Caveats and trigger warnings are in this paragraph; read or skip as desired. This piece is mostly written about instances where (presumed cisgender) men assault (presumed cisgender) women, but of course there are other forms abuse can take. There are more than two genders and more than two sexual orientations, but again, the bulk of the evidence points towards men being the perpetrators of sexual violence (and other forms of violence) towards women, so that is what I’m focusing on here. This post mentions domestic violence and gaslighting but does not go into detail about any forms of abuse.

As I write this, another prominent man is being accused of sexual assault (you can likely fill in the blank whenever you’re reading this, which is one of the points of this piece: harassment and assault are pretty ubiquitous).

This piece is not about the truth behind said accusations; I rather like the framing here, Someone you care about was just outed as a sex creep: a beginner’s guide, which counsels patiently listening in order to learn and understand more.

Rather, I am trying to work out the following argument for myself while sharing it with an audience, in case it’s of any use to y’all: why does it matter, or why should it matter, that a public figure quite possibly has abusive or exploitative sexual relationships? Why should anyone care? And I also want to explore the implications for women in particular, because so many of these conversations revolve around consented-to sex.

In the recent example on my mind, a few of Influential Man’s (IM’s) past partners have come forward stating that he acted in non-consensual ways during their relationship. Some people’s response is to shrug it off and state that sometimes people hurt each other in relationships, that’s normal, that’s just life.

While I’m not a philosopher, I’m deeply curious about what’s going on here and why we should care—whether we should care at all. I do read a fair bit of feminist philosophy these days, and so I’m going to bring some of those sources to bear on this topic.

As Amia Srinivasan writes in The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century: “Sex, which we think of as the most private thing, is in reality a public thing” (xii). By this, she refers to the gender roles we learn and project onto sex in terms of who deserves pleasure, who must be the most giving, and so on (surprise, these are highly gendered roles). But I think this phrase also applies to the kinds of sex that are legible as deserving of privacy or not. If you’re having sex in some kind of culturally legible relationship (probably heterosexual, probably monogamous, probably not transactional in the sense of being sex work), then what happens for you sexually is deemed to be your own business.

In other words, the sex we have in relationships is seen as private, even as the gender roles we are socialized into quite publicly dictate how the sex we have privately should look.

What makes sexual assault accusations tricky to navigate, in part, is this cultural sense that what is perceived as being private should stay private. Trying to take private business public feels off, because it goes against this cultural logic.

Why, then, should we care about what happens privately between two people?

If I try to put this in the most neutral terminology possible, this is what I end up with: a person has repeatedly hurt someone close to them, either intentionally, or by simply being ignorant of that person’s consent, comfort, and boundaries. Maybe they even got off on abusing that person’s trust (though I must say, all the sadists I know are quite careful to ensure that their partners are a) masochistic and b) consenting).

If we put this scenario in any context outside the bedroom, it sounds a bit different: “Yeah, Joe is a nice guy, but he has tortured the last few pets he’s had.” “Oh I’m still friends with Brad, he only harasses his coworkers.” “My cousin Finn is so much fun when we go out, unless you’re working at the places where we party, then he’s kinda a dick.”

If we swap the category of “person they’re in a relationship with” to “any other type of human” then this framing gets real concerning real fast. Saying that someone’s a decent person except to One Type of Person sound pretty bad. Especially if that type of person is, like, historically marginalized. “Oh yeah, he’s a good guy, except to Black people…except to Native Americans…except to…” you can fill in the blank as you chose.

So why is it different to be like “Oh yeah, he’s a good guy, except to his partners” when his partners are mostly women? How does this not leave us with some sort of conclusion that this person views women’s experiences as less important, less worth prioritizing, than their own? How is that not a tad bigoted or even perhaps dehumanizing?

The issue is magnified when I put it like this: a person with large amounts of social and/or economic power has repeatedly hurt someone close to them, either intentionally, or by simply being ignorant of that person’s consent, comfort, and boundaries.

This is…concerning. Because one of the slippery things about this current round of Influential Man accusations is that they were in a consenting relationship…but one person having significantly more social power than another is definitely a form of power, and it can be make saying “no” that much harder. One party having more power than the other can create its own coercive context, even if everyone technically counts as a consenting adult.

I’m not alone in wondering whether the power disparity of gender roles in a patriarchal/misogynist society like ours counts as a coercive context, especially when it comes to public discussions of when things go wrong. In Srinivasan’s words:

The question, from a feminist perspective, is why sex crimes elicit such selective skepticism. And the answer that feminists should give is that the vast majority of sex crimes are perpetrated by men against women. Sometimes, the injunction to “Believe women” is simply the injunction to form our beliefs in the ordinary way: in accordance with the facts. (10-11)

False accusations occasionally happen. This case—whichever one we’re on, as of when you’re reading this—could turn out to be one of those, or not. As The Jennifer Conspiracy reminds us in their Medium post linked above, when it came to the allegations against George Takei: “Fandom was heartbroken by it, but over time as more information came out, it became clear that it was very likely not true. This is why it’s so important to keep paying attention no matter how you feel about the potential validity of the accusation upon first hearing about it.”

