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Title: Fuck Abuse, Kill Power Author: CrimethInc. Date: December 14, 2017 Language: en Topics: sexual assault, accountability, patriarchy Source: Retrieved on 23rd April 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2017/12/14/fuck-abuse-kill-power-addressing-the-root-causes-of-sexual-harassment-and-assault
The past year has seen a wave of revelations about powerful
people—nearly all men—perpetrating sexual violence against those beneath
them. The #MeToo moment has provided a platform for countless courageous
survivors. Yet while some men have been made to face consequences for
the harm they have done, we are far from being able to solve the problem
of male sexual violence. Focusing on the wrongdoings of specific men
tends to exceptionalize them, as if their actions took place in a
vacuum. This is consistent with the mechanisms of a criminal justice
system focused on individual guilt and a reformist politics premised on
the idea that the existing government and market economy would serve us
perfectly if only the right people were in power. But with the bad
behavior of so many men coming to light, we have to consider the
possibility that these are not exceptions at all—that these attacks are
the inevitable, systemic result of this social order. Is there a way to
treat the cause as well as the symptoms?
Trigger warning for descriptions of sexual violence.
Virtually all recent mainstream coverage has treated sexual harassment
and assault as an issue distinct from capitalism and hierarchy. When
writers admit that capitalism and hierarchy play some role, they imply
that what is harmful about these systems can be fixed through reform.
They exhort us to appeal to power to solve the problems power causes: we
are to pressure corporations to fire their executives, to use the media
to shame media moguls, to use democracy to punish politicians. In short,
we are supposed to use the very structures through which our abusers
hold power to take it away from them.
On the contrary, we can’t be effective against rampant sexual assault
without confronting its root causes.
Sexual assault and rape are woven into the very origins of the United
States. The original colonists did not consider the indigenous
inhabitants worthy of the same moral considerations as white Europeans.
Sexual assault and rape were systematically employed as colonial tools.
Michele de Cuneo, a nobleman and a shipmate of Columbus, described the
following scene in a letter, apparently without shame or remorse:
While I was in the boat I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom
the said Lord Admiral gave to me, and with whom, having taken her to my
cabin, she being naked according to their custom, I conceived desire to
take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not
want it and treated me with her finger nails in such a manner that I
wished I had never begun. But seeing that (to tell you the end of it
all), I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such
unheard of screams that you would not have believed your ears. Finally
we came to an agreement in such a manner that I can tell you that she
seemed to have been brought up in a school of harlots.
Slaves, too, were routinely sexually assaulted. This was an essential
aspect of the system of slavery: in addition to domestic labor, enslaved
women were forced to engage in sex and reproduction that served to add
more slaves to their captor’s holdings.
Workers have also experienced sexual harassment and assault for as long
as there has been a workforce. This is just one of the many
manifestations of the unequal power dynamics between employers and
employees.
Throughout all this, women were never passive victims. Women have always
fought against their abusers with ferocity, creativity, and diversity of
tactics. For example, in the mid-1800s, a slave named Harriet Jacobs
fought fiercely against her captor; after resisting his sexual advances,
she hid in a crawlspace for seven years to avoid him. She eventually
escaped to New York and obtained legal freedom. An early forerunner of
the #MeToo movement, she wrote letters to the New York Tribune detailing
her experiences and in 1860 published Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl, one of the first books to detail enslaved women’s experiences of
sexual assault.
Starting in the early 1900s, women formed labor unions that fought for
the rights of female workers, including the right not to be sexually
harassed and assaulted. Black women’s struggles against workplace
harassment led to the creation of the first laws against sexual
discrimination and harassment. In 1993, Lorena Bobbitt cut off her
abusive husband’s penis and threw it in a field after he raped her. A
jury acquitted her. These are all legitimate forms of resistance.
“They passed round the bleeding stump, as if they had finally
exterminated a wild animal that had been preying on each and every one
of them, and saw it there inert and in their power. They bared their
teeth, and spat on it.”
-A passage from Emile Zola’s 1885 novel Germinal in which a mob of
starving women workers castrate the corpse of a shopkeeper who has been
extorting them for sex in exchange for food.
Of the men whose behavior is finally coming to light, it was no secret
that many of them were abusers. Nothing is different now except that
corporations have taken a bit more notice. Corporate media outlets have
published women’s accounts; some corporations have fired rapists if what
they have done is deemed egregious enough. Should we be grateful to
corporations for firing serial sexual predators once enough accusations
pile up that it becomes a problem for their brand?
