leupagus:

lightandwinged:

calleo:

brainstatic:

You ever get the feeling that people only try to redirect anger to “the system” when they lowkey approve of the status quo and are afraid of losing their privilege.

In a sense, they’re right; if the same system that allowed predators like this to exist and flourish essentially in public in the first place isn’t changed or dismantled along with a purge of the predators themselves, it’ll just rebuild itself and the new shitheel people who enter it will learn from the ‘mistakes’ the ousted predators made in an attempt to continue being predatory but with having a higher chance of getting away with it.

It’s a bit like the house of someone who has been an undiscovered hoarder for decades; you can clean that house out all you want, but it’s always going to still stink of garbage, cat piss, and filth no matter what you do and no matter how much you clean and no matter if you get every last spec of dirt out, it’s never really going to be fit to use again.
The house itself often has to be destroyed or gutted and rebuilt to get something fully clean and safe to use again.

There should be anger both at the people who do things like this and at the system that allowed it to become a thing they felt safe doing. 

It’s not really an ‘either or’ situation.

All of this.

Firing men who abuse women through their positions of power is treating the symptom. You have to tear this out by the root and enact real cultural change or it’s just going to happen again and again.

Firing people who sexually abuse and harass others is changing the system, though; and no, it will not somehow create a future generation of predators who are somehow smarter and better at not being caught. Because “the system” is built not on the assumption that these predators don’t get caught, but on the assumption that a victim will be punished for coming forward and a predator won’t be punished for admitting to the harassment/abuse. I agree that it would be totally groovy if abusive people, men especially, became magically non-abusive through whatever “real cultural change” y’all want to enact, but in the meantime, making it impossible for them to harass and abuse and still keep their jobs/power/prestige is a pretty good first step.

I’m okay with “treating the symptom”; “treating the symptom” saves lives and careers now. “Tearing this out by the root and enacting real cultural change” doesn’t actually involve doing anything, so I can see why it’s vastly preferred.