Feelings Friday

I never loved Woody Allen, though I like him better now that his films are incorporating less of 1. his face and 2. my accompanying desire to punch said face. The characters he played seemed to be the only ones he bothered to, you know, develop (literally the only thing I remember about Annie Hall  is how awesome she looked in that vest). And the Allen characters themselves always struck me to be like early iterations of Hannah Hovath from Girls, or the casts of Friends and Seinfeld: entirely unrelatable, borderline-odious individuals whose experiences are presented as universal because of their privilege. No, I never noticed [that] -- [that], my friend, is all you.

But I did love Blue Jasmine; for the first time, Allen seemed interested enough in someone other than himself to make an entire movie about them. I liked it enough that I'd been willing to consider that my loathing for Allen may be one of my many Irrational Fears and Hatreds, and I said as much to my husband, in case he wanted to add it to the catalogue that I suspect he maintains, partly for his own amusement, partly in an effort to not set me off.

I didn't realize that when back when my mom, who possesses her own set of Irrational Fears and Hatreds, was calling Allen a pervert, she was referring to him raping his child.

I hadn't yet read this.

Or this.

Or this, which addresses Dylan's recent letter more articulately than I can.

This has been talked to death, considering that there's no longer any decision to be made: Woody Allen, like almost everyone accused of sexual abuse and assault, will never stand trial for it, and ultimately, your opinion of whether or not he abused his stepchild will not affect him, because you do not matter to Woody Allen.

As far as I can tell, the "controversy" surrounds this: whether or not Dylan Farrow, who clearly believes she was abused by Allen, has a right to produce angry diatribes when her abuser is given a lifetime achievement award, and individuals outside the situation have a right to believe Ms. Farrow over Woody Allen, and to be angry on her -- or their own -- behalf.

But if you're wondering why some of us persist in believing some little kid over a Lifetime Achiever, and to insist that actually, yes, molesting a child renders irrelevant even the most stunning artistic achievement, here are a few things to think about -- especially if you enjoy the specific privilege of not having had your body parts co-opted as entertainment for another, apparently more human, being.

First, I'm not saying that a legal decision to dismiss what Farrow is claiming is incorrect. It's extremely likely that her story was convoluted, unclear, and potentially inadmissible; I just don't think that means it is untrue. Because a seven year old's story is not airtight, that is a reason to doubt (and then, even more weirdly) attack her? Have you met a seven year old whose recollection of anything would make a decent testimony in court? Because I've worked with kids for over fifteen years, much of it spent helping them learn to communicate, and I still don't what "really happened" in any given situation they describe. This doesn't speak to their credibility; it speaks to basic realities of child development.

Moreover, I don't understand why one would expect victims of sexual violence to act differently than traumatized and broken people usually act. To listen to a victim of sexual assault -- a specific kind of attack the purpose of which is to rip apart the victim's sense of who he or she is, to let someone know that they are not actually a person -- and conclude that the details of his or her story don't line up, so he or she is lying, is to ignore most of what we know about how people survive this kind of trauma. I don't think it's reasonable to expect a "real" victim of childhood sexual abuse to be able to present a compelling enough case to trump an adult man who creates stories for a living, who does it very well, and who, by virtue of these stories, can purchase whatever credibility his gender, skin color, and social status don't automatically confer. I don't think you'd expect any child you knew to present an airtight case that she was abused, if she brought that to you. I'd like to think you'd try to help her.

When you're a kid and bodies are defined as belonging to people, except your body can be looked at and touched at the discretion of This Guy, just for fun, it's an understandable conclusion to draw that you are not a person. Not really, not as much as This Guy, who then, often, becomes These Guys, because there is nothing more humiliating than attempting to preserve some semblance of control or integrity when in point of fact, you have no ability to do so.

Imagine your sand castle, kicked casually to the ground by a stranger, or a classmate, or your stepdad, and then pissed all over. How many times would you try to rebuild it? How eager would you be to share this event with everyone, to go to the cops, to sit in court and detail how you actually are shit, your right to your own body a grotesque little joke grownups told you that you were stupid enough to fall for, and here's how This Guy brought you up to speed? How effectively would you navigate a system that is legally bound to be on This Guy's side until and unless you convince them otherwise? You can't even keep your private parts private; who do you think you are?

This is why eyewitness testimony is essentially useless: because the brain's primarily commitment is to its owner. It will remember most experiences in the most tolerable way it can, even if that means that details become inconsistent or confusing. Because confusion is generally more bearable than the alternative -- when the alternative is the visceral recollection of all the ways that, instead of being a person, you are actually excrement -- and because the initial experience was lived out under the influence of a number of neurochemicals designed to facilitate survival, not objective testimony, trauma victims rarely make great advocates for themselves.

This is unfortunate: it means that in most cases, we can give a rapist or child molester his or her rights to a fair trial, or we can bring him or her to justice -- but not both. It's entirely likely that Woody Allen molested his stepdaughter and got away with it, and that justice was done, in  a legal sense, because there wasn't enough evidence to convict him or even to try him. That would be the "just" outcome. This is not at all incompatible with an objective reality in which Allen molested Ms. Farrow;you can't go around rendering legal decisions based on inconsistent testimony, even if the guy did it.