I think I’m inclined to view this phenomenon as a metonym for problematic sex, much in the same way that Srinivasan suggests that feminists in the 1980s and 1990s collectively lost their shit over pornography:

The intensity of the “porn wars” is more understandable when you bear in mind that porn came to serve, for feminists of an earlier generation, as a metonym for “problematic” sex in general: for sex that took no account of women’s pleasure, for sadomasochistic sex, for prostitution, for rape fantasies, for sex without love, for sex across power differentials, for sex with men. (35)

Perhaps these discussions of whether Influential Man did it, and whether or not and how it should matter, are ways of talking about so many of the other issues women feel silenced on…at least when it comes to being heard and seen by their male partners. Domestic violence rates remain high. My female friends keep getting assaulted. If no one will listen when we talk about what happens to us, maybe they will listen when we use public figures to have a very similar conversation. Again, Srinivasan says it best:

Men have chosen not to listen because it has suited them not to do so, because the norms of masculinity dictate that their pleasure takes priority, because all around them other men have been doing the same. (21)

To paraphrase from one of my favorite Saturday Night Live skits, “Welcome to Hell:”, when asked why they didn’t say anything about the constant harassment: they definitely did! for hundreds of years! but, like, no one cared!

To again return to the question of why we should care about strangers’ sex lives (because mostly we don’t, and when we do, it can be deeply invasive and bad; see, like, all of American history with sodomy and contraception laws and all that nonsense, which I discuss in my book Sex Education 101), I find it telling when we suddenly care and want to discuss all the details we have and don’t…when it’s an Influential Man perpetrator. Would we have cared about the women coming forward otherwise? Would we have even known who they are?

(and for fuck’s sake, people, stop with the “why is she only coming forward now” nonsense—you’ve seen how the collective treats those making accusations, right?)

The extensive pondering of what might have happened in these relationships, how bad his actions really were, seems to result in a punitive shitstorm for the women coming forward, while the men mostly wriggle free from lasting consequences. Again, there are exceptions, but it’s a pretty damn noticeable pattern.

And looking at all of this stuff, it seems to me that one of the messages to women is that when we consent to sex, when we are in a relationship with a man, we are consenting to potential harm. And yeah, people in relationships are gonna hurt each other no matter what, blah blah blah, that kind of truism is both true and vague enough to not really be helpful. And yeah, there are always exceptions to the pattern I’m focusing on here.

Because the more I look at these instances, regardless of which Influential Man is being accused today, the more I see the subtext of what we’re asking the women: “But what did you think would happen? Why are you surprised you got hurt? Why are you even talking about it?”

This pisses me off because not only is it some gaslighting bullshit, but it also, as noted above, presumes that when women are in relationships with men, some hurt is inevitable, and it’s pretty one-sided (again, FFS, not all men, I know). American culture (and perhaps Western culture more generally) continues to view women as human givers, in Kate Manne’s terms: as humans who owe their sexual, domestic, emotional, and/or reproductive labor to the full human beings who inevitably happen to be men.

Not only that, but as I noted above, the abuse rates keep climbing—and by golly, by gosh, who are the men abusing these women if they’re not Influential Man #1, Influential Man #2, Influential Man #3, and the rest of the Influential Men we like? If being a (heterosexual-ish) woman means entering a social contract that our consent and our pleasure don’t matter as much as men’s do, are we supposed to only date Influential Men because they can clearly never be abusers?

There is no good conclusion to this post because there is no good conclusion to this topic—another year, another Influential Man dealing with sexual assault or harassment accusations, another very public debate about what actually happened, another bout of grappling with what this means and why we should care and so on. I’m a teacher, so I believe we are innately capable of learning, but I don’t know that rehashing these conversations will do us much good until roughly half the population learns that the other half deserves to have their consent taken seriously (with apologies for the binaristic phrasing, but again, that’s the pattern I’m talking about here and it’s the pattern the bulk of the data points towards as being a huge problem).

At risk of sounding hideously second-wave-feminist, women aren’t just sex objects, passive partners in sexual interactions that, while consenting, don’t really matter apart from their presence. And until we figure this one out—and inform men that yes, abusive or otherwise shitty behavior in the context of a relationship does actually count in the real world—we’re just going to keep having the same conversation over and over again.