At least their apologies are getting better. Men accused of harassment and assault seem to be learning from the backlash over previous, inadequate apologies made by men like Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey, and are issuing more eloquent and sincere-seeming mea culpas.



Louis CK’s “there is nothing about this that I forgive myself for” and Senator Al Franken’s admission of shame seem to have deflected at least some of the outrage their original actions provoked. But we have to ask: what comes after the apology? What professional and personal repercussions are an adequate and proportional response to these accusations?

The whole point of a justice system is to intervene, set standards, and rebalance wrongs

It is important that we begin to have this conversation, because the accusations are not stopping and many industries are struggling to figure out how to respond. All kinds of predators are willing and eager to step into this chaos and uncertainty and use it to their advantage.

When justice fails, that leaves the door open for revenge. And the justice system has been failing women for a very, very long time. Violence against women, particularly these more intimate forms of violence like rape, domestic abuse, stalking and harassment, has been and is inadequately investigated and prosecuted, from the lack of enforcement for restraining orders to disbelieving victims to untested rape kits left to languish for decades. Even if people with scores of accusers over decades, like Bill Cosby, do make it to trial, convictions are not sure things.

Even if every accusation met the burden required for prosecution, from getting through an evidentiary hearing to being within the statute of limitations, one does have to wonder if the justice system is the right place to try some of these cases. Not only because the American justice system sometimes seems as if it were built explicitly to be biased against female victims, but because the justice system is, to put it frankly, broken.

Just the other week an investigation by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune showed that black defendants receive longer sentences than white defendants for the same crime. We regularly hear reports of coerced confessions, abuse of power by police and district attorneys’ offices, overreaches by judges looking to get re-elected. Not to mention the post-apocalyptic nature of our prison system, where guards often feel free to abuse prisoners and rehabilitation is less the goal than the total destruction of the prisoner’s soul.

But what that leaves us with to adjudicate these cases is the court of public opinion, where revenge is free to reign. Without some kind of arbiter, the punishment can be disproportionate to the violation and accusations can be difficult to investigate properly. When a member of the band PWR BTTM was accused of sexual assault, they began losing gigs and contracts immediately, without the accusation going to court or substantiated with evidence.



Though rare, people can and do lose their livelihoods just from uninvestigated accusations now, making accusations of sexual harassment newly politically useful to competitors and enemies. We risk leaving the ground open for false accusations and politically motivated hit jobs to take over, and we women should absolutely be concerned about what is done in the name of our “safety”.

Which is why we need some sort of societal standard in place, a method of weighing harm and consequences. We should not be complacent with the idea that it does not matter if innocent men get caught up in this – the goal should always be improvement of conditions for all, not replacing one slapdash and unfair system with another.



Nor do all the jokes about how only women should be allowed to run things really help anything. Just last year, multiple women were accused of harassing and exploiting their employees at companies like Thinx and Nasty Gal. We should not be thinking about this as eliminating one bad person, we should be thinking about dismantling and replacing the system that encourages and protects abuse of power.

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When a man puts his hands on a woman without her consent, or harasses her verbally, or tries to retaliate against her for sexual rejection, there should be consequences. But none of us seem to know what those consequences should be, and so they are meted out arbitrarily.

We can’t leave things to the victims, just because the family of a murder victim might want the perpetrator dead does not make the death penalty just. The whole point of a justice system is to intervene, set standards, and rebalance wrongs.

The fact that we can’t quite picture what a fair system for handling these accusations might look like is positive, I think. It means we’re not simply recreating the failing system that has let us down so many times. Reimagining a fairer world, one that gives space for all people to thrive without undue interference, is a radical project. We should start now.