Me Too

but tomorrow it could well be women....

Now it's men in overwhelming majority who get named and shamed and lose their job based on allegations

from my perspective it is not about men or women but about the right things being done

Margaret Atwood gets into a fight with 'Good Feminists' over due process for Canadian professor wrongly accused:

“A fair-minded person would now withhold judgment as to guilt until the report and the evidence are available for us to see.”

Many online took issue with her view. “If @MargaretAtwood would like to stop warring amongst women, she should stop declaring war against younger, less powerful women and start listening,” wrote one person on Twitter. “In today’s dystopian news: One of the most important feminist voices of our time shits on less powerful women to uphold the power of her powerful male friend,” wrote another.

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Others defended Atwood. “Genuinely upsetting to see Margaret Atwood attacked for pointing out that ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is the key to a civilised society. That has to still be a thing, yes? How can that suddenly be a bad thing?”

“My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones,” Atwood wrote. “They’re not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. If they were, we wouldn’t need a legal system.”

She raised the possibility that the answer could leave women divided. “In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated.”

I agree with some of her supporters as well as some of her detractors.

Women have already taken enough of a painful personal inventory to be able to say #metoo; I am not eager to go back over what I've come to comfortably accept as "crappy hookups," or "shitty sex," and come to realize that yes, that was sexual assault too.

If we begin to call all sexual assault what it is, we will have to voluntarily admit more pain into our lives, pain that we have up to this point refused to let in the door. If we call this kind of sexual encounter an assault, then women who have been weathering what they call bad sex will suddenly have justification for the icky feelings and shame that follows them home in the cab. And yet, we'd really rather just hit the showers.

I've taken that cab, crying. And I've taken that shower. And I would never have told the story, because I would have been afraid of someone thinking, "That's not that bad," the way I just ******* did. I don't have to imagine what happened to Grace because I remember it.

This is complicated.

This was never going to be easy or smooth. It's absurd to think that we'd be able to push through what Frances McDormand called a tectonic shift without revealing fault lines we didn't know were there. We're going to find ourselves on opposite sides of things. We're going to disagree. And we're going to get uncomfortable. Remember that you, too, are socialized. Even though you've been hurt, you are also trained to hurt others. I am; I do. I'm trying to do better.

Remember, we don't fail when we disagree. We fail when we go quiet and walk away. Stick around. Be honest. Don't be scared. Or be scared, but don't be quiet.

A new allegation of sexual misconduct against comedian Aziz Ansari has several women in the media saying the #MeToo movement may have gone too far this time.

After a Brooklyn photographer who declined to use her real name told her story about a date gone wrong with the Emmy-winning creator and star of Master of None to the website Babe, Ansari released a statement denying her version of the events and saying he continues to “support the movement that is happening in our culture,” as evidenced by the #TimesUp pin he wore on stage when he accepted a Golden Globe award last week.

First, Caitlin Flanagan, writing for The Atlantic, said that the woman and the writer who interviewed her created nothing more than “3,000 words of revenge porn” that was “intended not to validate her account as much as it is to hurt and humiliate Ansari.”

In The New York Times, Bari Weiss wrote that the only thing Ansari was “guilty” of was not being able to read his date’s mind.

And now, there is former CNN anchor and current HLN anchor Ashleigh Banfield, who delivered a searing monologue on Monday evening that accused Ansari’s accuser of endangering the #MeToo movement itself.

“Dear Grace,” Banfield began, using the woman’s pseudonym in the story. “I’m sorry you had a bad date. I’ve had a few myself. They stink.”                 

The host acknowledged that it’s “hard being a victim,” but that was clearly not how she was viewing her in this case. “Let’s take a moment to reflect on what you claim was the ‘worst night of your life,’” she added. “You had a bad date. Your date got overly amorous. After protesting his moves, you did not get up and leave. You continued to engage in the sexual encounter.”                

“By your own clear description, this wasn’t a rape, nor was it a sexual assault,” Banfield said, using the term that “Grace” utilized in the original piece. “At best,” Banfield said, it was “unpleasant.”

“So what exactly is your beef?” the host asked. “That you had a bad date with Aziz Ansari? Is that what victimized you to the point of seeking a public conviction? And a career-ending sentence against him? Is that truly what you thought he deserved for your night out?”

Banfield said she wanted to speak out because she has been a victim of sexual misconduct herself. “And it stinks,” she said. “But if you just had an unpleasant sexual experience, you should have gone home.”

“But what you have done, in my opinion, is appalling,” Banfield said. “You have chiseled away at a movement that I, along with all my sisters in the workplace, have been dreaming of for decades, a movement that has finally changed an oversexed professional environment that I, too, have struggled through at times over the last 30 years.”       

“You had an unpleasant date,” she added. “And you didn’t leave. That is on you. And all the gains that have been achieved on your behalf and mine are now being compromised by allegations that are reckless and hollow."

unless men take these voices seriously it is just a fad.

Now it's men in overwhelming majority who get named and shamed and lose their job based on allegations, but tomorrow it could well be women....