Narrative and Fallacy: Caricature, Distortion, and Setting the Terms of Justice

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Susan Faludi↱ considers the problem:

Joe Biden has been accused of sexual assault, and conservatives are having a field day, exultant that they've caught feminists in a new hypocrisy trap. A woman, with no corroboration beyond contemporaneous accounts, charges a powerful man with a decades-old crime? Hmm, doesn't that sound mighty close to Christine Blasey Ford's complaint against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh? Yet this time, many liberals who've championed the #MeToo movement seem skeptical?

Gotcha!

Tim Graham, executive editor of NewsBusters: "Where is the #MeToo movement on this story? What happened to their rigid 'Believe All Women' boilerplate?"

Fox News host Tucker Carlson: "the infuriating, the sickening hypocrisy of the media and the professional feminist movement. 'Believe All Women!' No they don't."

White House adviser Kellyanne Conway: "Three magic words, 'Believe All Women.' I didn't hear an asterisk; I didn't see a footnote, 'Believe All Women so long as they are attacking somebody aligned with President Trump, Believe All Women so long as they are—have a college degree or better or are—are for abortion in the ninth month.'"​

The question of what happened in 1993 is difficult; to meet the conservative challenge, though, is its own exercise in absurdity. That is, we can fill in blanks and unknot the convoluted pathways of Tara Reade's telling, but just how accurate can, say, my narrative patch job be? It cannot, and here is an example: One of the reasons I believe and accept assertions of rape culture is that I was raised in it; nor is this a new point around here. Even within that context, and starting with a standard from a Hughes film, we can consider an assertion of concomitant intimacy; in this case, she is kissing him, therefore he can grab her ass.

Wait, what?

Right. To the one, this is a question occurring between two people who happen to be romantically kissing, as the example has it, for the first time. To the other, what is the presupposition of access? Moreover, as every simile has its functional limits, we might acknowledge the example is bequeathed to the hapless young man by a deliberately styled libertine idyll invested in what the story holds is an actual manufactured woman.

If I say, of presupposing access, use good judgment and take your chances, I'm being unkind to you, that partner, and the trust of intimacy to be shared between you. As it is, that certain degree of presupposed access is what we need to examine.

Because I cannot think of any iteration of what passes for brocode circa 1993 by which, under the skirt, was not at least extraordinary, and in that context I don't know what to say of digital penetration. I really don't. The living analogs I have just don't apply.°

So we take a moment: What was the '93 brocode on under the skirt and attempting digital penetration? Part of my point is to look at where even this one part of the discussion goes. I really can believe the claim, but how much more of this narrative am I going to write in order to explain it? Because we can talk about variations of brocode all we want, and what it might have been in a good ol' boys club like the U.S. Senate at privilege, but none of that describes what any of this means to the women who suffer such behavior.

If, for instance, a U.S. Senator, who is her boss, has just done that, I am absolutely unable to describe what this means to her. Don't get me started on the meaning of the words, "sexual assault", circa '93. Again, that would be me writing the narrative.

Nothing about Reade's behavior utterly disqualifies her story. But it is also true the amount of narrative I must fill in would be a problematic justification, in no small part because I'm simply not qualified to write that narrative.

Moreover, the effort to compile testament on Joe Biden's behalf is as striking as the history it tells. One need not actually be a qualified psychoanalyst—I'm certainly not—in order to discern something significant about the magnitude of grotesquerie afoot.

To the other, Faludi does not so much evade or blow through or past the question, but, rather, countenances something important about the nature of the grotesquerie:

In fact, "Believe All Women" does have an asterisk: *It's never been feminist "boilerplate." What we are witnessing is another instance of the right decrying what it imagines the American women's movement to be.​

And, you know, maybe I could have told you that, but toward her point, she did say, another. Yes, this is something of a theme.

What Faludi describes is that, "yesterday's quotes suffer the insertion of some foreign DNA that makes them easy to weaponize". The insertion, on this occasion, "is a word: 'all'".