To me, it's also totally plausible that Allen, of all people, might have found a psychiatric team to vouch for him, or a judge who'd rule in his favor, regardless of the "evidence". Think about the people you know making the case that Allen's "personal life" is unrelated to his art, and then think about what those people who consider of more value: a little kid and her vitriolic mother -- you know how scorned women get --  or all those compelling films Allen's made in the past twenty two years. Do we really want to not have Mighty Aphrodite just so this kid gets her way? Who the eff is she?

And of course, Allen might have been innocent. (I doubt it, because the actual cases in people are falsely accused of abuse are rare -- this is why they are so sensational when they happen. But it's possible. Though one might consider 1. that Ms. Farrow suffers from a spectrum of psychological problems that each have a strong correlation with childhood sexual abuse, 2. that a number of people apart from Ms. Farrow and her mother recall an "inappropriate interest" in Farrow as a child, 3. that men who abuse children often do so because they find adult women anxiety-provoking, and Allen has made something of a career out of documenting how unsettling and unmanageable he finds adult women and their sexuality, and 4. that this child said he did this, and has continued to say he did it, for twenty years.)

Or, he might have gotten away with child abuse regardless of who he was.  A lot of people do: of the people I know who have been molested or raped -- which is solidly half of the women with whom I am close enough to know these things -- exactly none of their rapists or abusers have gone to court. And any one of those rapists and abusers could find people who would vouch for their innocence if they did, because:

1. We do not live in a society in which women are granted total say-so in what happens to their bodies. It's conditional: I gave up mine by going to a club alone and getting a ride from a friend. My best friend gave up hers by getting too drunk. And a lot of children give up theirs by not understanding boundaries and sexuality well enough to say no when grown ups touch them -- because, at least in my experience, you can be seven or seventeen, but if you want to not be touched, you'd better start saying no, and loud, even if you can't possibly anticipate what you're saying no to. For you to punch my face and me to press charges, I just have to prove you punched me, not that I didn't actually want to be punched, or invite the punching in some way. We've yet to establish a similar stipulation for sex.

2. The prospect of being falsely accused of rape or child abuse is, understandably, so terrifying that many men are particularly sensitive to it -- the way many women are inclined to believe rape victims, because the prospect of being assaulted and not believed by the people who you love is also devastating. I choose to believe that men insist on the pervasive threat of false rape accusations because they are so appalled by rape and afraid of being falsely accused of it -- and not, as I suspect in my more misanthropic moments, because it serves them to maintain a distinction between "real rape" (what other, bad men do) and "false rape accusations" (what happens when a bitch changes her mind "after the fact", or "during the fact", or goes along with it with just a little prodding/liquor/rohypnol, or falls asleep on your couch).

3. It's not just that no one wants to believe that someone they know would molest a child or would rape someone; we really don't believe it. People fight for the beliefs that make life tolerable: the belief  that your friend, your partner, your husband molested a child is pretty unbearable. If all you need to avoid that pain is for the kid to be lying, for the kid to be coached, for the situation to be "unclear" -- well, the guy in question doesn't have to be Woody fucking Allen for a person to try to force the reality with which one is presented into a shape that allows him or her to get through the day.


What touches a nerve, for me, is this: I've experienced people close to me being raped and not believed because the person they were telling personally knew and loved the abuser in question. I've spent decades rewriting and revisiting my own experiences as a child because ultimately, a person who was inappropriate with my body was also personally dear to me, and I wasn't willing to cut that person out of my life. I know that you can both "disapprove" of child abuse and find the reality of believing and defending its victims not just inconvenient but profoundly threatening.

It is so incredibly hard and terrifying to accept what is true when that truth is ugly and damaging and involves someone you love. People often can't handle it. But what are we going to do if we can't handle someone's claim because her abuser makes movies we like? If you can't believe Dylan Farrow because Woody's movies matter so much to you, what are you going to do when your wife/daughter/sister tells you that your father-in-law/husband/dad molested her?

Because, like it or not, whatever your bizarre "men's rights" websites might tell you, if she tells you that, the odds are good that it is true. If your response is to look the other way because this man you have never met "wouldn't do that", if you are so convinced of that that you are willing to take your cues as to how to interpret reality from a justice system that is necessarily skewed in favor of the accused, and less necessarily skewed in favor of rich, white, male adults, then it's not just Ms. Farrow who's out of luck.

Of course you don't think this guy did it; the whole point of the crime is to drive home the fact that this guy can do what he wants, and who will believe you? If we continue to look for reasons to not only exonerate abusers legally (we "can't know for sure"; "why was she even there"; "she'd had sex with him before!"), but to demonize private citizens for choosing to believe rape victims regardless of the quality of evidence -- because the victim is their daughter or their friend or because they make a habit of personally giving victims of sexual abuse the benefit of the doubt -- we are actively maintaing a society that privileges the word of the (generally more powerful) accused not only in court but in our homes and on our streets.

I do not think we need to make our communities friendlier to alleged rapists. Certainly they should be afforded the same guaranteed of legal innocence as any other alleged criminal. But I am not obligated to take their side just because they won at a game played in their (adult, male, rich, white, celebrity) arena. And I think because we don't know what happened, what seems to be dividing people is this: which is a worse tragedy, Woody Allen's damaged reputation, should he be innocent, or living with the fallout of sexual abuse and rape for two decades and then being told that you don't have a right to complain?

To me, it's barely a question. That apparently it is for so many people makes me wonder what needs to happen for my body (female, non-celebrity) to matter as much as Woody Allen's name.