These corporations are just plugging the oil leak that finally made the
news. But who creates and maintains this pipeline? They do. Let’s not
pat them on the back for solving a problem that they caused.
Most of these companies have known about these accusations for years
without doing anything. Worse, they’ve allowed these men to rise up the
ranks of power to the point that their serial abuse warrants national
news attention. In other words, these corporations have facilitated
these men’s behavior by giving them additional opportunities with which
to harass, assault, and rape women. For every Harvey Weinstein whose
actions are finally made public, there is another Harvey Weinstein who
gets away with serial assault thanks to the assistance of the
institution that gives him power.
Why do corporations have a vested interest in helping rapists succeed in
business? While misogyny is partly to blame, we have to look at the
bigger picture. Corporate success is determined by how much profit a
business produces, not by whether it protects women from sexual assault.
In capitalism, whether to oust an assaulter becomes a simple economic
equation: how is his presence affecting the bottom line?
Take the case of Bill O’Reilly. Since 2002, Fox News and O’Reilly have
paid out many millions of dollars to settle sexual harassment claims.
During this time, O’Reilly continued to be a rising star at Fox,
negotiating a $25 million a year contract as recently as January 2017.
While media coverage and exposés finally forced Fox to fire O’Reilly,
Fox knew he was an abuser for more than a decade and shelled out
millions to silence women he abused. Fox’s behavior is not so mysterious
when one learns that in 2015, O’Reilly’s show earned Fox more than $180
million in advertising.
This is not an anomaly; this is a standard utilitarian calculation that
businesses make all the time. Imagine you’re O’Reilly’s conscientious
supervisor. Having just discovered O’Reilly’s long history of harassing
women, you go to your bosses and demand that they fire O’Reilly. Even if
your bosses agree with your demand from a moral standpoint, how could
they explain the loss of O’Reilly, the goose who lays the golden eggs,
to their shareholders? Capitalism is designed to maximize profit over
everything else, including ethics and safety.
This system also makes it difficult to fight back against abusers. In a
hyper-competitive market, a single setback can mean the end of your
career, your healthcare, your ability to pay rent. The stakes are higher
for women and trans people, especially those of color, who are far more
likely to experience poverty than men. Those who have gained a footing
in the economy may be understandably hesitant to risk losing it, and
it’s no secret that those who resist abuse or call out their abusers
often face adverse consequences for doing so.
Targets of sexual harassment face impossible choices: do I allow this
abuse to continue or risk losing income I desperately need? Do I report
this abuse and risk deportation? Do I leave this job without reporting
this abuse? If I do, does that mean that others will be preyed upon
after me?
Capitalism, the state, and other forms of hierarchy offer sexual
predators many ways of doing harm to those who resist them. O’Reilly,
Weinstein, Ailes, Farenthold (the list goes on and on and on) all
routinely harmed or ended the careers of those who opposed them.
Fears about job security also affect those who are asked to witness or
even abet abusers. Weinstein used his employees to make his victims feel
a false sense of security before he assaulted them, often asking
staffers to come to the beginning of nighttime meetings and then
dismissing them so he could be alone with his victims. One former
employee described a scene in a nighttime meeting in which Weinstein
demanded she tell a model that Weinstein was a good boyfriend, and
became enraged when she said she no longer wished to attend these
“meetings.” It is easy to feel self-righteous anger at staffers who
abetted Weinstein, but it is undeniable that Weinstein’s position of
power enabled him to ruin people’s lives. While we deserve for others to
be brave in standing up for us even against the most powerful foes, it
is unrealistic to think we could put an end to sexual harassment and
assault in a system in which people have to martyr themselves in order
to protect each other.
Abolishing capitalism and all other systems that concentrate wealth and
power into the hands of a few would not put a stop to sexual assault,
but it would greatly reduce the coercive economic power that the rich
and powerful wield over the rest of us. Without those structural
imbalances in power, assaulters would not have the means to manipulate
anyone into complicity and silence. This may sound utopian, but it is
the only realistic solution if we’re serious about combatting sexual
assault. No system that centralizes wealth and power can prevent that
power from being used to coerce or harm people.
The law is no friend to victims of sexual harassment and assault. Police
officers across the United States have brought charges of false
reporting against sexual assault survivors who went to them for help,
only to later see these victim’s stories confirmed when their assaulters
were identified and convicted. Sexual assault survivors who manage to
convince the police not to arrest them for false reporting can find
themselves jailed in order to compel their testimony in court.
ICE uses courts as a trap for undocumented people. Undocumented people
cannot even enter a courthouse without risking arrest and deportation.