This distortion, "was all the rage during the Kavanaugh hearings", Faludi argues:

When senators from Kamala Harris to Mazie Hirono had their regard for Dr. Blasey's credibility elevated by Fox News pundits to universal gender credulity, their actual words, "I believe her," became believe all women. "That's literally the hashtag," former Fox News contributor Morgan Ortagus said in February 2019. "There's a great search function on Twitter, and you can search the #BelieveAllWomen. For those of you who don't believe that's what the Democrats had in the case of Kavanaugh."​

And it is true, as Faludi notes, that, "Meaningfully tracking hashtags on Twitter is a confounding chore, even for the professional data scrapers". Still, Ortagus' challenge makes the point:

As [Ortagus] noted, Twitter has a search function that, while hardly "great," does at least crudely reflect the site's use—especially by its most popular users who are most likely to spread a hashtag far and wide. For instance, type in #BlackLivesMatter or #MakeAmericaGreatAgain" for 2016, and you get a bottomless well of references. Type in #BelieveAllWomen for 2017, when the #MeToo movement took off in October, and you get several dozen references, followed in 2018 (the year of the Kavanaugh hearings) by many more. But here's the thing: I found that the hashtag is, by a wide margin, used mostly by its detractors.​

Detractors? We should not be surprised.

It seems that #BelieveAllWomen first appeared on Twitter in late 2014, in three tweets—by an Ontario midwife, a Toronto educator and "lifelong learner" and "Jenna & Kayla, twins from Ottawa who plan events in their spare time." Combined following: fewer than 4,000 followers.​

Ontario? Toronto? Ottawa? Okay, it's true: We should not be surprised.

Then, in the fall of 2015, Hillary Clinton posted a tweet: "To every survivor of sexual assault … you have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed." To which Juanita Broaddrick, who alleges that Bill Clinton raped her in 1978, responded on Twitter on Jan. 6, 2016, "Hillary tried to silence me." Conservative editor David French, who has a large Twitter following (more than 209,000 followers as of this writing), retweeted Ms. Broaddrick at once—attaching the hashtag #BelieveAllWomen, followed by four question marks.​

David French? To get Hillary Clinton? The only thing that is surprising is the degree to which we ought not be surprised. I mean, really? David effing French?

As happens, the canard, blown into a bonfire by the right, became accepted truth in mainstream media, from NPR to The New York Times to The Globe and Mail in Canada, with pronouncements characterizing #BelieveAllWomen as "the rallying cry of the #metoo movement," "the order of the day" and "a formula for miscarriage of justice if ever there was one."

It all came full circle last week, when Megyn Kelly said in her interview with Tara Reade, "Some of those who touted the 'we must believe all women' line the most, during, for example, the Kavanaugh hearings for the Supreme Court, certainly seem to have changed their tune when it comes to you."

In my online searches, I encountered some feminists who seemed genuinely to subscribe to the phrase. But overwhelmingly, the Twitterati deploying the phrase were conservatives, wielding it as a whip.​

It's a basic formula of establishing a false dichotomy and insisting on it: "If the pluralism of the women's movement can be reduced to rigid boilerplate in the public mind", Faludi explains, "#MeToo will have more to lose from a single untruthful woman whom it's sworn to defend than from boatloads of predatory men."

The insertion of that word, "all", becomes "not an amplification of 'Believe Women,' but its negation". And while the "double-standard purity test" that "operates in one direction only" is blatant, and it is true that conservatives seem "immunized by their own shamelessness", there does remain a question of what to do about that:

The right, being averse to principle, has long known how to turn the left's expressions of principle into Achilles' heels. Even when it has to make up the expression.

So, where does this leave feminists?​

The short answer to that isn't necessarily unfamiliar. It is vital that the terms of discussion attend reality, not the vice of observable make-believe fomented by those we already know are wrong.
____________________

Notes:

° And, yes, I even have a proverbial, this one time; it just doesn't apply, though, as no part of how that story happened is in effect.​

Faludi, Susan. "'Believe All Women' Is a Right-Wing Trap". The New York Times. 18 May 2020. NYTimes.com. 19 May 2020. https://nyti.ms/3e6Skql

 

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Faludi↱, goes on to explain some of the things feminism has asserted, or not, about all women:

That all women are deserving of equal treatment under the law, equal pay in the workplace, reproductive health, freedom from domestic violence. And feminists have long held that "all women" should be believed when the "all" refers to all categories of women—i.e., equal regardless of race, religion or economic status. This is what Anita Hill meant when she said in a CNN town hall in 2017, "And until we can believe all women, every woman's voice has value, none of us really will be seen as equal." Read her comments in full, and it's clear she wasn't giving equal credence to every individual woman, but equal standing to women of "all races, all ages, all sizes, all backgrounds."

