They Were Threatening Castration

In the prior Polanski post, I only noted the bitter irony that monsters who make things may well be remembered for something quite other than their monstrosity, but since The Children were involved, and The Sex, I assumed it might spark a bit of kerfuffling in the thread. Quel kerfuffle! Threadwinner La_rana really deserves the credit for the following, as he first noted, and best noted, the preposterousness of crying, Justice! I mean, here you have a gang of mostly progressive types seizing a moral issue with thoughtless tenacity. Throw the book at him! But anyone searching for justice in our judicial system is going to find themselves forever searching, and what these people are really looking for is a sort of vindication, some programmatic process through which each precious, individual conviction that he is the scum of the earth can be validated by some external authority. Throw the man in jail if you must, but do not pretend that it is righting some wrong. Our prisons abound with people who probably deserve to be there: they are not all leukemia victims who got busted for pot or innocents on death row, except perhaps in Texas—this doesn’t make them bastions of justice, nor even poor imitations thereof. You cannot selectively call it just when you agree with it--or, you can, but it makes you an idiot. Hauling Polanski back to the States and throwing him in jail for a thirty-year-old crime is in the end a poor attempt at vengeance on the part of those who wish to make a hazy point about rape, which, they rush to remind us, is bad. The victim, by the way, believes he should be forgiven, and wishes that all you fucks would shut the fuck up, though in politer terms. But whatever, fuck her! Justice delayed is justice denied! Exterminate the brutes. Throw away the key! If we can save just one more teenager from quaalude-spiked sexual abuse in Jack Nicholson's swimming pool, then by god, we must!

Consider: one does not disarm, dismantle, disassemble, or even inconvenience the goddamned patriarchy by availing oneself of its systems of coercion.