As a deluge of sexual harassment claims washes over Hollywood, the entertainment and media industries, the concern remains that innocent men will suffer as a result of false accusations of impropriety. The great tragedy of revealing an underground network of abusers is that all allegations will lose credibility if any actors, writers, or journalists are hit with false claims of sexual misbehavior.
But according to Teen Vogue columnist and “The UnSlut Project” founder, radical feminist Emily Lindin, a couple of falsely accused men who end up being harshly punished for harassment they didn’t commit is just a price that has to be paid in the service of dismantling the oppressive Patriarchy.
In a series of tweets published Tuesday, Lindin laid bare her case for alleging basically every guy in America is an unabashed sexual harasser.
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Basically, all men are members of an oppressive group, therefore they are all guilty of some form of sexual impropriety or gender-based discrimination, so it only follows that, if a few of them are dragged under by the wave of accusations now rolling ashore on movie sets and in newsrooms, they’re just a handful fewer men we ladies will eventually have to trod under our stilettos anyway.
Ironically, Lindin is the head of something called the “UnSlut” project which claims to facilitate the end of “sexual bullying” and promote “gender equality.” Although Lindin’s project claims that it involves “all genders,” it’s not clear whether any men involved in the project were aware they would have to self-immolate in order to help Lindin achieve her goals.
Lindin’s tweets are now protected, of course, but the backlash is still visible — and it came not just from conservatives and libertarians righteously outraged at Lindin’s radical feminism. It also came from feminist allies and social media users of color, who pointed out that some of the most famous cases of false allegations of sexual harassment have also been examples of “racist scape-goating.”
You don’t care that innocent men of color are disproportionately accused in colleges, and punished without due process, in ways that ruin their lives? Your feminism is comfortable with blatant racist scape-goating?
— Geoffrey Miller (@primalpoly) November 21, 2017
In fact, had Lindin paid attention in high school and college lit classes, she may have encountered a fictionalized, yet no less exemplary case of just this — in the seminal American work, “To Kill A Mockingbird.”
Lindin replied that she didn’t mean to say that people of color should be improperly accused of sexual harassment; instead, she was referring only to “powerful people who are protected by the system.” Eventually, she was forced to agree that all allegations of sexual assault should be properly investigated.
Linden is, of course, not the first progressive to abrogate her duty to intersectional feminism in light of sexual harassment claims. Lena Dunham took the opposite position over the weekend, claiming that all accusers should be believed, except those who lob allegations at a friend and co-writer for her HBO show, “Girls.”