Good luck finding any feminist who thinks we should believe everything all women say—even what they say about sexual assault. History offers ample evidence of the horrors that can ensue when a woman or a man is believed who shouldn't be: Remember the Scottsboro Boys?

Since at least the late '90s, gotcha conservativism's specialty has been condemning feminists for failing to live up to their dogmatist label. First, caricature feminists as a bunch of groupthink totalitarians, then accuse them of hypocrisy every time they are not in lock step. But guess what? Feminism has never, for five minutes, been about lock step. If anything, we tend to be at each other's throats more often than we're marching in ranks. And that's on subjects from comparable worth to women in combat to pornography to #MeToo, where feminists from Margaret Atwood to yours truly have argued for proportion and due process. The broad spectrum of opinion within feminism is one of its strengths, not a frailty. If feminists see distinctions between Anita Hill, Monica Lewinsky, Christine Blasey Ford and Tara Reade, I'd say they're doing their jobs. That's not hypocrisy, that's integrity.​

The perpetual tilting and torching of straw men is thematic, and neither is it simply conservative. To the other, if Faludi is holding back, don't say she never did anyone any favors.

Jean-Paul Sarte, seventy-five years ago, expolored the etiology of hate:

The [supremacist] has chosen hate because hate is a faith. At the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons. How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the reality of his hatred appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for someone to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by supremacists, all of them absurd: "I hate [them] because they make servants insubordinate, because [one of them] robbed me, etc." Never believe the supremacists are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words respnosibly, since he believes in words. The supremacists have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to indimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.​

There are manners of separating conservatism from supremacism, but these would be extraneous to the circumstance before us. Faludi asserts inherent bad faith—a conservative aversion to principle, "brazen hypocrisies", shamelessness, and caricaturization of its opposition:

When I searched databases for women's actual statements on "believe all women," what I found were appeals by women not to be defined in universal terms—"I do not believe all women are born with the desire to reproduce" or "I don't believe all women's interests are the same"—and outrage at attempts to categorize their sex.

This is why the preferred hashtag of the #MeToo movement is #BelieveWomen. It's different without the "all." Believing women is simply the rejoinder to the ancient practice of #DoubtWomen.​

Faludi notes a tweet she encountered during her search, responding to yet another femicide: "When we say #believewomen, it's because this can literally be a matter of life or death for us."

It is this that conservatives—(supremacists? antisocials?)—seek to mock and diminish by their distortion and caricature.

Faludi puts it plainly:

Not having its message and mission hijacked and distorted can be life or death for the women's movement. Feminism's bedrock reason for being is to free every woman from the concept of "all women." Its future rests on a full-throated defense of that belief.​

The mocking caricatures and distortions are not unique to misogyny; and while they are not utterly reserved to supremacism, certain burdens of consideration attend diversionary rhetoric, so we can let those protestations say what they will.

And if I could have told anyone this or that about themes, general and particular, in this manner of political discourse, part of the feminist defense against distortion and caricaturization is not simply to assert what is true as counterpoint to persistent falsehood, but to attack the foundation of ill-spirited dissimulation in order to reject fallacious frameworks. If the terms of discussion are set according to bad faith relying on pretenses of principle derived from assertions known to be wrong, then the discussion is dysfunctional from the outset.

Those who cling to wrongness and superstition in order to demand particular frameworks for discourse must either get a new argument or else justify their bad faith. There is no useful reason to let people known to be wrong set the terms of discussion.

