History, ancient and modern, is rife with stories of men being exonerated for violence against women (while women who fight back end up in prison for life). All of the stories shine a bright light on the way that women are objectified and reveal how their pain is trivialized. Take, for example, the case of Louis Althusser, a French philosopher of note who killed his wife in 1980. He spent three years in a psychiatric hospital and then went about his business.
None of this explains why actresses like Tilda Swinton and Whoopi Goldberg, who said of Polanski's crime, ??It wasn't a rape-rape, ? have come to Polanski's defense. Perhaps when you've made it into the big boys' inner circle, you start to think like them. It's been known to happen but it breaks my heart. These powerful women have access to the podium; if one of them had written an essay like this one, it might have made it into The New York Times, thus reaching a wider audience.
It remains to be seen what will happen in the Polanski case. Sadly, I think I can predict what will happen in the wider realm of violence against women: It will continue unabated, it will go largely unpunished, and it will be made fun of by comedians who really ought to know better.
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