics.”
I saw a documentary on Bill Cosby on BBC recently. One of his victims said that he used all of his good traits – his philanthropy, his fatherly bonhomie to hide his true nature.
I disagree, although I can completely understand why she feels that way. But humans are complex. Philanthropy and other ‘good things’, etc can be a genuine part of who you are, but something dark and evil and twisted can also be a real part of who you are, too.
It feels like this columnist has made the same mistake and has over-generalised. Bill Cosby isn’t being made to pay (hopefully he’ll be made to pay) for all imagined slights – but rather for the actions he took against many, many women – though yes, on a sample charge. Drugging, effectively poisoning, women and then raping and/or otherwise sexually assaulting them is something that I believe he did and which he must account for.
Jimmy Savile did the same thing – making many comments, often on camera, about girls and his proclivities. All very ‘nudge nudge wink wink’ Like Cosby he was extremely powerful in his world (which extended even further than Cosby) and knew how to make himself untouchable.
At least Cosby didn’t die before the allegations were taken seriously (there were complaints about Savile in his lifetime but no victim ever got further than an initial report, which was likely immediately disposed of), and there is a chance of some justice.
I guess this awful woman is not alone in deciding that this is a feminist witch hunt, but that was certainly not a feature of the Savile case (probably because almost everyone is appalled by the sexual abuse of children). I feel it is very telling that some people wish to pigeonhole this case as a feminist crusade. Cosby could have easily had male victims
(cont) what would the naysayers have said about that?
There are rich and powerful men out there who have a swathe of male victims, as Corey Feldman has highlighted, and the documentary An Open Secret presumably (as I have not seen it) has found that there are nearly as many male victims as female (I presume this because this tends to happen with much younger victims).
On Cosby’s personality: I only watched the Cosby show a little over 30 years ago, but it was pretty obvious that it was a character! Also, Huxtable may have been benevolent, but his position as powerful patriarch was unassailable. When people CHALLENGE benevolent patriarchs then we often see a very ugly side.
@ ellesar
*obvious cw warnings*
Savile was a weird case in every sense of the word. The allegations against him were well known (you may have seen Gerry Sadowitz and John Lydon’s interviews) but at the same time so egregious they took on the mantle of urban legend. One of my old classmates is a nurse at St James Hospital. His reaction when it came out was “I fucking told you!”. But Savile’s behaviour was so over the top it became practically unbelievable. Could there really be a necrohpiliac making no secret of his trips to the mortuary?
In a way it tallies with our incel discussion and the argument they’re just joking/trolling. The lesson to remember is perhaps ‘many a true word spoken in jest’. Not every red flag warning will turn out to be true, but enough of them do that its perhaps best to default to a situation where it’s much better to have a false positive than a false negative in deciding whether to take allegations seriously.
ETA: I don’t know a lot about Cosby, but there seem to be clear parallels with the “oh he’s so nice on TV he must be like that in real life” fallacy.
@Sir Alan
Where have I heard that before? Ah, yes.
I am certain the original truism is from a much more reputable source than an Asterix comic, however amusing it may be.
… Eachtime I read some english translation of Asterix, I feel sorry for the translators.
OT
Surprise sur-bleeding-prise. The Virginia Gunman was a domestic abuser.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/15/virginia-gunman-reminder-domestic-abusers-danger-society
@Ohlmann, some translations of Asterix are pretty good, don’t you think? Getafix for Panoramix, Totorum for Babaorum … and frankly Dogmatix for Idéfix is genius. (kind of like trying to come up with the puns that would have been there if they’d been written in [the other language] in the first place) But you’re right, it’s a hell of a task and not one I’d dare undertake.
I can’t even begin with this Flowers person, and commenters here have already said anything & everything I’ve thought of. JFC.
@Sheila Crosby,
Thanks for sharing that. Even though these warnings seem to fall on deaf ears (like here with the Lindt Cafe siege perpetrator), hopefully more people will take heed. I imagine these details about Hodgkinson will get lost in the inevitable noise of “so much for the tolerant left…”
@wwth
Australia is a kitty toy? That explains SO MUCH.
