What Does it Mean to “Believe Women”?
The Eric Swalwell problem.
What does it mean to “believe women? Does it mean women never lie? No, it does not. But this is what it does mean.
You’ve seen my frustration with some of the comments on other social media sites about the situation with Swalwell. The “why destroy a good man’s reputation with no proof” crowd. A ton of the comments were “I don’t know what happened, but it needs to be proved before I believe it.” And these were comments on posts where I was very careful to detail which news organizations had investigated the allegations (legit organizations like NBC news, CNN, San Francisco Chronicle) what the allegations were, that there were confirmatory texts that were reviewed by the news organizations, they interviewed other people, etc. other people chimed in with information about the woman alleging rape having gone for medical testing after the incident.etc ). I commented that that’s misogyny, to default to the position that you’re NOT going to believe what credible news organizations are saying the women said to them. In the absence of some unspecified additional level of proof (although sometimes people did specify they wanted truth beyond a reasonable doubt, kind of like in a criminal trial, which this is not) you default to doubting women rather than believing women.
So someone else came on to say that that’s not misogynistic, it’s just that people are too lazy, overwhelmed by information, just don’t want to sort through information online so they say “we don’t know.”
I said that is the essence of misogyny, that you don’t know, you can’t be bothered to find out, and you are casting doubt on what the women said that was vetted by news organizations which you’ve been told about already.
Disbelieving women, and not being willing to get the information that would enlighten you, is misogyny.
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And just FYI, here are some of the comments-and this is in democratic women’s groups by the way:
Other comments: “How do you get raped twice by the same person?” 🤬
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“Who cares if someone sent him nude pictures? No means no!” To which someone responded “It sends a message that no doesn’t mean no.“ 😮
(again y’all, Democrats, and women).
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And below are some of the posts I created during this period to address some of my massive frustration:
(this was to address the second most common comment “We’ll take down our Democratic politicians for sexual assault when Republicans get Trump out of office.” To which my response was A) two wrongs don’t make a right (didn’t you learn that when you were five years old?), B ), is this what you aspire to, to imitate MAGA? and c) our willingness to do this is what makes us better than them. D) is the graphic above, that when we get rid of our people, it puts pressure on them to get rid of theirs. How could we possibly make the argument that Trump should step down while we’re giving a pass to our own sexual abusers? Think logically.)
Also related to that point, on the issue of “the timing is suspicious!”, I offered this:
And then, finally, you would think this would not be controversial, but the first response I got was “who made you, Eric‘s Judge and jury“:
And that’s a good place to leave this. Take care and try to hang onto your sanity! XOXO Linda.
