Rape Culture

 Tom Junod, one of my favorite writers, collaborated on a long, searing expose on a serial rapist and murderer on the Penn State football team back in the 1970s. The focus, aside from the criminal, was on the degree to which Joe Paterno knew and tolerated the behavior. That aspect of the piece is actually the weakest for me. It functions less as an indictment of Paterno and more of an indictment of American football culture and the casualness with which we excuse sexual assault.

Of course, it's not unique to football. We have the Brock Turner travesty at Stanford. The list is very long.

What's appalling - and I know cataloguing the appalling actions of the GOP is exhausting and apparently fruitless - is the degree to which Donald Trump's successful run for the Presidency in 2016 has de-stigmatized rape and abuse within the GOP.

The nature of rape is that it can be hard to convict without a third party witness. The presumption of innocence and the usually private nature of the crime can make it hard to create a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.

However, when multiple accounts of sexual assault or harassment start to pile up, we really should see that as a corroborating evidence. It seems, therefore, that we can call Donald Trump a credibly accused sexual criminal. There's an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to cataloguing the allegations against him. His behavior seems consistent to what he bragged about on the Access Hollywood tape. He would grab a woman inappropriately and then basically gauge what happened after he shoved his tongue down her throat or grabbed her breasts or buttocks. "When they're famous, they let you do it." Meanwhile the lone and shifting accusation against Joe Biden by a politically motivated opponent seems way less credible.

All of this leads to the current state of the GOP. Candidates across the country are accused of really horrible things, yet there is little chance that this will count against them in the current climate of the GOP. The piece lists candidate like Herschel Walker, Eric Greitens, Max Miller and Charles Herbster who have been accused of sexual assault, domestic violence and harassment. But in a party where Trump remains a Golden Calf and Brett Kavanaugh has a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court, why WOULD a Republican drop out of the race? In what way is being a credibly accused rapist a liability in today's GOP.

What is sick is the number of GOP women who remain enablers of this behavior. In this piece on Florida's attempt to ban abortions, we have a GOP Assemblywoman in Florida saying that women will falsely accuse men of rape to get those sweet, sweet abortions, so there should be no exception for rape victims. 

The gender gap from now on is likely going to be huge. I really can't explain away or excuse my fellow men's desire to be OK with this. The shock of the #MeToo moment has gone, and even college educated men are moving towards a party that is perfectly fine with rapists, as long as they aren't Democrats. (Meanwhile stoking fears of pedophilia among Democrats. Every accusation is a confession.) There is something broken in men who never grow out of a petulant adolescent attitude about sex. 

How women can be part of a political party that actively treats them like shit is truly a marvel of motivated reasoning.