Comment by unsupp0rted

It's really not. Many people are strongly inclined to believe claimed victims and disbelieve reflexive "I didn't do it" claims. Accusations have a lot of strength generally.

Does "believe victims" avoid triggering your feelings better?

It just happens in this case that the accusations flow predominantly one way due to common behavior differences between men and women, and historically it's been one of the areas where the allegations were least believed by the legal system* so "believe women" becomes shorthand for "believe claimed victims of sexual harassment or worse."

Consider the stories around Weinstein or R Kelly. "Open secret" sorta thing where people in the know avoided the guilty party. Yet nobody took it seriously enough to take legal action. There are a lot of other crimes you couldn't get away with in the open like that for so long.

> It's amazing this is an acceptable thing to say in polite society

It's amazing the sorts of things men will say to women regularly with frequently no repercussions. Not everyone who's creepy or makes threats ends up raping or murdering a woman, but of the men who DO murder women, you'll see a ton of creepy/threatening past behavior.

It becomes "desperate times, desperate measures."

It's hard, of course, for other men to police other men directly because the creeps are usually smart enough to not say it in front of other men.

So you get to a situation where a lot of us men have:

1) heard men talk amongst themselves when women aren't around after-the-fact about creepy-ass-things they've done

2) heard women talk about men doing creepy-ass things when other men aren't around

so updating your priors to favor "lean towards believing a claim by a woman over a denial by a man" is entirely reasonable until someone can show that false accusations are a big chunk of the accusations. You hear a lot about false accusations on certain parts of the internet; I have seen very few accusations at all in real life and sadly none of them have been false - they've all been the "creep wasn't even smart enough to avoid witnesses" type.

And there's just not a lot of women raping or murdering men happening - some significant physical differences, to start with - soooooo it doesn't seem like something we can be sex-blind about.

> It's amazing this is an acceptable thing to say in polite society

I'd say it's an OK stance to take (e.g., based on past experience) if one of the conclusions you take from it is that it calls for a process that isn't similarly biased. If you recognize and acknowledge your own bias, you should be able to critically challenge it and/or be interested in neutral fact-finding, due process, and so on.

For myself, I'd say it's less general distrust of men and more the observation that many situations in society greatly favor men in their power dynamics and make it more probable for men to misbehave, i.e. given the option.

It’s one of those idiosyncrasies we’ve fallen into on the way to equality.

People haven’t trained themselves to do some simple thought exercises such as “what if I reversed the genders/ethnicities/whatever in this claim.”

It’ll get better though. People will mature.

I imagine if you'd had the countless conversations I have had with women over the years about men and intimacy, you wouldn't find this amazing in the least.