Right, but what’s the followup that “take seriously” leads to, that’s the thing of it. If women had more political power, they could push back earlier and create consequences for abusers much more readily, which would remove some of the relevance of random people believing it or not.

If I’m Random Nobody hearing about such a claim in the public eye, I’d still say it’s better if I take it seriously than if I’m dismissive of it. But in that position, I’m also generally not equipped well to investigate it either and being in a “eh I don’t know” position doesn’t seem worth a whole lot. Those situations are often somebody making a claim long after the fact and it’s their word against the other person’s. I understand why it happens that way, don’t get me wrong; I’m aware a lot of times people who are abused don’t speak out because of things like fear of consequences, or not wanting to harm the person who harmed them, and so on. But nevertheless, the end result is that we run into these cases where you sort of have to either take someone you don’t know at their word or “not be dismissive but also not rush to believe it either” which is sort of a weird halfway point to be in and doesn’t seem to be meaningfully advancing the liberation of women.

Then there’s cases where I may know the person and believing them matters insofar as acknowledging what they’ve been through, but again, it may be long after it happened or they may not want me to do anything.

Basically what I’m trying to get at is, far more is needed to prevent further abuse and bring consequences, and relying on public opinion to believe a claim is a horrible situation to be in. The metoo movement, for example, got some consequences out of it, which is good, but also a fair amount of “well now what”. It’s frustrating.