#METOO
When the victim is also the perpetrator
Someone’s mother once told them not to throw stones if they lived in a glass house. Judging from reports out of the New York Times over the past week and the subsequent firestorm they created, Italian actor and #MeToo activist Asia Argento has been lobbing boulders and chickens are coming home to roost.
When it emerged last year that Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein had spent his career sexually assaulting people like it was an Olympic sport, Argento was one of the first to step forward and identify herself as one of his victims. Since then Argento has been at the forefront of calling out the film industry’s pervasive culture of sexual misconduct.
But it turns out that at around the same time as she was rightly calling Weinstein out for being a sleazebag, she herself was quietly dealing with claims that she had allegedly sexually assaulted a minor.
According to documents obtained by the New York Times, Argento settled a lawsuit against her by actor Jimmy Bennett, who was 17 at the time of the 2013 assault, by arranging to pay him $380,000. Argento has vehemently denied any wrongdoing, claiming that she did not have sex with Bennett and that her now-deceased partner Anthony Bourdain paid Bennett in order to help the young actor in a time of financial hardship and avoid negative press.
Whatever the truth is, the curious case of Asia Argento has highlighted an oft-overlooked nuance in the discourse on sexual assault — how society reacts when it happens to men.
It should be noted that there is a very good reason why sexual assault against men is not scrutinised as much as it is when it happens to women.
By every statistical measure women are much more likely to be victims of some type of sexual violence at the hands of men than vice-versa, thus giving the two equal weight is silly.
That said, there is a disturbing derisiveness that male victims of sexual abuse are treated with that pops up time and again.
Every time the perennial story of a teacher having sex with her teenage student crops up, large swathes of the digital peanut gallery cheer the victim on as if he has unlocked a difficult achievement on a PlayStation game. Men often joke among themselves about how they would never report assault or sexual abuse at the hands of a woman because of the laughter that would follow.
At the heart of all of this is the male fragility, toxic masculinity or whatever the new woke catchphrase for men being victims of a system we created is. Sexual assault is sexual assault. Argento’s sexual misconduct towards a 17-year-old boy is just as egregious as Kevin Spacey’s.
Statutory rape laws exist for a reason and an erection or even enjoyment of the act does not make it any less reprehensible.
Patriarchy, however, has built a system in which men have styled themselves as superior and thus the idea that the “inferior” gender has taken advantage of them in some way cannot be countenanced. It must either be rebranded into a story where the man’s youthful magnetism is such that even a wily old cougar isn’t immune to his charms or, in the case of physical abuse, swept under the rug. Anything else makes one less of a man.
In a world where we place more value on the story of the victim rather than that of the perpetrator, Argento could be just as guilty as all of the men in Hollywood and if we are serious about tackling sexual assault, then, if guilty, she should be tarred and feathered the same as the Spaceys of the world have been.