The “Anti-Assault” Vote and Who Gets It-Hillary or Bernie?

Women in the United States who have been assaulted might not realize it, but they are a political force, about 35 million strong, whose shared desire for justice creates an enormous potential for unity. And women do vote more than men – in 2008, more women voted, in every demographic but one.

Female victims of assault are unlikely to be aware of their power as a political force, because the statistics are always presented in a way that makes it difficult to grasp the magnitude of assaults against women. Clearly 35 million is a lot of people -with those numbers, if the sexually assaulted had their own state, they’d have the second most populated state in America. Women who have been assaulted bond strongly and are highly motivated to help other women, and I truly believe that the political machine is very aware of the possibilities of this huge demographic uniting. They are doing everything they can to ensure that assaulted women don’t find any of the candidates to be someone that they can support.

What illustrated this to me was seeing both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton branded as callous toward rape victims in bold headlines within days of each other…

“Hillary Laughs at 12 year old Black Rape Victim” and “Bernie Sanders Rape Fantasy Essay”, the headlines screamed, guaranteed to trigger emotionalism.  I immediately thought of how both these headlines together would work to create a feeling of complete hopelessness for some women, so they may just as well stay home and not vote at all.

Both headlines make the candidates look callous, but when you look behind the headlines, you can see that while Hillary defended a rapist to please the “boys club”, Bernie was trying to delve into the issue of why we have “boys clubs” and “girls clubs” in the first place.

Lets take a look behind these headlines. When Hillary defended a child rapist as a favor to a male colleague, (yes, she had a choice) she was a 27 year old lawyer trying to prove herself to the boys club in 1975. The audio tape of her laughing about the mistakes the crime lab made which destroyed evidence against her client were bad enough, but her lack of empathy for what happened to this child in 1975 is horrific. The girl was in a coma for 10 days after the attack, and Hillary pulled no punches in her defence of the rapist. She made the attack as much the child’s fault as she possibly could, with vague allegations of the girl being known to go for “older men”. Yes, her client passed the polygraph, as she said in her taped conversation, but she also said that’s when she lost all faith in polygraph tests. With that line, and an amused chuckle, she admits that she knew her client was guilty. At least in that she was ahead of the curve, as we now know that polygraph tests are known to be inaccurate in the case of psychopaths due to their lack of normal fear responses.

Was she “laughing at a 12 year old rape victim?” not technically. She was laughing about the circumstances that got her client off, without any insight or empathy for the damage done, and no outrage about a justice system that systematically destroys and loses evidence of rape. Why was she telling this story in such an amusing way? For the same reason she took the case on originally, she wanted to earn points with men, the power structure elite, by demonstrating her male identification.

Three years before Hillary’s defence of a rapist, Bernie wrote an article called “Man—and Woman” in 1972

Reading Bernie’s piece, I was appreciative of the depth of the issues that he was attempting to tackle in his “ham-fisted” way, as his publicist has recently characterized the article. To my mind it is no wonder that the article seems crude, because what he was attempting to do in a few paragraphs, is examine the physical differences between men and women, and our attempts to cope with that reality in a new social system where women were becoming more equal. That is a very complex topic, involving many disciplines of study, which he attempted to approach it in a two page essay. My guess is that it was weighing heavy on his mind.

44 years later, this article reads as an inflammatory piece, because ever since Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech ( which, incidentally, was rewritten into dialect by a white woman 30 years after the fact, ) women have gained much of their power, necessarily, by saying they are “like men”. Now that science is actually studying women, we are starting to be able to quantify specifically in what ways men and women are different. We no longer have to maintain an artificially enforced blanket-logic on the whole question of gender similarity, but things were different back in ’72. Back then we were just starting toward the idea of total-gender-similarity being almost a “ moral” PC imperative.  Present modern science now refutes this idea. The question now realistically becomes integrating women’s views and reality into the views and actions of governments.

More evidence that shows Bernie was speaking from the climate of his times is in the opening lines of his article. It’s not just in what he says the man and woman are thinking, it’s what they are doing…Notice that the man is masturbating while he fantasizes of being dominant, but the woman is “making love with her man” while she fantasizes submissiveness. Journalistically, it would have been better to use the same circumstances for both parties..but Bernie uses different scenarios as a vehicle for projected thoughts from both genders….why?

Because it was ’72 and we still, as a society, had yet to come to grips with the idea that women even masturbated.

What I’m pointing out is that, because in 1972 our bodies hadn’t been studied, or our voices heard, people didn’t know in what ways we truly were similar and dissimilar to men. In 1972, both women and Bernie were starting to understand the inequities that led to that ignorance, and that silencing. In 2016, both women and Bernie still want to change that inequity, while Hillary remains subservient to that inequity as a person who values personal, rather than social power. A person who is so low on the empathy factor that the most valuable lesson she learned during that miscarriage of justice called a rape trial, seems to be how to please one crony by defending a rapist at his request, and how to bond with another over it’s anecdotal value.

“Big mistake,” Sanders has said on the subject of his article…”So now we have learned that I do bad fiction …But I do have some other attributes.”

I would say he does have other very rare and valuable attributes, judging from both his record, and this article. It takes intellectual courage to think about the truly huge issue of interweaving scientific, evolutionary, gender-difference knowledge into modern day gender equality. It takes even more courage to attempt to speak of these issues when the prevalent liberal social equation is “Women=men=women-same-as-man”. The courage and wisdom to examine larger social patterns, the willingness to admit evidence even in the face of possible social criticism…as a Bernie supporter, I’m only encouraged by seeing that he was thinking about gender roles and norms critically way back in ’ 72, and that he had the courage to address the topic and write about it.

Which candidate is more supportive of my cause to challenge the system that supports rape? My choice is clear, and it’s not going to be the lawyer who decided to defend a child rapist when asked to by a crony, and then laughed about the inequities of justice against that victim to amuse another crony. It’s going to be the man that dared to look at the origins of gender roles and how they affect us today. The man who said in the same essay that it was necessary for the “sake of all humanity” that women achieve equality.

 

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