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
The main problem of evil, is it knows how to pretend to be good. If evil people were always seeming to be evil, they’d be much easier to detect before they became severe problem to others.
Brings to mind Terry Pratchett’s take on one abuser (paraphrased)…
Bystander: He always seemed to be a nice person.
Abused person: He was very good at seeming.
Or my go to costume for several years at Halloween. Wear jeans and an inoffensive t-shirt. When asked why I’m not wearing a costume… “I am wearing it. I’m dressed as a serial killer.” “But you look like you usually do…” {penny drops}
@Ohlmann
They did a really good job, though, for the most part.
I think that Savile will hold a place in British popular culture, when it is not deemed ‘too soon’, that Cosby never will in US culture. Cosby is a terrible person, but Savile seems to have gone beyond terrible and then some.
Could the deadlock be not on whether he’s guilty or not but what he’s guilty of? I know of trials where the deadlock, f’rex, was on whether the killing in question was murder or manslaughter.
Bill Cosby gets defended a lot because lots of people saw him, both in his shows and in his stand-ups, and made up their minds that what they were seeing was the real person and not some perfectly-crafted piece of theater.
This infuriates me! None of these people defending him knew what he was like in real life. They never chatted Cosby up at parties or worked closely with him. They don’t know him. They only know the persona he created for entertainment purposes. Defending Cosby because he played Huxtable is like if Michael Keaton shot a man and I defended him saying “He couldn’t have shot a man. He’s Batman and Batman never uses guns!”
In the same vein, I think that’s why folks defend cops even in the face of undeniable proof. Not because they have friends/family who are in the police or they attend regular parties at their local station, but because of all the cop shows on TV. They think the theater they watch is reality.
So naturally, every instance of coercion is seen as a necessary bending of the rules, every suspect who asks for a lawyer is evil and every time a cop shoots someone it’s done in a fight for their lives. Heck, even the corrupt cops are secretly gruff-and-tough angels just trying to defend the citizens from even WORSE (non-white) criminals.
Here’s hoping that the jury manages to see through the facade and bring a serial rapist to justice.
@Citizen Rat
I know! By that logic Anthony Hopkins should be a monster because He played Hannibal Lector
And Mr. Rogers must have been a really wonderful person in real life. (So far, from evidence I’ve seen, he was.) At least some of my childhood icons are still considered good people.
Oh god. Someone needs to write a parody of Flowers’s text where in stead of rape, it is another crime. When will there be a time that rape and sexual harassment are actually treated with the seriousness that other crimes, such as murder and burglary, are?
My command of English is actually good; still, it looks like Flowers knew her condescending attitude toward rape survivors would shine through the text, leading her to try to hide it under language so flowery (pun intended) that it was really difficult to follow what she tried to say in those quotes.
JS skrev:
“I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everyone else.”
Can you say “hero”? I knew you could.
Yeah, gotta agree. Flows a little better than the original, even! Like disco/bisco for boogie/cookie from the Italian Despicable Me (not to be confused with Italian Spiderman.)
I kind of prefer that, actually – more amusingly twee.
@it’s just me
Please don’t assume that all Catholics are horrible people because of your father. I’m a lapsed Catholic but my mother is incredibly devout( she was an actual no joke Catholic nun for almost a decade)and somehow manages two reconcile her Progressive ideals with her religion. She goes to a Catholic Church(we live in New York City) that is pro-lgbt(it’s not exactly pro-choice but fully open to people who are pro-choice like my mom, and are not nasty to them at all.)They accept that nowadays it’s a perfectly reasonable view to hold, and the pro-life friends my mom does have are truly pro-life not anti-abortion. A number of them have adopted or fostered children, they say what’s the point of stopping abortion if the children’s life will be horrible, none believe in the death penalty, Etc and the priests speak against misogyny and racism and islamophobia in their homilies. I go to church with her occasionally and I’ve heard them myself. My mother also volunteers and donates a great deal of money to progressive causes. I’m not trying to claim there aren’t a lot of shitty Catholics but you shouldn’t assume they all are. Claiming any large group of people is bad is prejudice. Do you truly think all of the over a billion Catholics that exist on the planet are bad people? We even have the cool pope now as people who aren’t even Catholics call him because Pope Francis is the man. Hes obviously not perfect but for a pope he’s pretty fucking Progressive
@KatieKitten420:
Heck, I seem to recall there was an internal struggle just a few years ago between one of the larger groups of nuns and the rather more conservative bishops in the U.S.
Ah, here we are: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/04/20/sisters-are-doing-it-for-themselves/
There are lots of perfectly nice Catholics. The Catholic Church as an organization has some extremely serious institutional corruption issues.
