It Is Not Just Men

The revelations about Harvey Weinstein are certainly both wrong and repugnant, but I do worry that many people seem to believe that only males can be the perpetrators of sexual harassment.  For example, a radio show I heard the other day was on why men abuse power, not why people abuse power.

Scientific American, which is pretty much the epitome of unbiased fact based knowledge, reports on a CDC study that surprisingly found that men and women were equally likely to experience nonconsensual sex, and most male victims reported female perpetrators.

“In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956

This is similar to the widespread believe that men are more likely than women to commit violence in a relationship when if fact they are are equally likely to. (Given that I have a permanently shifted septum, which causes me no end of grief, from a blow by my ex-wife, I am perhaps in a better position than most to understand this.)

The reality is that women are no worse and no better than men. Believing otherwise is just prejudice. Much like people used to believe than homosexuals were sexual predators and that blacks were more violent that whites. Or that women do not deserve the vote because they are mentally inferior to men.  The road to justice is long.