The 4 Redemption Narratives We Are Currently Using to Minimize This Sexual Harassment Hellscape

“An Apology Is Enough”

The sexual harassment/assault statement has quickly become an emerging literary genre. Its stock phrases are already familiar: “If the allegations are true,” or “I don’t remember” or, more straightforward, “This is a smear campaign.” The statement allows the accused to move on but it’s little more than a gesture of accountability that says little and demands even less. The stock phrases of the apology are of a kind, they are, in their details, fundamental denials. While they might offer sentiment, they make no demands on the accused.

“It’s Not Like He’s Harvey Weinstein”

“The boundaries are already blurring,” Masha Gessen wrote in a recent piece at the New Yorker. Gessen was pointing to what she described as a “sex panic,” ostensibly occurring right now that began as “actual crimes but led to outsize penalties and, more importantly, to a generalized sense of danger.” The sex panic is evidenced by the “consequences” now suffered by Harvey Weinstein, journalist Matt Taibbi, and Louis C.K. What these consequences are exactly is hard to identify—Weinstein and Louis C.K. have lost work and money, while Taibbi has endured some thinkpieces, tweets, and responded to some difficult questions (questions that have circulated across the internet every other year or so). But, more broadly, the point is that Taibbi’s satirical sexual harassment and Louis C.K.’s sexual misconduct pale in comparison to Weinstein; their inclusion in this moment of reckoning, Gessen argues, amounts to the blurring of boundaries.

Gessen is hardly alone in this standard, one that positions Weinstein as the point of departure for all sexual harassment and assault stories. It’s a standard that demands the abuse of nearly twenty women before accountability for gendered discrimination is even considered appropriately newsworthy rather than simply a panic. Gessen is right that sexual assault and sexual harassment are not synonymous—surely readers can and should differentiate between the two—but the newsworthiness of gender-based discrimination shouldn’t be measured against the immense brutality of Harvey Weinstein. It’s a rhetorical flourish that excuses every behavior that isn’t criminal, and a slippage of the very philosophical boundaries it seeks to enforce.

Never forget that this moment has required an outpouring of victims and a certain spectacle of the shocking to demand this attention

“He Lost His Job—What More Do You Want?”

“People, this is America, remember? Due process?” Burr said in his podcast. Burr was defending his manager, whom he shared with Louis C.K. and who some have implicated in the protection of C.K. as rumors of his behavior circulated long before the New York Times released its report. Gessen, too, offered a far more sophisticated iteration of this defense, conflating mass incarceration with Title IX, and the “sex panic” of the post-Weinstein moment. Here, consequences of job loss and angry internet users are treated with the same broad stroke as a government that oversteps its constitutional boundaries and criminalizes certain sexual behavior. Gessen sees Title IX, with its preponderance of evidence standard, as part and parcel of the “sex panic” she describes. “The affirmative-consent and preponderance-of-the-evidence regimes shift the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, eliminating the presumption of innocence,” she writes, never pausing to consider that jail, suspension or expulsion from school, or job loss are hardly synonymous, or that their long-term repercussions are the same

Rather what’s at issue here is civil rights—freedom from discrimination in the form of harassment because of gender or sex. This argument relies on the concept of “policing”—a view that society has been reduced to “policing sex” but lacks the rational standard of due process found in a court. It’s unclear what policing is taking place—Weinstein may be charged with a crime, but that’s still a maybe and no one to my knowledge has been arrested. Conjuring up institutions constructed for the discrimination of the marginalized for the preservation of other forms of power (wielded with clear discriminatory intent) seems like more than a rhetorical leap.

“Witch Hunt! Witch Hunt!”

I’ve written about this before (many, many times before) but the “witch hunt” narrative that treats this moment has inherently irrational with no respect for the rule of law, and lacking any reflection of long-term consequences, is bound to a history too unfriendly to prove useful.

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Never forget that this moment has required an outpouring of victims and a certain spectacle of the shocking to demand this attention. The real peril of the aforementioned apologies are that they stand to leave this crucial moment unfinished, the systems that foster abuse may be damaged, but are still standing. Reckoning turns quickly to redemption, and the work of justice—particularly gendered justice—remains unfinished. It’s too early to wonder about the futures of Louis C.K. or even the men on the Shitty Media Men list—when there are still so many predators, institution, and systemic failures that have been left out of the reckoning.