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MSNBC discussion of ethical journalism

Camille Cosby defends Bill Cosby

Evin Cosby defends Bill Cosby

Joe Scarborough defends Bill Cosby

Eric Bolling happy to assert men are superior to women

Pete Hegseth tries to argue Clinton has no other qualifications but being female

Limbaugh’s worried about “chickified” colleges

Pat Robertson has a theory

Transcript

On this episode of Reality Cast, journalist Allison Yarrow will tell us all about this interesting new DIY fertility movement. The Bill Cosby situation gets uglier every week, and conservative media is ramping up the hostility towards women working and getting educated.

The discovery of discrepancies in the UVA rape story has caused all sorts of grief in the media, but luckily, MSNBC’s Irin Carmon brought a panel of feminist journalists together in order to show how to do feminist journalism responsibly. I like Buzzfeed’s Katie Baker’s discussion of the tensions here.

• Journalism

It’s frustrating that there’s a huge double standard, where accusations of rape are interrogated so hard whereas you can accuse someone of lying without any real fear of being subject to the same interrogation. But Rolling Stone did screw up and the extent of this screw-up has become clear in recent days. Hopefully some important lessons will be learned.

This Bill Cosby rape situation shows no signs of abating, which is both really uncomfortable but probably necessary. After all, if a man who is so rich, powerful, and clearly domineering and entitled as Bill Cosby can’t just make these accusations go away, as he has clearly done in the past, then maybe there’s actual reason to hope that things are changing for the better for rape victims who speak out. But of course a lot of people, for a lot of reasons, do not want this change and want to keep the balance of power right where it’s at, where rape victims are afraid to speak out and rapists can do their thing without worrying too much about derailing their lives or going to jail. And those people are going to push back and try to preserve the status quo. This is entirely predictable, but it’s also really depressing. Particularly when the person doing the pushing back is a woman.

• Rape 1

Sadly, it’s not just his wife, either. Cosby’s daughter has joined in as well.

• Rape 2

This is upsetting, but shouldn’t be surprising. A lot of men who do terrible things to women turn around and present a sunny, happy face to others. Men who abuse their wives will often be the nicest, most charming men to outsiders. And some rapists are princes at home. Often this behavior is a deliberate manipulation, done precisely because the abusive man knows that, if his behavior is exposed, people in his life will have trouble squaring the man they know with the accusations, and will likely choose their own personal experience over even huge amounts of damning evidence. If Camille and Evin Cosby have been manipulated in this way, it’s sad but not even remotely surprising.

In fact, I’d say that if it weren’t for everything being so terrible, the entire process of watching people deny and minimize credible rape accusations is a rather fascinating display of some of the theories of social psychology. Psychologists have long known that people will go to extraordinary lengths to excuse what they want to believe, coming up with incredibly laughable and even surreal excuses. That’s how things like denying global warming happen. Or, when dealing with anti-choicers, their insistence that women will suffer and regret abortions is rooted not in fact, but what they wish were true. And it’s clear that a lot of people wish it were true that rape accusations are a result of women being crazy liars than the likelier possibility, which is that the rapes actually happened. Witness Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, or what I like to call the dumbest show on MSNBC.

• Rape 3

This is the little dance that rape apologists do. If you don’t go to the police, they tell you should be quiet unless you are willing to go to the police. If you do go to the police, they scream and moan about how you’re turning what they characterize as nothing but bad sex into a criminal offense or they accuse you of lying to the police. There’s not actually a way to win with these folks except by coddling their desire to believe that rape isn’t really a thing that happens much, if at all, and the only way you can do that is to be quiet. Which, in turn, means allowing rapists to rape, confident no one will actually try to stop them. And at every point in time, they lean heavily on misogynist stereotypes to discredit women who are alleging rape.

• Rape 4

Whatever choice you make, besides the preferred one of suffering in silence and letting the rapist rape at will without any effort to stop him, will be met with a misogynist stereotype to hurt and discredit you. If you speak out publicly, you get hit with “attention whore”. If you go to the police, you get accused of being a “crazy bitch”. If you went on a date with him and he sprung a rape on you, you’re accused of being a “woman scorned” who is just mad because she didn’t get a phone call. Sue the guy, and you’re a “gold-digger”. And if you are intimidated by all this abuse and sit on the allegations for years, you are accused of being a coward and a liar for not coming forward sooner. The entire system is set up to discourage reporting and to scare women into silence.

