Thread by @Delafina777

Never fucking fails: any time you talk about a harasser, an abusive boss, a toxic coworker, etc. a man will show up to try to shut down the conversation by claiming said person is a good person because they were nice to HIM.

Like oh boy do I have a rant building about the weaponization of the idea that there are “good people” and “bad people” to stifle discussion of bad *behavior.*

And even when that particular rhetorical move gets …sort of… addressed, it’s usually in terms of “abusive people groom allies just as they groom victims.”

And sure, that’s true, but it also misses the point and reduces people to one-dimensional villains.

People who abuse some people are nice to other people bc people are *complex social creatures* who have different relationships with different people, and don’t fall into a binary of either monsters whose every act is manipulation or good people whose intentions are ever pure.

Like every single adult out there has engaged in behavior at some point that, if it were repeated, would be textbook abuse. And every person out there who has abused someone has had healthy, non-abusive relationships with someone.

And the "good person vs. bad person" rhetoric always seems to come out in response to discussion of someone engaging in abusive or toxic behavior, and it almost always *succeeds* in derailing the conversation.

Someone says "this person did these bad things in trying to get me to sleep with him." And someone else comes in and says, "I know him, he's a good person!"

And bam! The discussion becomes about whether he qualifies as a good person.

If he did those things, can he possibly still be a good person? And then it shifts to if he IS a good person, perhaps we don't have to believe that he did those things.

After all, he runs charity events so he CAN'T have sent someone death threats.

And of course a lot of people use this tactic to shut down any criticism of things their buddies have done.

I say "tactic," because it is, but I don't necessarily mean in the "fully thought out and planned" sense. Often I think it's a knee-jerk response from the heart.

But while it often *happens* in the defense of a buddy, or of someone the person who's doing it sees as like them, it's also frequently a way for people to justify their own behavior.

Since it comes up so often in discussing sexual assault and harassment, I'm going to concretize it in those terms. (CW: rape, harassment, and sexual assault obviously.)

Someone comes out and says "I was sexually assaulted by this guy."

Immediately, a bunch of people jump in to say things like, "if you really were, why didn't you go to the police?" and "does that ACTUALLY count as sexual assault?" and "I know him, he's a good guy."

So, leaving aside for the moment all the reasons that one might not want to go to the police, there are assumptions underlying all this that are part of turning it into a binary where either it must be EXTREME or it doesn't matter.

Not all sexual assault is rape. Depending on the context and who's doing it, some stuff that, in the context of sexual behavior, is generally considered mild can be very traumatic.

But people want it to either be extreme or to not really count for the same reason they want to determine whether the perpetrator counts as a "good person" and for the same reason they want to talk about intentions rather than effects: because it distances them from Bad People.

If the only sexual assault that counts is rape, and a rapist is someone who pounces on a woman jogging alone at night and drags her by the hair into the bushes, and not their friend who pushed a coworker to drink more and pushed past her "no"s...

...then straight men don't have to think about all the ways that maybe they've viewed a woman's lack of interest in sex with them as an obstacle to overcome rather than a directive to look elsewhere for someone to knock boots with.

They don't have to think about how sexual coercion is a spectrum and not a binary. They don't have to worry about how the way our society treats some people vs. others in terms of sex and what behavior it normalizes or even valorizes might have played into their own encounters.

It can be very simple.

Rapists are Bad People.

They are Good People.

Therefore their behavior is above board.

You also see it in the primacy of intentions over effects when discussion abusive behavior.

If I am a Good Person, and I did not intend harm, then whatever harm I did must not really be enough to matter, because only Bad People do things like racism and sexism.

And so ultimately, unless the harm is SO big and SO severe, and SO obvious that people can put the person who did it in the Monster category and not see any of themselves in that person, what happens is the harm gets minimized.

After all, that person was nice to ME. They're clearly not a Bad Person, so they must not have meant to do harm. And if they're a Good Person and had Good Intentions, clearly the *effect* of whatever they did couldn't have been THAT bad. So can't we just move on?

And even though I used sexual assault as an example here, because it's the easiest for most people to get their heads around as far as the harm it causes, this happens for all KINDS of harmful behavior between people.

See also: “moral balancing” and the reasons regular churchgoers are more likely to shoplift.