Cosby needs to pay for his crime(s). Any nostalgia attached to his father figure role in a comedy show from the 90s is overshadowed by his drugging and raping of scores of women. He chose to destroy his legacy by being a rapist.
I’m stuck on the part where coming forward about being raped is “finger wagging”.
Fuck that so much.
In my early teen years, a translated Asterix comic strip was run in one of the local newspapers. Apparently by then, “Getafix” was too controversial a name, because of the association with illegal drugs, so the wizard’s name was changed to “Readymix”.
Are you saying he’s not really an obstetrician in real life? Oh god…I think I just realized why he picked that profession for his character. And I think I’m gonna barf.
@Sheila Crosby
Someone posted an article about that in the Women’s March FB page and there were people commenting that we need to not politicize this tragedy.
Preeeettttty sure it’s the insistence by trash like Christine M. Flowers that men should never face consequences for the violence they enact upon women that’s making the world a dangerous place for our gender.
I remember one creative Bell & Hockridge translation of Asterix that baffled me as a kid. An imprisoned slave is given magic potion and bursts out of his chains. Asterix comments “He’s got a free hand now”, and Obelix busts up laughing for several panels. (The original French was “Il est déchaîné”, which makes better sense as a pun). It wasn’t till I was a lot older that I realized the translators were trying to pun on “manumission”…(I think).
Nothing else to add here. I just wanted to fangirl over Moggie for a moment.
Jury deadlocked? Insert swearing here.
…does that column actually have a central thesis? Because it reads like somebody who just really really doesn’t like that a powerful man has to be punished for committing sexual assault, but can’t outright say it, so it has to be dog whistled by means of throwing shade at feminists. “If Cosby’s guilty, feminists will think they’re right or something! And that’s bad! Because they’re such harridans!”
A better writer might have been able to cache such rape apologia up a little better, maybe used the guilty verdict as an example that “the system works” so concerns about rape culture can be safely ignored. But alas, we’re subjected to mental flailing and haphazard deployment of words meant to poke and prod the conservative lizard brain: “Patriarchy!” “Trump!” “College campuses!”
Not going to make the New York Times Editorial page with columns like this, I can tell you!
@ Tara
Thank you.
@The_samurai
My heart goes out to you. Take care of yourself, I wish you many spoons to help deal with this bs.
Jury deadlocked, instructed to “go back and keep working” pretty much.
It’s probably the whole “Bill Cosby’s acting persona was ‘wonderful person’, surely he’s a wonderful person in Real Life, too?” That and “it was so long ago, is this really fair?” If this had been Jack Nicholson going to trial with the same evidence… Not that I think it’s likely that Jack did such a thing, but the narrative would seem more believable to the average person.
I’m not the least bit surprised a Catholic wrote this disgusting garbage. A few years ago, my Catholic father sent me an article written by the archbishop of Washington, D.C. that laid out all of Warren Farrell’s arguments, blamed working women for the rise in young men who masturbate and play video games in their parents’ basement all day, blamed fake rape claims on their disinterest in dating and marriage, blah, blah, etc, etc. I have since (for that and many other reasons), permanently blocked my father’s email (never been happier, anger and stress levels are way down!).
On another note, here is a case from 1292 (!!) of a physician who was convicted of drugging and raping one of his female patients. We’ve known better for centuries! It’s a good read – https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/7/15749834/medieval-rape-cosby-constand-rape-case-history
Uncomfortably close to this
Where does this idiotic idea that you can only be one thing come from? In the same way that good people do bad things, bad people can also do good things. People can be nurturing to some and abuse others. I’m sure even white supremacist are nice to some of the people that they like and respect. But we have this idea that only very obvious monsters dressed in trench coats in dark alleyways can rape or abuse, when that is just so far from the truth, and so damaging.
These days, there is not enough brain bleach in the world for everything that is going on.