Bret Stephens, the closest thing the New York Times can manage to swallow as its conservative columnist, is trying to fix up Matt Damon on a blind date with Gertrude.
Kirsten Gillibrand agrees: “I think when we start having to talk about the differences between sexual assault and sexual harassment and unwanted groping, you are having the wrong conversation,” the Democratic senator from New York said at a news conference when asked about calling on Senator Al Franken to resign. “You need to draw a line in the sand and say none of it is O.K. None of it is acceptable.”
Of course none of it is O.K. The supposedly petty sexual harassment that so many women have to endure, from Hollywood studios to the factory floor at Ford, is a national outrage that needs to end. Period.
As everyone knows, when you say “period” at the end of the sentence, it’s a done deal. Except it’s not, even if the conservative guy wants to pretend that “none of it is O.K.” The claim is hidden behind phrases like “petty sexual harassment,” which tells us nothing. It’s being screamed everywhere by women, for whom every interaction holds potential for unpleasantness, but it is meaningless verbiage.
But what about the idea that we should not even discuss the difference between verbal harassment, physical groping and rape? Here’s a guess: A vast majority of Americans, men and women, would agree with Damon’s comment in its entirety.
Now it’s “verbal harassment,” as in being asked out on a date by some unhot guy as opposed to the guy she wanted to be asked out by? Or hearing “misogynistic jokes” because the punchline wasn’t “mansplaining”?
All societies make necessary moral distinctions between high crimes and misdemeanors, mortal and lesser sins. A murderer is worse than a thief. A drug dealer is worse than a user. And so on. Gillibrand, Driver and others want to blur such distinctions, on the theory that we need a zero-tolerance approach. That may sound admirable, but it’s legally unworkable and, in many cases, simply unjust.
Of course there is nuance in what constitutes an offense. But Stephens is only talking about distinctions between offenses, while assuming that everything about which a complaint is raised is an offense. Or as Sonny Bunch joked before it became true, “everything is problematic.” Everything is not problematic. Everything a woman complains about is not an offense. Everything is not harassment. Everything is not an outrage.
But no man can say that without being sexist.
Listening is always essential. But one-way conversations go down about as well with most men as they do with most women, and #MeToo isn’t going to succeed in the long run if the underlying message is #STFU. Movements that hector and punish rather than educate and reform have a way of inviting derision and reaction.
It was once considered somewhat radical, if not ridiculous, when men were told that their place was to sit silently, listen to the sad stories of pain suffered by women, nod their heads empathetically, wiping a tear from their eye, and then confess their transgressions and beg for forgiveness. There was no other acceptable response, even if they never touched a woman uninvited, never catcalled a chick on the street, never forced themselves upon a woman by use of any coercive mechanism whatsoever.
There are bad things that men do to women. There are also things that men do to women that aren’t bad. The former should be stopped, and men should be just as much a part of ending offensive conduct as women. And there are things that are just the ordinary part of interactions that some women will find totally normal and others will find traumatic and outrageous. These are not offenses.
Women will ridicule the position that whatever they, individually or in their small circles of friends, decide to be offenses fails to rise to the level where others give a damn. There is a vernacular of snark to deride such men, and the women who use it consider themselves brilliant for doing so. Hah! I have outsnarked you with my ladybrain! Their allies will tell them how fierce they are, and others, not wanting to be their next target of vitriol, will turn away, shaking their heads.
Women like Gillibrand and Driver believe that anything a woman finds offensive, even if only one, is an offense. As an offense, it’s intolerable and must be punished. Forget what’s illegal. Forget what’s “unjust,” whatever that means. Every woman is now judge, jury and executioner in her own feelz, and men should be “educated and reformed.” Did Stephens borrow that phrase from Mao?
Every woman, and every thoughtful man, is rooting for #MeToo to succeed, not just by exposing male misbehavior but also by transforming it for the better. It won’t get that far if people like Gillibrand and Driver drive its high ideals and current momentum into the ground.
So if you’re a man, and you aren’t rooting for a creation of female-centric societal norms where there is not only a distinction between greater and lesser offenses, but a distinction between conduct that is an offense and conduct that’s not an offense at all, you can’t be “thoughtful”? Not everything that makes a woman feel a twinge of discomfort or unpleasantness is an offense.
Offense is not defined by “it makes some woman feel a twinge of discomfort or unpleasantness.” Stephens is right, of course, that not every offense is rape and deserves the death penalty. Stephens is wrong, however, that everything is an offense at all, and that the only question is whether it’s higher or lower on the outrage meter.
Some men walk on eggshells, through minefields, praying that whatever they do, whatever word they utter, it won’t cause some woman’s head to explode. And women will demand it of them, their allies, their sycophants. The only question for them is whether they get the death penalty or some lesser sentence.
I will not let offense be dictated by the transient feelings of the most sensitive among us. There are offenses. Some are serious, and some are not. But not everything a man does is an offense, no matter what women or Bret Stephens say. And I will most assuredly not #STFU, and I truly don’t care how you feel about it.
