Cornell lawprof Sherry Colb sought to make her point about the movie Submission, which she had not yet seen, by introducing an analogy.

[I]magine going to see a popular movie and finding out that the story of the movie is all about how a rich, Jewish moneylender exploits the poor Christians who live in his neighborhood. In the course of the story, the moneylender collects usurious interest rates for his loans, and various Christian borrowers descend into terrible poverty, unable to feed their children, some driven to suicide. At the end, the moneylender sits at the table celebrating the Jewish Sabbath with his family, singing songs and beaming at the heavy gold jewelry around his wife’s neck that he was able to give to her after appropriating what rightfully belonged to his clients.

Such a story would be anti-semitic propaganda, and we would all recognize it as such. Does that mean that a Jew has never leant [sic] people money? Of course not. Does it even mean that a Jew has never charged excessive interest on a loan or that borrowers never suffered as a result? No again. And still, releasing a film that tells the story of one Jew who does these terrible things is hate propaganda, because the film implicitly says not only that this thing happened one time or may happen sometimes. It says that this is what people can expect from a Jew, that the Jew is a greedy villain. And even as this is obvious to most of us, a Nazi might reply with outrage, “It’s just a movie!” or “This does happen sometimes,” even as he would enjoy the effect of propaganda that conforms so well to what he thinks about Jews.

Putting aside whether people go to see movies without having any notion of what they’re about, her point, that most would see the story as anti-Semitic propaganda is well taken. And society has a nifty mechanism to address this issue: people don’t buy tickets to see the movie and the movie fails miserably. But this fictional movie is offered to explain her problem with another movie, a real movie.

At the movies last week, I saw a preview for it. From what I could gather, it is about a female student who feels attracted to her male professor. She submits assignments to him in which she writes very explicitly about a student having sex with her professor (in ways that sound strangely like something a man might find on pornhub). The professor refuses the student’s advances at first (again, from what I could gather), and the student falsely accuses him of sexual harassment.

Same thing?

The appeal of movies like Submission—what Susan Faludi might call a “backlash film”—testifies to the reality that we still have serious problems with denial when it comes to sexual violence.

While there are real life situations, if imperfect analogies, called to mind, such as what happened to prof Laura Kipnis, there is also a fundamental failing to the analogy. There is no populist movement to promote Jews as fair lenders happening, raising the “backlash” question. There is, on the other hand, a movement to “believe the woman” that calls the question. And that’s really what Kolb seeks to address when making her comparison, by raising the problem she calls “denial” and “devaluation.”

In my Verdict column this week, I talk about two of the ways in which African Americans and women have been marginalized: denial and devaluation. Denial refers to the refusal to credit the stories that people on the losing side of racial and gender conflicts tell. If a police officer kills a black suspect, and witnesses say that the killing was unprovoked, they face skepticism and disbelief. And the same is true for women who tell of being raped by a date; listeners (such as juries) choose not to believe what they are hearing and to assume that the woman is lying. Devaluation happens sometimes when African Americans and women manage to actually convince those in power that what they are saying is true. Devaluation consists in minimizing the gravity of the harm in question.

Is the analogy of cops killing a black guy and female rape accusers any more apt? Are the reasons people believe police, want to believe police, the same as someone who accuses another person of a crime? Do people (such as juries) choose not to believe date rape complainants, or do they look for evidence to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt?

At the same time, do juries tend to give cops every benefit of the doubt, even to the point of rejecting video of their outrageous actions and accepting nonsensical testimony of fear? Of course they do, and we’ve seen too many instances of this to think otherwise. But does that mean the cop problem would be better served by juries being more skeptical of police testimony or less skeptical of date rape complainant testimony?

Frank Bruni’s column is about how old movies have shaped male expectations of how women want to be treated, beginning with that scene in the 1976 Best Picture Academy Award winner, Rocky.

I’m referring to the end of Rocky’s first date with Adrian. He invites her into his apartment. She tells him — not once, not twice, but three times — that she’d prefer to go home. He nonetheless wears her down, then mocks her continued protests once she’s inside.

“I don’t belong here,” she says. “I don’t feel comfortable.” He’s down to his undershirt (a wife beater, no less). She still has her winter coat and hat on. When she goes for the door, he backs her into a corner, removes her eyeglasses and declares: “I want to kiss you. You don’t have to kiss me back.”

Romantic, no? It’s framed that way: Bold stallion awakens dormant passions in timid mouse. But if you wonder where some men got the idea that “no” means “maybe” and that a squirming woman just needs a thuggish tug toward her inner vamp, well, one answer is “Rocky” and a long line of movies with similar suggestions and scenes.

Love or hate Rocky, it was seen by a great many people, some of whom were women. Now we learn Stallone is to blame for making “rape culture” cool? There were many complaints about the choice of Rocky as Best Picture, but that scene wasn’t one of them.

Will that movie about the murder of Tamir Rice, or the one about Eric Garner, or what about Walter Scott, win Best Picture this year? Oh wait, nobody made those movies. But Moonlight won last year, a movie about a drug dealer facing his sexuality. It didn’t make the top ten grossing movies of that year. Rocky was number one.