In this way, the state systematically facilitates the sexual assault of
those whose papers are not in order.
Even if the police don’t throw you in jail, only three to six percent of
workplace harassment claims ever make it to trial. Some of these cases
are settled, but many are dismissed due to the law’s high bar for what
constitutes harassment (the harassment must qualify as “severe” or
“pervasive”). In one typical example, a construction worker brought a
case against a supervisor who talked about raping him multiple times.
The worker’s case was dropped because the supervisor’s actions occurred
over a ten-day period and therefore did not meet the standard of being
“pervasive.”
The court system not only punishes those who attempt to utilize it—it
also targets those who try to defend themselves. In the New Jersey 4
case, a group of black women defended themselves against a catcaller who
threatened and attacked them. They were prosecuted and four were
sentenced to between 3.5 and 11 years in Rikers.
The idea that the law could ever serve to put an end to sexual
harassment and assault is a patriarchal myth. Men have always promised
to protect women from other men in return for power over them; this is
part of the protection racket that forms the foundation of patriarchy.
In fact, the law is integral to maintaining the oppressive hierarchies
that create the conditions for a wide variety of power imbalances and
grave injustices, including sexual assault.
The criminal justice system exacerbates all the problems we have already
seen in the corporate sector. While corporations implicitly hold people
hostage in the context of the capitalist economy, the criminal justice
system explicitly holds people hostage via the coercive apparatus of the
law and the state. It is the epitome of power being distributed to the
few and entirely denied to the many, and as such it is a site of
terrifying abuses of power. People in prison are routinely sexually
assaulted, often by their jailers. When we appeal to the violent
authority of the state to punish our abusers, we are complicit in
perpetuating the power dynamics that we claim to oppose.
We need to explore systems of justice that hold people accountable to
each other, rather than to a higher power. Wherever we concentrate
power, we will see abuse.
Although we are framing this primarily in gendered terms, the identities
“male” and “female” are just proxies with which to discuss different
degrees of power and privilege. Whose voices we hear and how we respond
to those voices is determined by a myriad of other factors including
race, sexual orientation, economic status, ability status, and first
language. In seeking to disentangle ourselves from patriarchy, we need
to internalize the way our privileges protect us from harm that others
face. We need to listen to the stories of those most likely to be harmed
under patriarchy and capitalism: black women’s stories, trans people’s
stories, undocumented workers’ stories, poor people’s stories.
We need to take note of whose voices those in power seek to discredit.
For example, the only sexual assault charges Harvey Weinstein has
specifically disputed came from the only black woman, Lupita Nyong’o,
who has accused him of harassment or assault.
Although women also perpetrate sexual assault, we are statistically far
less likely to do so than men. Is this because women are inherently
better, more moral, or less violent than men? If we are, it is in part
because we, as non-men, are not taught that we must embody the norms of
toxic masculinity that are symptomatic of patriarchy, i.e., that women
are objects, or that our self-worth is based on the number of women we
fuck. Men’s internalized toxic masculinity accounts for many of the
reasons they sexually assault women.
Some have suggested that the solution to rampant sexual harassment and
assault is that women should replace men in all positions of power. But
the problem is not the condition of maleness; the problem is patriarchy,
an unequal distribution of power. As long as some hold power over
others, the powerful will prey on the less powerful, regardless of who
occupies these roles.
To call out sexual predators without seeking to dismantle the system of
power that created them is like bailing water out of a sinking ship. The
fundamental problem isn’t a shortfall of publicity, law, policy, or
education; the fundamental problem is that the systems that purport to
keep us safe make us vulnerable.
We have to weave together the ways that we respond to specific instances
of sexual harassment and violence with a determination to confront and
undermine the social order that gives rise to them. In every case of
male violence, we should be clear that we are not dealing with an
exception, but with a problem that is a structural feature of our
society. At the same time, we need to create models of transformative
justice that can replace the criminal justice system without replicating
any feature of it, and to foster new ways of relating in which
patriarchy, white supremacy, and other forms of authority do not
determine the possibilities of our lives. Every person of every gender
stands to gain from this.
Let us join hands, teeth bared.
Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of
society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded,
responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government,
eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy
the male sex.
SCUM will not picket, demonstrate, march or strike to attempt to achieve
its ends. Such tactics are for nice, genteel ladies who scrupulously
take only such action as is guaranteed to be ineffective… If SCUM ever
marches, it will be over the President’s stupid, sickening face; if SCUM
ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.
–Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto