So, I got a lot of hate mail yesterday. →

It’s weird — I don’t usually get hate mail. Negative comments? Those I get like crazy. I’ve had pseudonymous people on the Internet publicly declare that I am stupid/retarded/fat/gay/black?/racist/etc in response to things that I’ve written loads of times, but this is the first time that a bunch of people independently took it upon themselves to email me to let me know how much of those above things I am.

In any case: This was a response to this week’s Down And Distance column for CultureMap, which talked about Ben Roethlisberger. The emails, naturally, were from Steelers fans who felt like I was picking on their guy unfairly, since it’s been over a year since the last time he was accused of raping anybody.

I will admit that it’s not the freshest of topics, but that’s why I wanted to re-visit it. Because while I am certainly aware that 20 months are an eternity in football-time, I bet it doesn’t seem like several lifetimes ago to the young woman in Milledgeville, Georgia who offered horrifying details to the police (who, hah, posed for pictures with the QB when they got there) about what Roethlisberger did after he had her cornered. That’s part of the point.

The other part of it is that the dude gets to just go and play football now, 20 months later, after a Super Bowl appearance and a few stressful weeks with a publicist have rehabilitated his image. And we will watch, and when we do, we should remember who we’re watching, and what role our enthusiasm for watching played in the fact that he avoided prosecution.

But the article isn’t some you shouldn’t root for the Steelers guilt trip. And that’s why I’m so surprised by the angry emails. Because I know how it is. You were a Steelers fan long before Ben Roethlisberger joined the team. There is an emotional connection to the black and yellow colors and the uniform that is very real and very significant, and I don’t think that people should feel like they have to give that up in order to be a good person — that is not productive. It doesn’t work that way. And ultimately, it’s got nothing really to do with the Steelers. They’re just the team that drafted Roethlisberger. Whatever team he ended up on, they’d be the bad guys. It’s a thing that all of us who care about football share responsibility for.

So I also didn’t propose that we should stop caring about football, because the problem isn’t football, either. Ben Roethlisberger could have played baseball, and people would have argued that the women were lying; the police would still have posed for pictures and called the one in Georgia a drunk fucking bitch; the investigation still would have been dropped because she still wouldn’t have wanted her name in the news. That’d be true if he played baseball, or played in a killer band, or starred in movies, or ran for office. The culture that values Famous, Important Dudes more than the women that they may have raped, is bigger than football.

So what I proposed in the article that got me a couple dozen hate emails was really just a gesture, inspired by the #10ForTebow thing a couple weeks ago: put your money where your mouth is, and prove that you care about the women who may have been raped by the people that our participation in this culture has helped empower. If you want to watch Ben Roethlisberger play football — whether he’s throwing touchdowns and you’re thrilled, or interceptions and you’re rooting against him for whatever reasons — then every time he scores, or tosses a pick, donate $10 to RAINN. Pay for your interest in what he’s doing on the field by offering support to the women who nobody’s cheering for. It doesn’t solve the problem, but at least it says that they’re not forgotten.

And apparently that sentiment is still so upsetting to dudes — not a single letter or comment from a lady! — that they felt the need to fill my inbox with shit about how much I suck for suggesting it.

Some unpopular thoughts on Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Mostly this whole subject makes me sad and frustrated, because I see a lot of people whose opinions I trust and respect being very angry at legal standards that are in place to protect people accused of crimes. And it’s much more likely, in most instances, that the people those standards are in place to protect will have more in common with Nafissatou Diallo than with Dominique Strauss-Kahn

I think it’s likely that he raped her. What’s the alternative, that she consented to extremely brief sex, violent enough to bruise her vulva, within moments of walking into his room, without even knowing the guy? If you put those two possibilities on a scale, the rape side weighs down as more likely. It’d be dishonest to say otherwise.

But that’s not our standard. We don’t ask for a preponderance of the evidence in criminal convictions, we ask for proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Our system isn’t perfect, and it disproportionately displays its imperfections around cases that involved marginalized people. But this standard — which right now benefits a wealthy and powerful white man — is often the biggest protection that poor and other marginalized people have from injustice. And the desire to see a guy who sure looks like a rapist punished, even if it means changing that standard, seems like it would do a lot of harm to other people.

I guess what I am frustrated by is the idea that, because we live in a rape culture — and we do, obviously, in ways that the responses to this very case continue to demonstrate — we ought to ignore that we also live in a culture that punishes unfairly, that seeks to validate its own prejudices by condemning people who look like our idea of what a criminal is. Because in most cases, those people look a hell of a lot more like Nafissatou Diallo than they do like Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

It reinforces the framework of rape culture when a complaining witness’s character is targeted, making it seem as though any woman who’s not a Napoli victim is going to be viewed as a liar. But it also reinforces the framework of a culture that prosecutes people unjustly when arguing that a preponderance of the evidence ought to be sufficient, or that being able to afford a high-powered defense is breaking the system (anyone who’s done work with the wrongfully convicted laments that their client didn’t have the same), or that allowing a guilty man to go free is the worst kind of injustice.

In both of those cultures, the victims are usually people who are easily marginalized. Women, or poor people, or people whose credibility can be impeached, or who don’t have the resources to defend themselves, or people of color. I’m really frustrated to see this guy walk without so much as a trial when he seems, more than likely, to be guilty of raping Nafissatou Diallo. But I’m also frustrated to see people who I very much respect reinforcing the framework of a system that perpetrates injustice on people who are usually much more like her than they are like Dominique Strauss-Kahn.