"Why didn't you.....?"

This Weinstein pile-up is turning out to be far more thought-provoking than I'd have imagined when the dirt first hit the fan. Then I was very much of the deja, non school of response. Someone your mind had snagged on and given the beady eye, only to move on because nothing appeared in public.

"After Weinstein, let's stop asking women to answer for their sex predator's crimes" by Laura Bates is very well expressed, but I suspect there's not much chance of that, sadly.

Why didn’t they respond differently has been a regular response to victims’ stories.

As if indeed, as she says, that would have changed anything. 

....all the usual questions have been directed at his victims. Commentators have questioned their stories, their motives, their timing, their responses, their actions, their inaction, their silence and even their clothing.

I've only once received an answer to the question of why there are "health costs of obesity"-which places all the focus on the target- but no 'health costs' of child sex abuse, rape etc., in the face of rape being used to prop up the "people choose to be fat" line. It was from an mra troll, he said;

"We can do something about obesity." 

[Indeed]

That's how the down-punchers feel. Those who are always expected to change to make things work or to keep things ticking over, will always be turned on and asked why they don't alter themselves sufficiently in any given situation.

Within that frame, people develop a feeling that the scapegoat can do something about being the target of unwanted attentions or assaults, along with the decent cohorts/compatriots of the alleged perpetrator can do something to interrupt their actions, but not the perpetrator him or herself.

Somehow they become the unstoppable, unchangeable force at the heart of everything to which all around must adapt to.

In the collective mind, the abusers become the power they presumably feel they are and are exercising through committing their various crimes.

The gainsayers are revealing they too feel powerless in response to hearing about these alleged crimes, they too are overwhelmed, unable to know how to react, reverting to some primitive basis of sub-rationale. A Randian style, everything that happens to you is somehow as much a product of your agency as the things you actually do.

Bates cleverly arranges the reports of the various women concerned into most castings of "Why didn't you......?" that are dredged up-pointing out these instructors can't even recognise their own instructions in action. Nor accept the shortcomings of their method. 

They are just placeholders for an intense desire for there to be some way of instantly transferring power from assailant to assailed, without having to upset the status quo.