what (some) men in power do to women who threaten them

i have just realised that i have seen this happen twice now - the slow but steady insidious character assassination of a woman who threatens a man (or group of men) in power.

i saw it happen in a students' association back in the late nineties - a man, aided at times by his cronies, identified a friend of mine as the leader of a faction that opposed him and so he subtly harassed her and lied about her in public until there was a groundswell against her and he did his best to push her over the edge mentally. constant petty erosion of sanity by such seemingly innocuous tactics like sitting outside her office for hours on end reading an old newspaper upside down, always coming up to her table at the pub and taking her seat whenever she stood up to get a drink, deliberately baiting her in meetings in snide ways designed to force an emotional reaction through the use of trigger words which would get a reaction out of most people (the example that comes to mind is calling someone who has believed in honouring the Treaty since childhood a racist). and then there were the leaflets and speeches denouncing her as mad and misguided and incapable and incompetent (all of which was untrue).

i have seen it happen again in the now and i hate it. i hate it passionately because it is so dishonest.

if you disagree be honest enough to disagree on the principle, or the policy, or the idea, but don't take the nasty despicable path of demonising the person to lose their side of the argument support. it is much easier to drive things on an emotional basis - people will react without thinking and write other people off much more quickly.

of course we all slip up and make remarks that we probably shouldn't. but what i am talking about here is a systematic attempt to undermine someone, usually a woman, by making them out to be weak, emotional and not capable of rational thought. this is so much easier when the target is a woman - even other women will write off their own once they start crying at a meeting, i have seen it happen. just because you are emotional does not mean you are irrational, but in our culture this is not the dominant belief. think about how women who make allegations of rape have been treated historically - false allegations get media coverage when proven ones do not, and yet false allegations would be well less than 5% of all those made (not to mention all the ones that are never made).

an emotional reaction does not mean you do not have an intellectual or moral argument to support that reaction.