<
https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/the-she-made-him-do-it-theory-of-everything-2/>
'The rhetoric and logic of the abuse of power operates similarly at all scales,
which is why I've found feminism such useful equipment for understanding
authoritarians in public and political life. Because no matter what abusers
take from their victims, they don't want to take the blame. And one of the
prerogatives of power is to be in charge of blame, and abusers routinely
exercise that power to make their own acts someone else's fault.
Let me start with where we used to hear "she made him do it" all the time—in
sexual assault and gender violence. The logic was that somehow women were very
powerful, which is why they got raped and beat up—their power consisted in
making men to do things, which men were powerful enough in the sense of brute
force to do but powerless in the sense of moral agency or self-control to
resist doing. The idea that all this was a result of men losing control was
always undermined by the fact that a person who truly has no self-control will
act heedlessly, recklessly, and these acts were usually carried out covertly,
in an effort to escape hostile witnesses and consequences.
There's a term, coercive control, which describes such violence and sexual
assault as part of a larger campaign of domination, which is why it was always
about control, never about losing control. Blaming the victim is another tactic
in a campaign of control and power, and it has often worked. It still does.
Male violence was a given, and it was women who were supposed to alter their
lives to avoid it and who were blamed not only by attackers but by society if
we didn't succeed.
This was not just personal intimidation or gaslighting—in cases like that of
Harvey Weinstein, whole teams of lawyers, spies, and aides were deployed to
allow Weinstein to continue his decades of sexual assaults. The legal system
cooperated in many ways, including with NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) –
legal instruments used to silence victims over and over (though in 2019,
California banned them in cases of sexual assault or harassment).'
Via Kenny Chaffin.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
