Okaaay, I want to Super-Girl-punch something, preferably all of the so-called gentlemen—and some gentlewomen—for the un-fucking-believable amounts of victim-blaming going on here. Some choice morsels:
-“She’s got no moral high-ground to be coming out with this now...”
-“She’s spoiled merchandise...”
-“I have suspicions about her motives...”
-“She’s just trying to re-start her failing career...”
ARRRRGGGGHHH!!! What-the-flingenderkindersheisse is going on here?
Shit like this, on a supposedly-Progressive website!
A quick re-cap on the Megyn Kelly situation: she recently let loose on O'Reilly in her show, revealing, that once again, sexual harassment has had a massive place in the toxic culture of FOX. O’Reilly has paid MILLIONS to accusers to shut them up. It wasn’t just Roger Ailes—it seems to be an endemic problem at FOX—so it wouldn’t surprise me if Hannity was in on this shit, too.
I don’t think Kelly was ever intended to be anything else but an eye-candy, talking-head at FOX. She did interviews, yes, but how much did she actually get to talk, and was she ever reprimanded when she’d get in a little cut at the Conservatives? How much was she allowed to write on the show? How much personal discretion did she actually have in regards to the crap she was paid to say and report on?
She’s a talking-head who was most likely paid to read off or talk about scripted propaganda bullshit. I doubt she had much control or input into the stuff she had to say… The sexual harassment Kelly claims happened to her and other women at FOX, has NOTHING to do with what crap they were paid to say on TV.
Make that equivalence and it’s a short distance to saying they were paid for sexual favours as part of their job (ya know, the kind of fucked-up views people like Ailes and O’Reilly have about women they employ).
Calling a victim’s past into account as a way of discrediting their accusations is bullshit.
She might believe some of the shit handed to her, but people keep forgetting that does. Not. Matter. We’re talking about sexual harassment in the workplace, no matter where that workplace is, and no matter who the harassment had happened to. In other words, we are not talking about Megyn Kelly, the person, OK? She is just the latest of too many people to come forward (although she apparently made accusations against Ailes, too). We should be talking about what happened to her and what happens to women all over the world, whether the victim is a well-known TV or movie personality, a housewife in India, a migrant-worker cleaning hotels in Dubai, a politician, a teacher, doctor, mechanic, soldier, or professor.
I will keep hammering this until it gets through some thick skulls around here: bringing up a person’s past as a way to discredit or devalue their input on this repulsive matter in our society is BULLSHIT.
Here, let’s make it even more personal. This shit happened to me just two years ago (I was 47), where the skeevy lawyer the Step-Monster (I’d accused him of rape and physical abuse) had hired pestered me with questions such as, “If you were being abused, why didn’t take your brothers with you when you left?” (I did the first time I ran away from home when I was 12), “If you were being abused, why didn’t you tell someone, or scream?” (screams at home happened often enough that they were just ignored) “Is it true that as part of your Wiccan practice, you used drugs in your rituals?...” (No, where did you get such stupid information, some ill-informed, religious witch-hating website?), and once before, when a paedophile’s defence-lawyer tried to make a case for my being “precocious” and somehow managing to seduce a 30+ year old man... when I was SEVEN.
Fuck this line of “reasoning”, because it’s a huge fail in terms of real lives.
Like Ailes, he died before any real punishment could be meted out to him. In fact, he literally died the night before he was supposed to give his testimony at his trial.
Yeah, Kelly was one of the many faces of ugly racism and brain-dead talking points. She was paid to do that, just as many of the other women were paid. How does this mean they deserved to be treated like that? I don’t like her. I doubt I’ll ever like her. The things she was paid to say and make people believe were repulsive and hurtful. But, she did not deserve to be harassed at her job or anywhere else because of that.
One good act may not wipe clean a slate full of ugly, but it’s a damned good start. This might be the step that helps her become a better person, and I’m all for that, just like my Mum made a big step in admitting that she was an abuser and complicit (in the sense that she’d guessed something was up, but didn’t risk saying something about it) and acknowledged it and apologized to me with sincerity. She’s since been an awesome Mum, and we share laughs and conversations regularly on Facebook (we live over a thousand miles apart).
We’ve been giving McCain and some others props and respect for denouncing the Rump and encouraging others to do the same, but we can’t—or won’t—do the same with Kelly?
Let’s give Kelly the same chance, too, OK?
So, let’s drop this here to give people a bit of fucking perspective, OK?
Sexual harassment knows no character—it can affect anyone.
This drivel about moral high ground is just another way of saying it was somehow her fault:
-Using someone’s evil past to justify saying, “Enjoy your karma b***h!” No. Just. Frakking. NO.
-She deserved it
-She was drunk
-She was walking in a dangerous neighbourhood at night
-She wore a “slutty” dress
-She kissed him
-they were on a date/he bought her dinner/they were married so she “owed” him sex
-She was asking for it
-...She was paid to report/talk about what was probably scripted racist propaganda crap…
Am I getting-the-fuck through, yet?
The above shit-lies are excuses to victim-blame. Period.
There is NO excuse, for ANYONE, to treat a woman this way. Period.
No woman (or man, or Transgender, or Asexual)—no matter how supposedly evil they are—deserves to go through abuse.
Period.
Full. Frakking. STOP.
#Me Too, and fuck you.
Now for a sharp left turn:
A show of hands, how often have any of us brushed off someone we hated, but who’d been hurt, too? Someone who’d hurt us, but you knew how they’d been abused might have contributed to what they did to you?
*raises her paw with shame*
And I regret all of them.