Oh, Baby, We Have SO Not Come a Long Way!

Additional Thoughts on the Diddy "Freak-off" Trial

In response to my piece about the Diddy "Freak-off" Disaster, many readers emailed me privately. They agreed with what I said--but one woman wrote the most disquieting comment. Of course, she is absolutely entitled to her view, but she reminds me of the late great Margaret Mead, whom I once debated in 1977.

Mead believed that when a woman was raped, she deserved it; she "must have violated some taboo." Nothing I said could persuade her otherwise. Nevertheless, we befriended each other. I decided that she was simply a woman from another age, perhaps one whose sense of security resided in avoiding certain taboos. (I had no idea what taboos she had in mind since she famously violated so many herself.)

Anyway, my disquieting correspondent views what Diddy's victims did as their "free choice"--they "chose" to be sexually "humiliated and degraded," and the law does not protect them from themselves. True enough. She suggests that these women "should have settled for a humbler life and maintained their dignity and self-worth."

Thus, they must pay a price for being ambitious. Their own overreaching desire doomed them.

In an interview, a prominent lawyer just decried the Mann Act under which Diddy was convicted as "unconstitutional and absurd." He believes that Diddy was "convicted of transactional, consensual sex with two adults."

Really?

This takes me back to the pre-feminist Dark Ages (although we've never really totally left that fundamentalist era). Back then/still now, if a woman was raped, it was her own damn fault for having been out alone/at night/in the dark/in that place/and dressed in a seductive manner. She was as good as "asking for it."

If a woman goes out drinking at night and gets drugged, kidnapped, and raped--what was she thinking? Why was she out at all? She should have been at home where a "good" woman belongs.

Really?

What if she is being battered by her husband or her boyfriend (or girlfriend) at home--or raped as well? It happens. What if it's her father or her older brother--that happens too.

What if she's at work--in a factory, an office, a film or modeling agency? What if she's being sexually harassed, even sexually molested on the job; what if her economic survival is at stake and she literally cannot afford to quit? What if she's in her doctor's or dentist's office--and already partially anesthetized--and he happens to be a predator? What if she's a promising gymnast and he's her coach? My God! What if she or he is in church and it's their priest?

Second Wave feminist pioneers (of which I'm a proud member) raised all these points--and yet, we could not and did not abolish incest, sexual harassment, domestic violence, pornography, prostitution, or trafficking. Yes, we changed some laws for the better, but most rapes still go unprosecuted. Rape kits remain untested for up to twenty years. All forms of violence against women remain, intractable, endemic. Jurors remain sympathetic to male rapists and woman beaters. Misogyny has not disappeared. If anything, it may have gotten much worse.

And now back to Diddy's heroic accusers. Let's review the culture in which they've grown up.

First, consider the normalization of half or fully naked women in animal-like and unbelievably vulgar poses and "dance" moves in hip hop and rap videos and at concerts. The pornographication of female (but not male) celebrities, the on-screen sex scenes, the outright fully nude female actresses but the often or usually hidden penises of their co-stars. Please note that male singers are fully dressed, sometimes wearing Satanic leather or bespoke tuxedos as they tower over the near-naked female singers groveling, gyrating, and grooving at their feet.

Think about how decadent our culture is in terms of easily available sadistic anti-woman pornography. Consider that young girls are being indoctrinated not only by fairy tales but also by all this glamorized filth.

Contemplate the realities of female poverty, especially of racialized female poverty. Take in the crowds outside the court house who doused themselves with baby oil and cheered for Diddy.

What Diddy did was an example of male sexual perversion run amuck, and he could do so because, thus far, the law seems to allow it, and because he exerted a "coercive control" over the women whom he beat and drugged, and who--and here is where the drama becomes quite sad--exercised control over the women who thought they "loved" him. Read Eve Barlow's piece about "coercive control" up at Substack.

The pioneer work on domestic violence was done by Dr. Lenore Walker, in the 1970s, by the National Center on Domestic Violence, and by all the underfunded, understaffed, shelters for battered women. (And you won't find the most influential feminist work on this subject online. I just checked.)

As I now understand it, Judge Arun Srinivas Subramanian is the son of Indian immigrants to the United States, the first South Asian to sit on the federal bench for the Southern District of New York. I hope that he understands that whatever he decides will be a landmark decision.

Most of all, I hope that he, as well as the witnesses who took the stand against Diddy, are all given police protection.