@Donna Quixote… Jaywalking, maybe? Which crime would lead to the most humor or sarcasm I wonder.
@Jenora
That’s all I’m trying to say. I totally agree with what you wrote, I’m not saying the Catholic Church as an institution is not fucked up. I’m saying there are tons and tons of Catholics who are beautiful people, just like every other religion.(plus atheists)People are people, not monoliths. I hate prejudice against any group, especially a group with a billion people in it.
@jenora, everyone
That’s one of the best articles on women in Catholicism that I ever read and I’ve read a bunch because my mother was a Catholic nun before I was born. Thank you Jenora, for letting me know about it, and everyone else who is at all interested, you should read it too. It is very informative if you are at all interested in women in the Catholic Church
I wonder if she would apply that logic to actors that play villains? James Gandolfini played a fantastic mob boss, does that mean at some deep level he must be a real gangster? Is Bryan Cranston drug dealer at some deep level? Is James Earl Jones at some deep level a space nazi?
Hey, this is only tangentially related to the thread, but I have a really stupid question for Fran, Axe and Dali: How come so many of the richest black men are racist towards other black men? Bill Cosby, Morgan Freeman, Ben Carson, Steve Harvey… Did they make it because they were already racist, like “Cool girl” misogynists, or did they become racist because they made it, like “Fuck you, I got mine” Libertarians? I’m having a real chicken-and-egg moment here and need an answer from somebody smarter than me.
@SFHC
No idea. The other 2 would more likely know. I’ll add @KK, Patricia Kayden, and lkeke to the beacon, and give it a think of my own
I will note, tho, that the youngest person on your list there is 60. Maybe something in that…
@axe & sfhc
I know its not for me, But Sam L Jackson also said some things about Daniel Kaluuya being British and not black enough for when he play the american in Get out. Does that same thing? He also little bit younger than your other examples.
I’m none of them, nor would I ever think to speak for any of them. But from my perspective this looks looks like your basic pulling up the ladder behind you.
It’s shit however you try to make it, but “it’s good enough for me” is a thing that’s easily weaponised to murder unionists, leftists and other undesirables. Instantiated, as we all know, through Thatcherism and/or Chilean fascism (no, I can’t them apart either).
Google says yes on Paterno. Not sure about Sandusky, I didn’t actually read any of her columns.
CW: quotes that support a pedophile enabler, rape mentions
It wasn’t unwarranted, he covered up a dude raping children so he could win some fudging football games. His rep didn’t take enough of a hit.
Good. He enabled a rapist.
She doesn’t seem too enamored of Sandusky, based on the little blurbs from columns on Google. Maybe because he raped boys?
Re: the deadlocked jury
Apparently they asked about his testimony in his desposition where he admitted to drugging at least one woman.
6 questions the jury had in Bill Cosby’s trial
Edit: fixed a typo, added an extra cw
@SFHC
Not certain why I’m on the list, but the short answer in all cases is respectability politics. In the case of Carson, Harvey, and Cosby, this is compounded by a powerful misogyny. They gravitate to people who share that, along with the inevitable concurrent queer antagonism. Being that they associate with a lot of white folks, the people who share those opinions are also pretty racist. Also, ‘social conservatism’ always ends up being pretty racist generally cos there’s all that Charles Dickens rags to riches by hard work and virtuous character garbage in it. Freeman appears to subscribe to the ‘colourblind’ flavour of liberalism, with the racist bullshit that always entails. Why, I cannot fathom.
(OT rant about hard work and safety nets)
“Hard work never killed anybody” say the ones who haven’t had relatives die young, or suffer terribly, after working too hard at manual labor.
NFL football players, generally considered in good shape with good training and good health care, start getting joint and muscle problems earlier than average, despite everything done to try and keep things from being injured (knee braces on just about the whole front line these days).
—
They’re called “safety net policies” for a reason you assholes in Congress. Just because some of you like calling them “entitlements” doesn’t mean they’re bad for the social structure of the country.
@ JS: Ah yes, the Wednesday Addams approach. 🙂
Also, I don’t think anyone ever managed to dredge up any dirt on John Denver. And believe me, there were vultures who tried. But the worst I’ve ever heard said of him was some shit about him being a millionaire singing about being a country boy… a song which was actually written by one of his band members; he acknowledges that explicitly on one of his live albums.
Speaking of Mr. Rogers, anyone who’s a fan of his should read this fanfic. Hankie warning.
@JS
“Hard work never killed anybody, oh hello ghosts of brutalized and mangled workers, didn’t see you all there”
Sometimes it feels like they really just want to say that they want a neofeudal state.