Women's voices being shouted down if they deviate from the official 'grab yer pitchforks' party line seems to be a common problem. If anything I'd say you're more likely to become the latest victim of a twitter pile-on as a woman calling for moderation than as a man openly defending abusers.
Assault is not a feeling. The Aziz Ansari story shows why language matters | Tiffany Wright
...this woman makes the point that many people started attacking her after only reading two tweets from a long thread. There's an attention span issue here I think, where ideas being reduced to tweets or clickbait headlines leads people to see everything as highly polarised between good and evil.
I don't think this rush to anger helps victims of abuse, and I don't think it helps men analyse and change their own behaviour. I hate to mention it but Aziz Ansari dealt with this on his own TV show, with his character being pilloried because of his association with someone who later turned out to be a creepy cunt. It was all done a bit ham-fistedly but there was at least an attempt there to look at the dynamics of these public exposure situations without discrediting victims or letting men off the hook.
Even now I'm trying to find a form of words that can't be misread as a defence of Ansari's behaviour. I just think there has to be a better approach to supporting victims, whose voices are often lost in the hullabaloo, and improving the behaviour of men in general. That may require an acceptance of the idea that in some cases people can do bad things without necessarily having bad intentions. So far a lot of public apologies (or not-apologies) have focussed on intentions, not consequences. That is clearly something that needs to change, but I think airing all this out in public encourages people to be defensive in that way. This doesn't help the victim find closure and doesn't give the perpetrator any motive to genuinely hold themself accountable or analyse their own behaviour.
But my views are vague, conflicted and ultimately irrelevant. We should be listening to women, not shouting them down because we can't be bothered to process subtle concepts or read more than three sentences in a row.
