Notes to Self

abbyjean:

Just as we make heroes instead of celebrate social movements, we also make villains to stand in for social ills. @nezua

this is a good and important point. whatever happens with polanski - even if he makes a movie about how what he did was rape and was awful and unforgivable and then we hang him at dawn while the movie plays behind him, that won’t eliminate rape, it won’t eliminate rape culture. no matter how we fight this particular human incarnation of the existing problems with rape, this individual case can’t solve the overall problems.

this is why the coverage of and response to the polanski case has distressed me more than the case itself. i’m not surprised that planski doesn’t think he should be extradited. i am surprised that a significant number of hollywood luminaries think it’s appropriate to support that position. i’m disappointed that news coverage thinks it’s appropriate to hedge on whether the sexual activity that occurred is correctly classified as rape. i’m horrified at the lengths to which people are going to argue that the justice system has no role in regulating nonconsensual sexual activity.

so while it’s easy to shorthand all of that as ‘polanski,’ let’s keep our eye on the real enemy - rape apologism and rape culture. polanski himself is just a tiny cog in that giant machine.