“He’s Not a Bad Guy” Doesn’t Absolve Him of His Bad Actions, Tho
my complicated feels at this moment in history
Culture is shifting. It is a peculiar feeling to simultaneously feel pain and despair and numbness as more men are exposed AND a sense of vindication AND empathy for humans, period.
I. Guilt
A week before the Weinstein story broke, I wrote about a man who — very euphemistically and at minimum — made me feel uncomfortable.
Friends reading my posts said his behavior was egregious and confirmed my emotions of disgust, self-disgust, and shame were valid even when I kept minimizing my own feelings of discomfort by blaming myself for enabling him while minimizing his role in creating an environment where I was more enabling than I should’ve been.
Accountability was had — he is personally remorseful, has apologized to me with understanding of the harm, and was asked to leave a team that decided to take his actions very seriously despite his leadership role (this was a pretty big deal).
I felt incredibly guilty. As I’ve stated before, this is not even close to the worse experiences I’ve had both before and after with other men who’ll never see consequences. (And each experience cements the lesson that men are not to be trusted with closeness or vulnerability.)
He’s not a bad guy. I like him otherwise. Kind, intelligent, driven, ambitious, trying to make the world a better place, funny. We could’ve been friends except for how gross he made me feel because there’s some lack of understanding of how to interact non-men.
He’s not a bad guy. No one is. But they all are.
II. Good & Evil
In fact, we all are.
Evil is not a prerequisite for wrongdoing and harm — nor is it an innate trait of human beings that determines the actions of so-called “good” people and “bad” people. There is no moral arbitrator sitting atop a lofty perch weighing our actions on a balance and deciding which we are. This seems to be a difficult concept for many to wrap their heads around.
I personally ascribe some of this difficulty parsing the complexities of experiencing harm to religious or remnants of religious teachings that still play a foundational role in organizing social information in our brains — a binary of good and evil we need to actively work to dismantle. “Experiencing” doesn’t even seem to be quite right here in describing harm but framing harm as being “perpetrated or received” would also neglect to distinguish how complex it is to be human — they are, after all, binary concepts that seem to imply one actor and one object being acted upon.
Thinking that evil is required to be racist or sexist or cause harm is precisely what allows us to continuing minimizing healing and to maximize retributive practices. Consequences need not be equivalent to vengeance.
I once spent a few hours in a car with an affable atheist author who very much supports and feels empathy for a man in the atheist movement accused of sexually harassing multiple women at secular conferences and of behavior creating unsafe environments for women (which includes behavior that demonstrates unwanted/inappropriate sexual attention).
He felt surety in his empathy for the women but claims to know the characters of the individuals so well (that some of these women were scorned lovers) that he felt his friend was bring unfairly crucified.
I have no interest in commenting on his reasoning. I simply want to note the number of times he insisted, “but he’s not a bad guy.”
There’s many ways of saying women (or POC or LGBTQ) lives matter less — or don’t matter at all, by choosing what the perpetrator of harm IS or IS NOT. The dominant narratives reflect and perpetuate these choices.
- He’s not a bad guy.
- He’s not a rapist.
- He’s not a Label.
Alternatively,
- He’s mentally ill (vs. he was radicalized).
- He creates great art (vs. he destroys pieces of others’ humanity).
- He could have made the Olympic swim team and had a promising future (vs. he was a th*g).
- He’s made progress for the American people (vs. he has regressive behaviors unbecoming of a holder of political office).
No, he’s not a bad guy. That’s not the point. The point is that accountability and consequences reach further than easy for any of us to imagine or understand as just when we set the standard for consequences unconscionably high at “evil.”
III. Vindication
A week before the Weinstein story broke, I wrote about a man who — very euphemistically and at minimum — made me feel uncomfortable. He suffered consequences.
I felt incredibly guilty at the time, myself attempting to wrap my own head around the cascading consequences of his actions — not a slap on the wrist, not a symbolic gesture, not a well-worded confession of conscience, but something that affects the trajectory of his near-term foreseeable future. I asked myself if I had exaggerated the events.
I questioned my version of reality. And with how seldom women are believed and how often we are dismissed, it simply makes sense that we might be more prone to skepticism and questioning of our own realities — we have to come with airtight convictions no one can doubt.
And then the names of men of power started feeding the media industrial complex as those harmed were emboldened to tell their stories, forcing institutions to bring them SOME of these men to some sort of reckoning — disproportionately and unjustly applied, yet more than ever before.
And then I no longer felt so guilty, but vindicated, because the tide is turning.
Some might argue none of what I’m about to say matters if they ascribe to the “harm has been done, fuck the perpetrator, they deserve no sympathy” extreme, but even realistically, I am not concerned about his future. Not because I don’t care at all (I do care about this particular individual’s life outcomes) or because I want to cause him harm (which is the opposite of not caring, by the way), but because I think he’ll be more than fine in the long-run.
Truth be told, he is not in the midst of his career, but just the beginning of a surely prosperous and successful one — or at least one that has great potential. That has not changed despite this one lost opportunity resulting from a mistake that doesn’t show up in any background checks or criminal records.
And although it is always valid to report, I admit that my choices are political when the consequences faced by people in different positions in society are disproportionate even though, again, identity never excuses the harm caused by one’s actions.
This individual was not a person of color but a white man of a particular background with connections and education and with never having to mention what happened because honestly, it wasn’t a big deal (small harm caused to one person), but it was (this one person feels really gross about it and the many experiences like it), but it wasn’t (this one person has experienced worse), but it was (reflective of larger societal dysfunction). I am also fairly confident he will be more intentional about how his actions make women feel in particular contexts and with particular power dynamics in mind as in seems to have, in theory, pro-feminist views.
***
Culture is shifting. It is a peculiar feeling to simultaneously feel pain and despair and numbness as more men are exposed AND a sense of vindication AND empathy for humans, period. I hope men understand that this conflict is taking place instead of feeling personally attacked.
Fin.
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