tweet Begging the question. 5-yard penalty, repeat 1st down.

My criticism of all this, including what you're saying here, is the underlying assumption that this is the only way the necessary change will happen. You describe hypotheticals about making things safer for women, but that's incredibly short-sighted. Women may stop being victims, but instead they'll start being threats. This is not an improvement for anyone. How long until employers start hiring fewer women simply because they're afraid of having to deal with a lawsuit and/or mob? If you think that's unlikely, just look at what happened with "ban the box" laws, which actually reduced hiring rates for black and hispanic men, because without the box, employers just fell back to stereotypes. I posted a link earlier to this story, which shows how the "always take the accusers word for it" could easily lead to more accusations against women by men who are trying to get ahead of an accusation (regardless of whether that accusation would be truthful or not).

I was going to write about mental illness in men, and how men are vastly overrepresented in suicide (to the tune of 77% according to the CDC, with 3 times more men dying of suicide than homicide). But I didn't, because I knew I would be accused of minimizing the problems that face women. For whatever reason, we've decided that there are "sides" in this issue, and that they're per se based on gender. Yet you've also shown how this isn't the case: you worry about the women in your life, just as I do (I have a daughter too). In all the replies to me in this thread, not a single person has explained why it's okay to believe women over men. And you can't say that it's just about victim versus abuser, since male victims are not treated remotely the same way that female ones are. But Caesar is an honorable man.

I know women who were raped, and I know men who were raped. I've known at least one woman in my life who made up a rape story for sympathy and attention, and I knew a girl in high school who suffered physical abuse from her boyfriend. I had a relationship end because the girl I was with was a walking mindfield of triggers. If your first reaction is to think about whose fault it is that our relationship ended, you're illustrating the problem perfectly.

I also know that intentions and perceptions don't always align. I've told this story before, but briefly: in my first-year criminal law class in law school, our professor read a story about a college-age woman who has sex with a guy she went to a dance with. It's clear from the book's descriptions that she was at best ambivalent about it, and may have actively not wanted to do it. But it was equally clear that she never gave even the slightest hint of this to the guy. My professor then asked if we thought this was rape, and every single woman in the class said that it was. As a guy, that was absoultely terrifying. And this comes from the same refusal to consider nuance: in the story described in the book, we could treat the woman with the sympathy and support we should give to any victim, without treating the guy like a predator.

But that's hard. And what passes for liberalism/leftist politics in the U.S. is mindblowingly lazy. Somehow the idea has taken hold that in order to consider any such accusation to be legitimate, we must treat them all as legitimate. Then everyone gets to wank themselves off about how woke they are, while simultaneously criticizing conservatives for being close-minded. You can't actually have virtue signalling without virtue, but God knows people are trying.

My own experience in this thread has been a pretty good example. I've gotten nothing but personal attacks and appeals to emotion. If there's anything more condescending than "won't someone think of women" becoming the new "won't someone think of the children," I haven't seen it.

At the end of the day, you can't call something a principle if you discard it the first time it costs you something. Your post is the closest anyone has come to acknowledging that fairness is not actually what you're interested in. That's at least honest, even if it's still deplorable.