We must boycott sexual assaulters

The argument

This argument holds that we must boycott the art and products of sexual assaulters: continued consumption is not a neutral act but a vote for the abuser's continued place in public life, and conscience requires withdrawing it. The case begins with what consumption does. Streaming the music, buying the ticket, watching the film — each act sends money, chart positions and cultural relevance to the abuser, sustaining precisely the wealth and status that empowered the abuse and shielded it from consequence. Powerful men assaulted with impunity because their value to industries and audiences made them untouchable; an audience that keeps consuming keeps issuing that licence. Conversely, the boycott is the one lever ordinary people hold. Studios, labels and platforms respond to demand and reputational cost: when audiences withdrew from figures exposed by the #MeToo movement, careers that had survived decades of whispers ended in weeks. Collective refusal changes the industry's calculation about whom it protects. There is also what consumption says. Survivors live with trauma that does not end when the credits roll; for them, a world that hums the abuser's songs is a world announcing that what was done to them matters less than the public's entertainment. Boycotting is how a community signals the opposite — that no performance is good enough to purchase exemption from accountability. To enjoy the work while deploring the deed, proponents argue, is morally disingenuous: it takes the benefit of the abuser's talent while outsourcing the cost to his victims. From this standpoint, the consumer's choice is part of the system that either enables abusers or holds them to account. Because we must boycott sexual assaulters rather than fund and celebrate them, this argument holds, we should not consume their art.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The argument runs two cases together that come apart in most actual instances. The consequentialist case is that withdrawal removes money and status and so changes what industries tolerate; the expressive case is that consumption says something to survivors. Where the first fails — work by the dead, work in which the accused holds no continuing revenue interest, catalogues sold long ago, or the overwhelming majority of individual decisions whose effect on a chart position is undetectable — the conclusion is still asserted on the strength of the second. Those are different arguments with different scopes, and the stronger-sounding one does not cover the cases the weaker one has to carry. The costs also fall well beyond their target. A film is the work of hundreds; an album involves co-writers, session players and engineers; a back catalogue supports estates and collaborators. Boycotting a work punishes everyone attached to it, most of whom did nothing and controlled nothing, and the argument offers no account of that distribution. The evidentiary threshold is left unspecified, which matters more than it appears to. The question's own term is 'accused'; the argument moves to 'abuser' and 'assaulter' without pausing at the gap. Accusation is not adjudication, and a rule that triggers on accusation and a rule that triggers on conviction are very different rules with very different failure modes. Finally, survivors do not speak with one voice on this. Some have argued for erasure, others against it, and some have objected to being invoked as the reason a work must disappear. Presenting one position as what survivors are owed speaks for a group rather than from it — which is close to the appropriation the argument objects to elsewhere.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The money-and-status mechanism is absent in many of the cases the conclusion covers: work by the dead, work in which the accused holds no continuing revenue interest, and individual decisions whose effect is undetectable. [Rejecting P2] Boycotts fall on collaborators as well as the accused — crews, co-performers, writers, engineers, estates — who neither controlled nor caused the conduct, and no account is given of that cost, nor of the evidentiary threshold at which withdrawal is triggered, since the question's own term is 'accused' rather than convicted. [Rejecting P3] Survivors hold no single view on whether an abuser's work should disappear, so presenting one position as what they are owed speaks for a group rather than from it. That enjoyment alongside condemnation is disingenuous is also the disputed claim rather than an established premise.