DSK weirdness

Something strange about discourse on DSK, a weird schizophrenia. We chastise the French for having given him a pass all these years, for going okay, boys will be boys, so we won’t call DSK on his groping, his obscene texts, etc. Why do we chastise the French for not speaking out earlier? Because had DSK been halted earlier he would not have perpetrated this rape. Okay. We imagine then that there is a logical progression: harassment, groping, rape.

On the other hand, we deny any logical progression. We Americans draw an absolute line between harassment and rape. Rape is a crime of violence. It is not the logical end to flirtation, even groping. We are now re-examining Arnold Schwatzenegger – cad, sleazebag, sexual harasser - but we do not expect him now to rape someone. Because we do not believe that rape is simply an exaggerated form of harassment, unlike medieval theologians who thought that the beauty of a rape victim counted as a mitigating circumstance for the rapist.

And this is an advantage; it’s enlightened. By refusing to excuse rape as something that a woman can bring on herself through flirtatious behavior, we place it firmly out of the realm of excusable offenses.

But with DSK we are trying to have it both ways. We are assuming that he is guilty. No question of this – just look at the news. And why don’t we assume that he’s innocent until proven guilty? Because he has been an outrageous chaser of women. And yet, we do not accept that aggressive flirts, gropers, shade over into rapists. We can’t, because if we did believe in a logical progression we would consider certain circumstances to be mitigating. We don’t. A rape is a rape. It isn’t like murder where there are degrees. If the woman says no, even quietly, if she feels pressured by her inferior position, it’s rape. When the Republicans tried to invent a category of “forcible” rape, we vigorously opposed them, rightly so. Rape means nonconsensual and there is no gray area.

So let’s stop pretending that we know that DSK is guilty because he is a known dirty old man.

And let’s stop pretending that suspecting that someone may have set the crime up is the equivalent of believing in highly complicated, implausible conspiracy theories, like the one that says that the US government staged 9-11 or that the moon landings were faked. It is hardly unprecedented that political rivals set each other up, break the law to get the dirt on each other. It would not be complicated to find someone willing to claim rape for a lot of money. The police routinely consider the possibility that someone accused of a crime was set up. Why not in this case? All the more so given DSK’s reputation.

In fact, I think that our American eagerness to believe DSK guilty is probably more his role at the IMF than anything else. We are so furious at Wall Street and international banks in general that his alleged crime, rape of an immigrant by a fabulously wealthy sleazebag of a banker who pretends to be a Socialist, serves to focus our outrage. We don’t really care whether he in fact violated every rule of civilized behavior by forcing himself on a physically vulnerable woman, because he has done that again and again in a metaphorical sense. He is guilty of rape in the largest sense.