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Interview

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So I have this pet theory that one of the reasons that we’re seeing an uptick in attacks on contraception access from the right is that it’s a panic reaction in response to the fact that women’s economic and social gains have really been coalescing in recent years. Yes, women lag behind in many ways. We still make less money than men. We are still underrepresented in positions of power. We are still treated like second class in social life, from having to do more housework to having to endure mansplaining and other slights against our intelligence all day long. We still endure gendered violence that people are more eager to excuse away than to fix. There’s a long way to go.

But, from a right wing perspective, women’s gains have been alarming. Marriage doesn’t feel as mandatory as it used to and women often spend years being single and are far less eager to marry the first guy who’ll take us. Women feel good about committing to their careers with much less worry that we’ll be stereotyped as loveless harridans. If anything, having a good career makes you more attractive to men in some circles. There’s a real possibility that a woman could be elected President. College campuses swarm with women. We aren’t equal yet, but it’s in view and the right is getting scared. That’s why the attacks on contraception, which they rightfully believe had a lot to do with all this.

As evidence for this, I present the various male panic attacks in right wing media over the idea that women might actually, gasp, have ambition and power in the world. Eric Bolling, one of the uglier sexists on Fox News, which is saying a lot, threw a major fit and just straight up asserted that women are inherently inferior to men.

• Sexist 1

Honestly, I prefer this kind of blunt sexism to the alternative of dancing around the issue. As complex and noisy as the arguments over whether sexism exists or not can get, at the end of the day, the debate is actually quite simple. It’s an objective fact that women make less money and have less power in the world. So the only real question is how you explain that fact. And it can only be one of two explanations: Either women are inferior or they’re oppressed. If you deny they’re oppressed, by definition, you are arguing that women are inferior. But most sexists don’t want to say that out loud and so come up with all sorts of smoke and mirrors to try to say that’s not what they’re saying. So Bolling’s willingness to come right out and say it is, at least, a show of some good faith. If you must be a bigot, don’t lie about it.

Realizing that they’re in such an impossible bind of having to either admit they think women are inferior or concede that women are oppressed, however, many conservatives are instead trying to argue that women are actually the dominant class these days, putting men down. Like Pete Hegseth on Fox News.

• Sexist 2

I dunno. I think of merely being a woman was enough to charm people into voting for you as President, then we would have had a woman as President some time in the last 238 years. Okay, being fair I realize the premise of this argument is that sexism may have been a thing in the past but now it’s somehow being overcorrected and people are so eager to show they aren’t sexist they would vote for an unqualified woman. But that’s just an elaborate version of the women-aren’t-oppressed-they’re-inferior argument. After all, the other premise of this argument is that a woman who was both Secretary of State and a Senator from one of the biggest states in the country is somehow obviously unqualified to be President. However, both those jobs are better preparation than, say, being the governor of Texas, as George W. Bush, who these folks all supported, was. His argument only makes sense if you believe that women are inherently inferior and that feminism is about stealing jobs from deserving men to give them to inferior women.

Rush Limbaugh has a less sophisticated version of this argument that women are inherently inferior and that feminism is a misguided attempt to deny women’s inherent inferiority.

• Sexist 3

Needless to say, there’s zero evidence for his assertion. But really the whole “rapist” thing is a fig leaf for the real argument, which is that colleges are “chickified”. Which is a way of Limbaugh saying that colleges, with their insistence on gender equality, are forcing poor, helpless men to rub shoulders with inferior women and even, gasp, treat them like equals. And that men won’t stand for it. The whole thing has the whiff of a threat: Either women return to a second class status or men will stop contributing. And, of course, the folks making this argument assume men are the only people who have contributions worth making. But I think what they’re really afraid of is that if you give women a chance, we will prove that assumption wrong.

And now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts, Pat Robertson has some theories about reproduction edition. I liked this one, because it is particularly funny after the subject of today’s interview.

• Robertson

Robertson thinks gays are going to die out because they don’t reproduce. My question is then where does he think current gay people come from? Pods? While plenty of gay people have kids and always had, either through hetero sex or through reproductive technologies, the fact of the matter is that most gay people have straight parents. Pat Robertson’s simplistic views of heritability could be torn up by a biologist, I’m sure, but just common sense should be enough.