Cathy Young
1 min readJul 4, 2020

--

You ought to check out what I've written about #MeToo! In fact, I'm pretty sure I've written more than one piece "listing lots of times women had made false rape accusations," because I think "Believe women" in an absolutely toxic slogan.

There are people in every demographic who lie. No accusations should be accepted uncritically.

However, the actions of individuals who do bad things should never be ascribed to an entire group.

"Some women make false accusations of rape"/"Some black people make false accusations of racism" is not the same as "Women lie" or "Blacks lie." Likewise, "Some men rape women" and "Some white people engage in racist abuse of blacks" is not the same as "Men rape" or "Whites are racists."

But I suppose that since statements like "men rape" and "whites are racist" are acceptable in progressive discourse, the unremarkable observation that some women and minorities make false claims of sexual violence or racist abuse translates into blanket derogatory statements about women and blacks.

Incidentally, using your logic, if a woman accuses a black man of rape, the only two possible conclusions are either "Blacks rape" or "women lie."

--

--

Cathy Young
Cathy Young

Written by Cathy Young

Russian-Jewish-American writer. Associate editor, Arc Digital; contributor, Reason, Newsday, The Forward etc. https://www.patreon.com/CathyYoung

No responses yet