A Tiny Note on Revolving Door Concepts

The resurgence of the old accusations against Woody Allen reminds me that we're seeing a recycling of old feminist ideas.

At the time Allen was accused, the thought that children don't lie about abuse was being put to rest. It caught on first in the early 80s, most prominently with the McMartin preschool case. The news that the faculty of a preschool were sodomizing and otherwise abusing children as part of an organized pedophile ring was immediately taken at face value.

But the interviews with the students started producing outlandish details, from underground chambers to their abusers flying through the air. The accusations lost public support and eventually no one was convicted.

As it turns out, it's pretty easy to get a child to not only say something that isn't true but also believe that it happened. In the McMartin case, the children's interviewers assumed that the children were victims and teased out their stories detail by detail as one would an alibi. By the time Allen was accused, prosecutors across the country had wasted countless hours and dollars pursuing cases based only on children's testimony. A consensus had formed that extracting factual information from a child was a more delicate process than asking, "and then what happened?"

Couple that with the stories related by grown-up "victims" of satanic ritual abuse (really they were victims of over-zealous therapists) and the profession, "It really happened, I swear," started to sound like the cry of a street crazy.

"We must believe the children" is a rusty tool that won't work in the court of law but it still has use among the naive. Dylan Farrow's support seems to come from this wing of the public, women too young to remember when we over-believed the children and too complacent in their prejudices to consider that it's a bad principle. But it's believable that it's come up again--have you ever seen women fight? They grab anything that they can use.

Similarly, the old trope about girls' toys forcing girls to be, well, girls has seen a revival, most prominently in the Goldiblox brand. I grew up in the "Free to Be You and Me" era--we got a full dose of the gender non-specific medicine.

My mother got her masters in early child education back in the 70s. She tells me that they all really believed that the only reason girls and boys played with their respective toys was because they were told to. But, she says, you put kids in a room with toys of all types and the boys will run to the trucks while the girls run to the dolls.

Several scientific studies have proven this but that hasn't stopped the concept from returning. Let's just hope we won't see another monster like John Money.