Can you explain how stating that an edited porn shoot or an audience for a company offered to the wider public is an inappropriate and invasive way for them to decide whether or not consent happened is the same as denying as evidence uncut footage?

There is a straw man in arguments such as yours– the critique of an act of revictimization is not synonymous with arguments for censorship. There is room for supporting victims of rape *while also* fighting for the democratic position that people accused of a crime are innocent until proven guilty. In fact, there is room for supporting victims of rape *and* opposing the prison industrial complex completely. These standpoints are not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, nowhere in this essay does its author argue against the entering of evidence into a courtroom; as far as I can tell, the argument is against acts that have been called rape on numerous occasions, caught on film, being packaged and sold in a marketplace that serves only to bolster systemic and economic entitlement of the same class of people who have, historically, raped with impunity with little comeuppance.

Questioning the potential innocence *or* guilt of a person accused of a crime is something we, as humans with blood in our veins and a pension for equity, do quite regularly. And indeed, both questions have merit and both should be strenuously investigated. A pesky question emerges for me, though– why the outrage (from mostly white, cis gender, hetero dudes) when the focus is on a rapist’s potential guilt? Why the insistence that we, as a culture, ignore the historical context in which these accusations occur, namely an entire history predicated on the sexual subjugation of women?

So video of a crime cannot be entered into evidence because it might make the victim uncomfortable, nor a subpoena issued for the uncut footage because accusation is the only reliable form of proof, and the only innocent man is one who displays remorse. We are indeed seeing a “tidal change” as society become unmoored from reality, not alas to float away into a “progressive” world, but to break apart into the abyss.