https://www.unionleader.com/news/crime/victim-rights-group-pressures-abc-not-to-run-owen-labrie/article_2c21939e-eeb7-5649-9955-88291ebfe528.html
Suppressing the other person's side of the story isn't advocacy; it's the kind of thing that the ridiculous "men's rights" people can exploit when they accuse feminists of being fascist.
My concern about the interview airing would be more about whether Mr. Labrie felt that he had to repeat lies that he felt he had to tell to avoid a felony conviction. Not for a minute do I believe that he didn't have sex with Chessy Prout.
The conversation about sexual behavior has to stop being presented as a battle between absolute good and absolute evil. The mechanics of sex are not complicated; everything else about it is.
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I don't know how to organize everything that runs through my mind when I read about this case.
-The entertainment industry has to take responsibility for how it influences adolescent perspectives.
--Schools and other institutions have to take responsibility for talking about sex. You can have sex education in a classroom that talks about sex in society. You can have that for all 4 years of high school. The politics of it. Sex and the economy, including things such as how belief systems about gender and race are built and perpetuated to serve economic interests. That happens everywhere, and has always happened everywhere, and it is particularly relevant in the United States to stereotypes about black people that are still ruining lives today. Sex and religion. Cultural gender expectations, archetypes of Good Girls vs. Bad Girls, Sluts vs. Studs, Studs vs. Wimps. Sex and disability. Sex and aging. Art vs. Pornography; there is no genre of pornography which isn't available on the Internet, free of charge to anyone who can type the word porn, so this topic has never had the relevance that it has now. We can also give a round of ironic applause to the entertainment industry for mainstreaming sadomasochism with the "50 Shades of Gray" movie series over the protests of advocates for victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Sex and socioeconomic background. Sex and the criminal justice system. Gender bias in the medical profession, scientific research, psychology, advertising, literature, the media, and almost everything else that people do or have ever done. Power dynamics in same-gender settings. The myth that women are naturally more empathetic than men. The myth that women are naturally ready to fight to the death over men. The heartbreaking silence about male-to-male sexual harassment and sexual assault that is so seldom recognized by activists for women who prefer to think of all men as living in an exclusive men's club where all men are treated equally to each other while they sit around thinking of ways to oppress women. The inadvertent way in which women who have been sexually assaulted are made to feel ashamed of their own sexuality when they are told by those who are trying to console them that sexual assault has nothing to do with sex and that it is only about power. Sex, gender and initiation rites; a class about that, the world history of it, would be helpful for defusing the insidiousness of peer pressure. There are limitless topics, and all of them are appropriate for students ages 14 to 18.
-You will never hear me say that there's such a thing as white collar sexual assault or that age-of-consent laws shouldn't be taken into consideration when determining verdicts. You will never hear me blame someone whose consent to unspecified sexual activity put her in a situation which she hadn't expected and which made her feel hurt, confused and violated. You will never hear me excuse the disgusting things that immature boys, girls, men and women say to each other when they're bragging about their conquests and betraying the privacy of their brief or long-term partners, particularly when the bragging is prolonged, intimately descriptive and derogatory. You will never hear me say that bullying people who have reported being sexually assaulted shouldn't be treated as a serious issue or that those who do that bullying shouldn't be punished.
-You will hear me say that the stories of sexual abuse that I have heard while homeless are so horrific that anyone who hears them should be able to understand why the victims turned to drugs or otherwise haven't had the productive lives that they could have had. Children taken into basements where bags were put over their heads so that their rapists didn't have to think of them as human beings when they were raping them. Toddlers forced to give blow jobs. Women trapped and raped for days. Women thrown against walls and raped from the back by people who they thought were friends. Gang rapes. Being raped more than once, in separate incidents, by different people. Rape of transgendered people. Rape when the rapist knew that he had HIV. Anal rape immediately followed by vaginal rape. Waking up in the middle of being raped. Robbery and attempted rape, resulting in the victim walking into the shelter in the morning, crying and with blood all over her face.
-You will hear me say that the criminal justice system, the shelter system, the mental health care system, and many other systems are failing, mostly through negligence, to prevent sexual assault and to rehabilitate offenders.
-You will also hear me say that I know what it's like to be smart, broke and from a mostly rural area. I am glad that I didn't go to boarding school for high school. I am also glad that, by the time that I was swept up into the midst of a lot of wealthy people, I was already an adult in my mid-30s and knew my value as a person too solidly to tarnish it by doing bad things to impress them. They have tortured me for almost a decade for refusing to participate in or condone their crimes and their promotion of crime. The price that I have prayed for going against the grain has been almost fatal, but I knew that there was nothing else that I could do.
