Where Accusations Go
What do we talk about when we talk about sexual violence? Often it's the sex, and it's the not violence. Often we talk about how normative ways we talk about it are or aren't changing, but the violent character of accusations, something that would seem to be their most salient characteristic, is often distorted into absence. How does this happen practically?
This week the CBC, Canada's national broadcaster, fired Jian Ghomeshi, a host of Q, a popular program. According to the Toronto Star, the CBC received information that Ghomeshi had violently sexually assaulted at least three women, and there is word of more accusations to follow. Though Ghomeshi is using legalistic language to defend himself and suing the CBC for $50 million for defamation, he is attracting more attention for framing the encounters with these women as exciting kinky sex that multiple partners suddenly regretted and now seek to do him wrong.
Describing these encounters, he has said "Let me be the first to say that my tastes in the bedroom may not be palatable to some folks. They may be strange, enticing, weird, normal, or outright offensive to others. But that is my private life. And no one, and certainly no employer, should have dominion over what people do consensually in their private life." The questions are here now about taste, offense, privacy and work.
What the Ghomeshi case reminds me of is Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French politician accused of sexual assault in New York in 2011. American authorities dismissed his accuser's account because of some inconsistencies. Nevertheless, it doesn't register the seriousness of accusations that much of the discussion in American media like The New York Times was about how differently French people feel about a public leader's private life. Things are different over there, we hear: people have "arrangements"; a man's business is respected, and media consumers don't go for cheap thrills or middle-class judgments.
What? Whether or not France is still like its midcentury movies Americans so admire, what about an alleged violent crime is Strauss-Kahn's personal business? How is the question of whether his wife or partner had an understanding with him about sex outside the relationship at all relevant? Maybe the American media are more interested than others in the sex lives leaders want private; I don't know. But the accusation had nothing to do with an affair.
Whether Jian Ghomeshi will face authorities is unclear, and so is the question of whether he will be seen as a man brought down by scandal or someone who did violence to women. But when sex is involved, a social standard of proof is put against women whom men have harmed that is little present elsewhere: who's to say it's not just a matter of taste? Of course, there are other issues to discuss here: about deep ambivalence about violence in porn and media, about how race and immigration frame sexual violence, about privilege. But for Americans and Canadians, people believed to be prudishly reticent in talking about sex, we seem to prefer that topic to violence and violation.