Been watching all the screeching and crying about Al Franken.
Frankly, it’s disgusting.
And it’s time to set few things straight.
- Groping a woman is a physical attack that implies the threat of rape. Especially if the attacker is a man, given the average disparity in size, strength and aggression.
- Grabbing someone, putting your hand on the back of her head and shoving your tongue into her mouth, is violent physical penetration backed by an extraordinarily credible threat of rape.
- Leeann Tweeden was “wrong” when she wrote she “felt” disgusted and violated: she endured an objectively disgusting violation.
- Franken was not entitled to due process because he was not even facing a civil suit.
- Franken himself warned us how he treated women in “Why Not Me”. He wrote he would be forced to resign as President because of a “sex scandal.” Did he mean he would be caught cavorting in flagrante in the Reflecting Pool with someone who really wanted to there, doing that, with him? Not even close. “I regret very deeply the harm that I’ve done both to people I care about and people I don’t really care about all that much...”
- As for that hideous photograph, in 2006, it was well known that servicewomen face a campaign of abuse, all the way up to rape and murder with the absolute connivance of the institutional chain of command. In that context, the photograph is almost sadistically indifferent to women’s reality.
Al Franken hasn’t been ruined or broken, or forced to endure for subminimum wage and tips, what he dished out—let alone far worse, as so many working-class women do. Nor does he face jail. Even though “keep your filthy shithooks to yourself and your tongue in your own mouth” is a reasonable standard for staying out of jail.
He has simply been compelled to retire from elected office because anyone who deals with any government official, let alone a US Senator, has the absolute right to reply upon that official and his/her staff respecting her honor, dignity and physical integrity.
Nor is Franken is indispensable. The cemeteries are full of indispensable men and I am quite sure there are at least a dozen good women in Minnesota who could ably fill Franken’s seat.
This isn’t taking the high road.
It is, however, good ground to die on. As good as Black Lives Matter, as good as Social Security and Citizen Medicine and a decent tax code.
It’s the price of men wanting women to vote for them and the price of regarding women as integral to the progressive movement, as indeed we are. Because all of us know damn well, traditional economies run on our impoverishment. And one of the most potent methods to impoverish us is the use of sexual aggression to drive us out of well-paying work, while forcing us to deal with the physical and psychological damage of those attacks.
If you refuse to pay that price, or think paying it is a bad idea, now you know why so many women vote “against our interests.” Indeed, you’re part of the problem. Because if you force us to choose between being public or private sexual property, private is better.
And now you also know why many of the rest of us stay home. Because “progressive” men are not entitled to our trust or our votes. They must earn them.
If we cannot trust the men of the party that actively courts our votes, to uphold our honor and dignity, our right to our absolute control over our own bodies and economic self-determination so we can provide for ourselves and our families, then we will wisely choose to keep peace with the men in our lives.
If this is a struggle between liberalism and fascism—and I believe it is—the definition of liberty must include women’s right to the liberty, honor and dignity of our bodies—yes, up to and including the right to abortion on demand, until the point in delivery when the woman is safe from damage, rather than death, and even if no man ever has sex with a woman again—and our lives.
It means, our word is worth as much as a man’s. It means, no man has a right to be believed when he claims to speak for a woman against her words or her interests.
Anything less is subjugation at best, usually genuine sexual and reproductive slavery, and all too often, very real totalitarianism.