More on DSK

Have to re-think what it means to be a feminist. I have never asked myself many questions about it, taking it for granted. Of course I’m a feminist. After all, for a specialist in literature that means granting authority to voices that resist the master narrative. That's what I do for a living. But reactions to the DSK case have turned a light on in my head – for the first time, I have a sense of why some people dislike feminists as a group.

The feminists they dislike are the ones who seem happy to ignore the basic protections of our legal system – like presumption of innocence – in the case of a rich white guy to argue that of course he is guilty, even if the case gets dismissed, as will happen any day now. People who argue that the fact that the accuser turns out to be a fraudster does not mean that her word on this should be disqualified even though the single bit of evidence we have is her testimony. People who mistake the broad metaphor of rape for the legal reality of rape by interpreting an unpleasant interaction between a rich, white male and a poor woman of color as necessarily a literal case of rape.

Most frustrating of all to me is that they will not own the problem that they create in arguing that the jury (which of course will now never sit) should take the word of a known liar for proof beyond a reasonable doubt. If we extend that argument we have to justify accepting the word of all those racists who have identified random men in a police line up. The problem with our judicial system is that it has convicted the innocent to a degree that we are just now beginning to fathom through DNA evidence because juries do in fact listen to an emotionally persuasive voice.

When I think of all the people later discovered to have been innocent who have been locked away because the jury takes an accuser’s word as true I want to be very very sure before we convict. I don’t care what color the accused is – I am no more willing to lock up an innocent rich white person than I am a poor person. The eagerness to lock up a rich white person is a manifestation of a particular ideology. I have spent much of my adult life arguing that feminism is not about ideology; it’s about listening to a variety of voices. I continue to maintain this. But I do understand why a certain type of feminism arouses such disgust. Yeah, it is very difficult to make rape charges stick, but it should be.