So the Aziz situation is fascinating bc the q is "what punishment is appropriate when morally ordinary behavior is revealed as monstrous?"
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for something that "everybody does," for something that is morally ordinary. Not virtuous, not right, but entirely ordinary.
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A guy who DIDN'T keep pushing until he got a clear "no, stop touching me, I'm leaving" would be considered either virtuous or gay, tbh.
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If he had done the right thing, it would have been like... a story to tell your girlfriends about an unusually decent man, right?
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But the opposite moral instinct (which was 100% my reaction) is: she clearly expressed, verbally and not, a desire to stop touching.
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He failed to stop. This might be normal, but it is NOT right, and not even acceptable. To focus on what's normal is to focus on him over her
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And our work is all about moving privilege out of the center of all of our considerations and focusing on those we have ignored.
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And from her POV, what he did was pretty awful. Monstrous even. Its ordinariness doesn't change that at all for her.
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(Obvious parallel: slavery. Nice masters were unusually good! But should their slaves have hated them any less?)
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So the question becomes, how do we reconcile these two impulses? How do you deal not with grotesque monsters like Weinstein...
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Or even sort of ridiculous and yucky monsters like Louis C.K.---how do you deal with ordinary monsters behaving in ordinary ways?
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But that, friends and family, is the ACTUAL QUESTION of radical social change, which is the business we're all in, whether we like it or not
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And I don't have an answer but I just thought seeing this conflict play out so clearly esp among my normally united (on this issue) TL...
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Was a good moment to think seriously about what an answer might look like, and just what question is demanding an answer in this moment.
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End of conversation
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