Does truth matter to the feminist left?

Such self-serving inquiries illustrate something crucial — namely, that many of those who describe themselves as “journalists” these days are more interested in moral positioning and the advancement of their agendas than in the attainment of objective truth. Where most of us are primarily concerned with whether a given claim is correct, others seem more attentive to how we react to that claim in the first place. Did you ask questions about Jackie’s story as it was reported? If so, you must hate women, work for the patriarchy, or hope to prove that nobody is ever raped. Did you believe Jackie uncritically and with a full-throated roar? Excellent, then you must be a good person who wants to help women, move the country forward, and do something concrete about the issue of sexual assault. It’s really that simple, my dear.

Amazingly, these presumptions tend to remain intact through thick and thin. In consequence, a person who incorrectly judged the veracity of Rolling Stone’s story can remain on the side of the angels, while a person who was correct to doubt the account is dismissed as a devil who just got lucky. Sure, the zetetics might have been right in a technical, factual, reality-based sense. But that they tried to investigate the matter in the first instance tells us something terrible about their character. And yes, the story may have been completely and utterly wrong. But at least its advocates took a stand for something nice. Did you? Wait, you’re not a rapist, are you?

This is an area in which we hear a great deal about empathy and kindness. But there is nothing that is nice or kind or empathetic about the subordination of truth to narrative. It would indeed have been abominable if Jackie had been transformed by hyper-dubiety into Cassandra’s cousin — into a woman, that is, who knew the terrible truths of the past but who could not convince anybody to believe her. And yet — and this, I think, is the part that the Maxwells, Kohns, and Dunhams of the world seem to struggle with — it would also have been wretched if Rolling Stone had been permitted to report as fact a devastating crime that never actually occurred. (Or, at least, that did not occur in anything like the manner in which Rolling Stone claimed it occurred.) Which is to say that there are always two sides to justice’s ledger, and that those who fight blindly and stupidly for a particular outcome are not so much seeking justice as trying to corrupt it for their own ends.