Skepticism

Woman Supports Sexual Abuser, Discovers He Sexually Harassed her Decades Ago

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Transcript:

In my previous video, I talked a little bit about Republicans trying to push through Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court despite a lot of red flags. Part of that campaign is, of course, to discredit the women who are credibly accusing him of sexual assault and harassment. To discredit the first accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, who says that Kavanaugh tried to rape her when they were both teenagers. The way that they decided to rebut her claim was, at first, to collect the names of 65 women who say they knew him in high school and he didn’t try to rape them.

Skeptics should recognize this immediately as the logical fallacy known as argument ad populum, or an appeal to popularity. If many people believe it, it must be true. It’s surprisingly effective for people who already want to believe the thing in question, whether that be that alternative medicine will cure their cancer, that vaccines cause autism, or that stirrup pants should come back, or that capitalism is good for humanity, or that if a man doesn’t rape 65 women, he probably didn’t rape one other woman.

It’s convincing, until you take a few minutes to think it through. I can find 65 people that Charles Manson didn’t kill. Hell, you could find 65 people who had great experiences with Ted Bundy, who by all accounts was very charismatic and lovely when he wasn’t raping and murdering people.

This tactic is particularly effective because we grow up learning that good people are good, and evil people are evil. The people who do bad things, we know, are bad all the time. They’re the villains in our fairytales, full of warts and fatness and long hook noses and other physical traits we inherently think are bad, often due to sexist or racist underpinnings.

But as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, the line separating good and evil passes right through every human heart. We can’t just separate out the evil and banish it — everyone has the potential to do horrible things.

All of this leads to another issue, which is using marginalized people to hamstring their own. Republicans appeal to the racism in the working class to get them to vote for people and policies that only help millionaires. Black gamers who are chill about white teens calling them the n-word are hailed as heroes by Gamergaters and used to make black activists look like crybabies. And in this example with the pro-Kavanaugh letter, 65 gullible women are used to tell millions of women around the world that no one will believe them if they report a sexual assault.

In some, if not many of those cases, the gullible marginalized person doesn’t truly experience comeuppance. Often, voters are too stupid or stubborn to accept the fact that Donald Trump was never going to help them, and he was always going to help millionaires. Some black gamergaters will continue to put up with the “ironic” racist jokes from their peers in exchange for the pleasure of being the cool guy, of being admired for not rocking the boat. And the women who signed that letter may by and large go to their graves thinking they did the right thing for an old prep school chum.

Well…at least 64 of them might. One woman will not. Renate Schroeder Dolphin signed the letter stating that Kavanaugh was a good guy who, and I quote, “has always treated women with decency and respect.” Within days, she opened up a news article to learn that Kavanaugh, along with 12 other classmates, all bragged in their senior yearbook about hooking up with her, with the implication that they all had sex with her.

Wow, now that’s some hardcore schadenfreude. That’s up there with Trump voters getting deported. And I know, I’m not supposed to laugh at that, either, but come on. We are in the darkest timeline. Everyone is experiencing misfortune, so I’m going to get the slightest amount of joy out of witnessing the misfortune of those who bring it upon themselves. To see, within days, a woman go from voluntarily helping discredit another woman’s allegations of sexual harassment to realizing that she herself was sexually harassed by the man in question… I mean come on, Universe, that’s a little on the nose.

Kavanaugh claims that he was only bragging about kissing her, not fucking her, to which Schroeder Dolphin says she never even kissed him. Ouch.

I hope Dolphin’s story goes viral, because I really, really want other women to see it and to think twice about allowing themselves to be used as tools to silence other women. Those “chill girl” points will only get you so far, because in the end, you’re still just sucking up to people who see you as being second class.

Rebecca Watson

Rebecca is a writer, speaker, YouTube personality, and unrepentant science nerd. In addition to founding and continuing to run Skepchick, she hosts Quiz-o-Tron, a monthly science-themed quiz show and podcast that pits comedians against nerds. There is an asteroid named in her honor. Twitter @rebeccawatson Mastodon mstdn.social/@rebeccawatson Instagram @actuallyrebeccawatson TikTok @actuallyrebeccawatson YouTube @rebeccawatson BlueSky @rebeccawatson.bsky.social

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