It’s all over the news. It doesn’t mean she wasn’t a Weinstein victim, but it looks like she was also a predator who had groomed Bennett for years. And her friend Rose McGowan’s response? We should “be gentle” until more facts come out.
Maybe, but this is rich coming from McGowan. If it had been a man rather than her friend, would she be urging us to not rush to judgment? My guess is that she’d be leading a vigilante gang with torches and noose in hand – as long as there was a camera crew nearby.
In that particular industry nothing would surprise me and hypocritical I would have to agree with as well. But given that this sort of thing is usually driven by an unequal power dynamic, the truth of the matter is that we usually see women on the receiving end of this behavior. And that’s a function of the fact that women hold less power positions across most industries.
“Is it any surprise that women can be assaulters/harassers and hypocritical about it too?”
Yes. I encounter denial about this, as well as the belief that if it exists, it’s so rare as to deserve zero attention.
Two truths:
A. Most of the assault/harassment in this country is men hurting women, and that’s facilitated by a unique gender power differential that isn’t comparable to same-sex or reverse hetero situations.
B. A lot of our response to assault/harassment is heteronormative and erases victims who don’t match the assumed narrative.
Those two truths are going to be in tension. The best we can hope for is to acknowledge both.
The boy involved was 17. Actually, I see news stories about female teachers having sex with high school boys fairly often. It isn’t all that unusual. There are plenty of Mary Kay Letourneau’s out there.
Yes there are Mary Letourneau’s out there and they lose their jobs, get prosecuted and do their time in jail if found guilty. But there doesn’t seem to be the same outrage when women lose their jobs and get prosecuted that we see with men being terminated by their boards and facing legal action.
One explanation is that there haven’t been many famous women accused. But as to school teachers or others that are not well known, I think the outrage is far more when a male teacher rapes an underage girl than when a female teacher rapes an underage boy.
What I really meant was the outrage that these men were being fired not outrage for the victims. When women lose their jobs and find themselves on the sex offenders list I don’t hear the same sympathy or lamenting about how they might never work again.
But to your point I can tell you that I feel plenty of outrage reading those stories coming out of Pennsylvania from the victims of priests. And most of those victims are male.
It’s tough to compare the data about men and women perpetrators because there are so few women in positions of power comparable to Weinstein et al. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
@HarvestMoon1 In comparing the stories about Boston in 2002 in Spotlight and Pennsylvania now what struck me is that the Boston victims were almost all boys while Pennsylvania had many girls as victims.
