Every man certainly should be worried

Sep 18th, 2018 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

Alexandra Petri wrote this scorching parody yesterday, and I regret not reading it until just now. (A whole day lost!)

“If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.”
— A lawyer close to the White House, speaking to Politico

Look, who among us?

If, apparently, a single alleged assault at a single party decades ago is to be frowned upon, then no man is safe, right?

What’s next? You can’t harass a colleague and serve on the Supreme Court? You can’t pick up high schoolers outside custody hearings and serve in the Senate? You can’t have a meat locker full of female femurs and expect to breeze through your confirmation as interior secretary?

Right? Won’t somebody at last think of the men and boys before it’s too late?

I wonder if she too saw Tom Nichols’s tweets and was inspired by them.

“Things you did as a minor.” It’s funny (i.e. infuriating) how consistently he veiled it, how adamantly he refused to say “35 year old accusations of assaulting a teenage girl” in all that fretting about precedents.

Back to Petri:

This isn’t just my worry. This isn’t just something horrible I am now revealing about myself. This is an every-man problem.

If suddenly, as a country, we decide that violently attempting to assault someone is, like, bad, then that knocks out 98, maybe 99 percent of men, just going off the locker-room talk I’ve heard.

Look, which of us is 100 percent certain all his sexual encounters are consensual? That isn’t most people’s baseline, surely? You’re telling me I am supposed to encounter dozens, hundreds, thousands of women in my life, some drunk and some sober and some with really good legs and just … not assault any of them?

It’s funny, in a bitter way, but it’s also real.

I mean, it’s not as though they’re people, are they? At the moment of conception, yes, but then they come out Daughters, not people! They grow into objects; some become Wives or Mothers, others Hags or Crones. Then they die! If they were people, we would not expect dominion over their bodies, surely; if they were people, we would not feel entitled to their smiles. If they were people, I could read a novel with a female protagonist and not be instantly confused and alarmed.

No. They are an unintelligible something else. They are to be put on pedestals, as John Kelly urges, or groped, as the president urges. They are impervious to cold, capable of wearing a bikini on the most frigid day to please us; they can run great distances in heels without discomfort; they were created for us from a rib and designed as our companion. If they have wants of their own, there is really no way of knowing.

And even if they do have wants of their own, those wants are rudimentary and shallow, and forgotten in an instant. They may seem to struggle and resist when we throw them onto beds and jump on top of them, cover their screaming mouths with our hands, and drag their clothes off, but actually it’s just a reflex, with no connection to anything going on in their tiny smooth brains.

If assault renders a man unfit to serve on the Supreme Court, then how are we to discern the Founders’ intent? I mean, Jefferson, hello? And what is going to become of the presidency? Who wants to live in that world?

Every man should be worried. If boys cannot be boys, then how can boys be men who rise to the highest offices in the land? If this stops being something you can get away with, then will anyone still be above the law?

Yeah, I don’t see this whole move getting anywhere.

8 Responses to “Every man certainly should be worried”