In order for #MeToo to succeed, it must have an intelligible goal. And order for anyone to determine whether he wants it to succeed, he must know what that goal is. I’m not sure that either of those is the case.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do this.
Put some unhinged dingbat in the Senate, and next thing you know, she thinks she can tell people what conversations they can have.
Will her authority do better in the White House?
The difference that would make would be simply that her grandiose, self-beclowning pronouncements would impair (if still possible) the dignity of a different office.
You aren’t very good with rhetorical questions. You should see someone about that.
Is there a special school for this? Can I get student loans?
How should I know?
I think Dan’s comment above deserves kudos; I hadn’t thought about it in those terms before. However, it bears repeating: What’s the goal? “Ending harassment” isn’t good enough; we already know we can’t agree on a definition. “Men STFU” isn’t gonna go over with most people of either (any?) gender.
My wife might say, as she has about similar things, that I’m simply trying to exercise my need to fix things rather than validate them, but in this case, there are things that need to be fixed, and simple validation isn’t going to cut it. That means there has to be, I dunno, an actual dialogue.
Here’s an idea. What if you rephrased your comment to be about Dan’s idea rather than what you and your wife feel?
Eventually, the people that run corporations will decide that there’s too much liability in hiring women, and cease to do so.
Eventually?
Silence of the rams?
Reminds me of that great old joke in Playboy of the redneck band getting ready to do one for the old boys back home:
“Pull up your pants, you creep.
That’s MY sheep!”
Back drop to much of sexual harassment discussion is the dissolution of many values of decency, decorum, dare I risk enproblematizing myself – gentlemanly norms. Not that these norms were universally followed when they were known, but today many lack even sufficient awareness of old norms to pay hypocritical tribute to them. Forensics and Title VII’s (and IX’s) CFR sections are the only wells in the desert.
I blame us fathers; ignorant scolds told us we were redundant, and we accepted the slur without punching back in the mouth. Think: when have you seen on TV or elsewhere in the culture a scene of a young man screwing up on gentlemanly norms and getting upbraided by Dad for the lapse? Dad’s largely gone and so is what his Dad taught him.
One cannot blame the wokeoisie for trying to recover the cultural fumbles of Homer Simpson and every other idiot Dad portrayal, and run like hell. We let the ball hit the turf; hell, we failed to suit up and lost by default.
Speak for yourself. I never needed TV’s (or anyone else’s) approval to be a good father and teach my son to behave like a gentleman.
Bruce Godfrey, you do realize that most of the reprehensible actions, the true offenses (Harvey Weinstein, for instance), have been conducted by men from your age of supposed “gentlemanly norms”, don’t you? They are the folks who would have grown up watching Andy Griffith or Leave It To Beaver on TV. (I know, as they are my generation or older.) Though as our esteemed host on the blog rightly notes, guidance on how to be a father and to raise a gentleman should probably not derive from television.
If John Wayne ever tried to spank his wife in real life, I suspect there would have been no second attempt.
Oh agreed, TV isn’t the problem, but its state is a vital sign on other actual problems. Dozens of sitcoms with fathers as ignorant losers are great profit centers; what cannot seem to make money is one where the father is largely an upstanding moral example. Fathers have to a large extent checked out, and the wider society more or less expects no better. So courts, HR departments, probation officers, school counselors parole officers, cops in schools, drug courts, drug rehabs, public defenders, private attorneys, prosecutors, now the opioid crisis following crack and old-school heroin in many cities, etc. – all signs of our times.
Idiot Dad needs no further explanation as a sales pitch in the culture; it’s like exerting effort to persuade a fraternity house on a Saturday night that beer has merit. They are already sold. As Linkin Park sang it, we are already numb.
You are a committed father, I would gather, because it’s inculcated in your values with firmness not to be anything less. Those values make you a sign of contradiction against this culture. I hope the same might be true for me and my two sons, though no man should be a judge in his own case.
There was a huge hoopla about an article written about bourgeois values. After all, these are white middle-class values, and are therefore all the -ists possible.
I suggest this, rather than fathers, might be the larger problem. Yes, fathers have been reduced to jokes, but so too have all such banal values.
Given the MeToo Movement’s failure to put forward any clearly-defined goals or principles, I wonder how much of it is just a money grab.
Modern times have shown that victimization-real or perceived-can be monetized. There’s always someone willing to donate, plug, advertise, offer air time, and the like. Not to mention the leverage to be had from threatening civil suits and doing public interviews (the payments for which most likely exceed liquidated damages provided for in any applicable NDAs).
And given Senator Gillibrand’s MeToo insistence, I also wonder how much of the movement might ultimately be aimed at a certain (big) orange target, as B. McLeod has posited…
As to Gillibrand, I’ve got no doubt she would throw the “survivors” under the bus in a flash if it got her the White House.
Or, really anything that she wanted. Sacrifices must be made.