If it starts to feel as if it doesn't matter whether Joe Biden is guilty or not, that, at least, is part of the negating purpose. We have a case that cannot presently be prosecuted per evidence, and a political challenge reminiscent in particular manner of Juanita Broaddrick, who spent decades encouraged by pretenses of care offered by conservatives who never really gave a damn about her. The tragedy of how things came to be that way is part of what Faludi, Atwood, and any number of feminists struggle against, yet here we are with another grotesquerie in which an accuser becomes a victim even of her supporters, who hold her up as an icon of antifeminist fallacy.

Perhaps it is glib to remind that we should not be surprised, but still, this is part of how injustice works. And if people wonder about the real influence this cultural ideation we call rape culture, remember that traditional prejudice, even when one does not intend it, can easily be accepted and communicated; and this, in turn, makes makes personal sympathy toward prejudice, even when one does not intend it, that much more accessible.

As Emir Ali Khan suggested, prevailing ideologies in communities "may be so ancient, so deep-seated or so subtle that they are not identified as such by the people at large"; and if such prejudices "are often discerned only through a method of challenging them, asking questions about them or by comparing them with other communities", we see what the caricature and distortion and bad faith seek to ward off. Furthermore, if some significant aspect of this challenge in public discourse should seem rather quite simplistic, that might well be a manifestation of marketplace dynamics.

History does not require that Tara Reade be a liar, but inasmuch as timing is everything ...― well, what has happened that I can even say that? There is no way in which bringing this now could have been anything but a catastrophe for Reade, and that would be with the best of representation° guiding her through the process of trial by public discourse.

And while the political implications are spectacular in and of themselves, there really is a larger question of how these things go, according to what agenda, and who is setting the terms of discussion.

Or, Faludi:

This is why "Believe All Women" is not an amplification of "Believe Women," but its negation. As Mr. Morales Henry at the Schlesinger Library told me, after several days of analyzing the use of the two hashtags, "It looks like #BelieveAllWomen, especially recently, is being used in opposition to #BelieveWomen." Its use spikes on occasions when allegations are made against a liberal politician—often with companion hashtags decrying a double standard.​

____________________

Notes:

° What would that "best of represntation" have done? The prospect that Covid could have thrown off the timing would suggest Reade was not being given the best of advice. That we can have any timing discussion at all is beyond extraordinarily problematic.​

Faludi, Susan. "'Believe All Women' Is a Right-Wing Trap". The New York Times. 18 May 2020. NYTimes.com. 19 May 2020. https://nyti.ms/3e6Skql

Khan, Emir Ali. "Sufi Activity." Sufi Thought and Action. Edited by Idries Shah. London: Octagon, 1990.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Anti-Semite and Jew. 1944. New York: Schocken Books, 1995.

 

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OK. "Believe All Women" isn't a fair assessment of what the "MeToo" movement is all about.

Obvious, but OK...

 

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A little aside. Time for a George Carlin reality check.

(warning, crude language)

 

Fails for the same reason #BelieveMen would fail

Some of both genders LIE

Believe me

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I believe you....., believe me....

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"Some lie" does not conflict with either of those hashtags.
Neither fails on that ground.

 

i have met women who have a 7th sense who can sniff that kinda stuff out
and even give kinda details of what the real event was

previously aggressive sexual action where women were expected to simply surrender as a normal part of social culture is mixed inside the aspect of abusive sexual assault
saying no was expected and "no" was considered to not mean anything verbally.
actions were most important
bullying and lynching and mod justice was normal
people had to choose which gang they mixed with and would be held accountable for being abused by that gang because that is the morals they chose.

that WAS the normal culture

and inside rape however there is a very big difference
only the morally abhorrent, corrupt, terribly broken and evil wish to mix those differences together
unfortunately the average person cant tell which type of person the person mixing them together is.

date rape sex
forced sex
was common 50 years ago
women didn't have the social authority to say what would and would not happen
but the alt-right & the sexual perverts want to confuse those lines
and in so confuse the subject

 

a: i didnt want that !
b: what are you paying for ?
a: im not paying you for anything
b: so you are demanding something for free ?
a: no ! i am telling you what i want !


soo typically American !

totally consumed by being the consumer
screaming at the world telling it what they want
and demanding the right to do so as a human right equal to equal rights

oh so typically American ! (middle-class) privilege