Originally Posted by theatlantic
In contrast, Constance Grady of Vox rejects the notion that exposing readers to a new perspective can justify an essay like the one the NYRB published, arguing that to promote an essay like that “is not a harmless intellectual enterprise in free speech hypotheticals. It has real consequences” because such essays include ideas “fundamental to the widespread narrative that the #MeToo movement has gone too far.” (How curious for a journalist to imply that exercising free speech is most defensible when the attendant ideas have no larger consequences.)

In Grady’s telling, spotlighting such perspectives reinforces “a system in which men’s social status is considered to be more valuable than women’s bodily safety … in which accusations of sexual violence are brushed aside as so much shrill hyperbole, and in which powerful men are able to hurt those they have power over with impunity. It’s difficult to understand how these essays are doing anything more than striving to return to the system that necessitated the birth of the #MeToo movement.”
These two paragraphs are pretty damning. This is supposedly a journalist (I honestly have no idea how people perceive Vox as a journalistic publication, so I just assume this person is a respected journalist) who is willing to throw another journalist under the bus simply because he had the gall to publish a piece that she thinks has no business in the public sphere. Fuck off.