Jennifer Weiner got herself published in the New York Times today.
And why not? She is a summa cum laude graduate (English lit) from Princeton and her Wiki page tells us she is the author of multiple New York Times best selling novels, including "Good in Bed," and she is a T.V. producer to boot.
Jennifer Weiner
So, she ought to be an expert.
Her topic, of course, is the Cornell rape case. What else? the NYT has run, by my last count, twelve articles over the past three days about the case of a young woman who is suing people and institutions over an incident which occurred at a fraternity house, where she apparently not only had sex or was forced to have sex, with multiple frat brothers, and one or more of them sent messages about the whole thing on Snap chart or something, and maybe even images.
There have been so many version of what happened, in the NYT alone, the facts of the case are so far, in the public domain at least, incomprehensible, but one version has her showing up drunk or maybe drinking some alcohol, performing public fellatio on some frat brother, and either asking for or being asked about having group sex, and then things went downhill from there, if that's possible, with her being held against her will and raped by seven frat bros.
Having just dropped off her own daughter at college, Ms. Weiner tells us news of this nasty crime left her "incandescent with rage." Her daughter is a big hearted girl ready to spread her wings, and this Cornell outrage was not at all what she dreamed of for her daughter.
So far, I was with Ms. Weiner, but then she says:
A/ "How is this still happening? Shouldn't things be better now? How could all of our activism have brought about so little change?"
B/ She walked at "A Take Back the Night march, where students walked through campus stopping so that women could tell agonizing personal stories."
c/ "People accused of sexual assault can in some circumstances cross-examine their accusers, a terrifying prospect for survivors of trauma."
(As if being accused of rape is not a terrifying experience for the accused.)
Well, let's not skip by "C" too quickly.
It is here that Ms. Weiner revealed herself most completely. What she is saying is the crime is so unspeakably cruel and horrible that we ought to abandon all our principles of how crime is evaluated and judged. What she is attacking, at its heart, is Due Process. The authors of the U.S. Constitution's Sixth Amendment say the accused is guaranteed the right to confront his accuser. Fairness, justice, human decency demands that much.
Even the guys who wrote the Bible did not, at least in translation, make the ninth Commandment about simply lying, but it says, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." False witness, from antiquity has been known to be a truly vile act. Accusation is a significant act, an attack, often with the most significant consequences for the accused.
So, for both religious folk and legal folk an accusation is a ponderously serious thing, and if false, is a great injustice, and the presumption of innocence is there for a reason.
None of this is to say the woman at Cornell was not harmed or should remain silent. Her accusations should get a full hearing, but the crime is so important, it should be examined thoroughly, no matter how terrifying that may be for her or for those she accused.
What Ms. Weiner would advocate, and, for that matter what the activists of the #METOO movement advocated was that the accusation substitute for the whole process--no examination, no challenge, no defense. The indictment is the only thing. All the rest is rejected as beside the point, because, you know, women have suffered.
I would, modestly, suggest that accusation without a chance for examination, rebuttal is a crime unto itself. It is the "Oxbow Incident," in essence.
Then there is the A & B above. Does Ms. Weiner really think that marching through campuses, telling horror stories, holding up signs which say, "Take Back the Night," or "activism" like hers would really de-toxify testosterone saturated college boys?
She must not have raised any sons.
Reading further into her Wiki page, it turns out her novels are "chick lit" and although one was turned into a movie with Cameron Diaz and Shirley MacLean ("In Her Shoes"), I have to confess, I've never heard of it.
But, then again, I'm told this is because she has been dismissed as a genre writer by the male dominated star making culture of American publishing and media:
"I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance or a beach book--in short it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention," Ms. Weiner tells us.
Well, Ms. Weiner should know, having been a summa cum laude graduate of Princeton in English literature, but I imagine this would come as something of a surprise to Katherine Anne Porter, author of "Old Mortality," and Harper Lee ("To Kill A Mockingbird") or Willa Cather ("My Antonia") or, for that matter, to Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath or Joan Didion or Anne Tyler.
None of those women authors were ever taken seriously by the male dominated publishing and media.
But then again, maybe it was the "TV producer" that got in the way of Ms. Weiner's Pulitzer prize--after all she live tweeted "The Bachelorette," and she wrote the "State of Georgia" which was cancelled after 12 episodes.
So, she has not been given her due, I'm sure, likely because she is a woman, and suffers from that cross carried by women like Nina Kostroff Noble and Karen Thorson who were producers instrumental in that Mt. Everest of TV's greatest five seasons: "The Wire."
But you have to give Ms. Weiner some credit for asking the question: "How could all of our feminist activism have brought about so little change?"
If you don't ask the question, you will never find the solution.
