I wish she could stay. It's not as though a Dem is likely to win in freakin' Palmdale again. (That city is on the edge of the Mojave, and California has red deserts.)
The great question: When it comes to sex scandals, do women have it worse than men? Are women judged more harshly or less harshly?
There are two schools of thought, two responses to the great question. As is my wont, I shall argue for the response most likely to piss people off.
Response 1: Women are judged more harshly. Those making this argument will, quite naturally, compare Katie to Donald Trump. This Daily Beast piece on Trump's history offers the most convenient -- and damning -- collection of evidence. Here are a few choice snippets...
But both men also put Donald Trump in the room with cocaine, very young women and underage girls, and rich, old men there to—pardon my language, but if the Times can say pussy on its front page, I can say this—fuck them.
Trump would “go from room to room,” said the photographer, who added that “I was there to party myself. It was guys with younger girls, sex, a lot of sex, a lot of cocaine, top-shelf liquor” but no smoking. Trump didn’t approve of cigarettes.And so on. Trump, of course, remains in office. Katie will leave. The double standard is infuriating and unfair.
Those men at these parties often knew each other. “It’s a small community,” the photographer says. “They exchanged information, facilitated each other. Trump was in and out. He’d wander off with a couple girls. I saw him. He was getting laid like crazy. Trump was at the heart of it. He loved the attention and in private, he was a total fucking beast.”
The argument in favor of Response 1 is pretty damned compelling, I must admit. Here's the counter-argument: Donald Trump -- through some magical operation that later historians will struggle to comprehend -- seems impervious to scandals that would have destroyed all other politicians, Republican or Democratic. I don't know how he became invulnerable. Neither do you. Neither does anyone else.
Response 2: Women are judged less harshly. Before proceeding, I want to make a few things clear: Katie Hill's humiliation is rough and unfair and just plain maddening. I hope that, one fine evening, her vengeful ex bites into a pizza clandestinely topped with rat feces.
I should also confess that I'm much more conversant with the Dem sites, as opposed to the rabid right sites. So I can't pretend to have read everything written about her.
That said...
I think it is instructive to compare the way liberals are treating Katie to the way they treated Al Franken and the late, great John Conyers. In those two earlier cases, not only were good men forced out of office, they were pelted by hate-commentary from feminists screeching about Toxic Masculinity. In post after post, in article after article, in comment after comment, Franken and Conyers were held up as representatives of their whole gender.
That won't happen to Katie Hill.
On Democratic Underground and Daily Kos and similar forums, vituperative feminists drew one lesson from the Franken and Conyers cases: Men are all lecherous louses. As recently as last month, Virginia Heffernan (the epitome of everything I can't stand about feminism) castigated Franken for attempting to "redeem" himself. How dare one of those awful, awful penismonsters hope for redemption? Why doesn't he just die?
She expressed this attitude well after most other liberals woke up to the fact that Franken had been smeared by a Roger Stonian ratfucking op.
Whenever any Democratic male is accused of sexual impropriety, female progressives chant their familiar chant: "HIM FUCK! HIM BAD! HIM FUCK! HIM BAD! ALL MEN BAD!" Too many progs are eager to do Roger Stone's work for him.
Some months ago, I ran into an article (which I can't find right now, even though I saved it to my hard drive) written by a feminist. She argued that, since Bill Clinton once had a brief affair with a very willing adult female, he must also be guilty of raping kids on Jeff Epstein's island. I mean, that's only logical, right?
Fellow Baltimorean H.L. Mencken once defined puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." If Mencken were alive today, he might approve of my definition of feminism: "The terrified realization that some male, somewhere, might get an erection while thinking about a woman."
Liberals judge males by hysterical, priggish standards which are never applied to females. The discussion of the Katie Hill case on Democratic Underground has been subdued and rational. No progressive speaks of Toxic Femininity. No progressive will pronounce her beyond redemption simply because she hit on a staffer.
(Bisexuality works in her favor. In progressive circles, lesbianism is sacred.)
Even on the right side of the web -- to the small extent that I have glanced at it -- I have not encountered anyone arguing that Katie Hill did something characteristic of all females.
Let's face it: Sex compels everyone, or nearly everyone, to do crazy things. It's a fever. It's intoxicating, entrancing, and irresistible -- and it draws us toward danger. Some of us -- male and female -- have overwhelming sex drives, and some have weak drives; a few have nonexistent drives. Fortunately, the level of compulsion weakens over time. When I was 19, I wasn't safe around gopher holes, butterscotch donuts and the 18th green at the miniature golf course. Things are much calmer nowadays, thank God. (It's a lot easier to get things done when you don't spend all your time thinking about girls.)
Sex is a wildfire, but it is also a fact of life -- THE fact of life. It's a recurrent madness that we all must learn to live with. I agree with Shaw's observation that "Marriage will always be popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity." Yet I also believe that sex will never be entirely constrained by the rituals, protocols and conventions our society uses to tame the beast that can’t be tamed. Obviously, I'm not trying to excuse rape or harassment. I'm simply stating what everyone already knows: Transgression -- at least, the aura of transgression -- is precisely what makes sex sexy. There is no eroticism without a hint of risk; reason and responsibility are the enemies of carnality. If the union of Tristan and Isolde were licit, would anyone have written an opera about them? If O had been vanilla, would you have read her story?
In my opinion, Katie Hill did nothing to warrant removal from office. Neither did Al Franken, John Conyers, or Bill Clinton.
Donald Trump, on the other hand...
6 comments:
I consider myself lucky that my sex drive was too weak to make me seek sexual contact.
Not only was I socially awkward, but I was never sufficiently comfortable financially--indeed, I am still awkward and, by the standards of college-educated white males in the USA, impoverished.
Also, I hit puberty about the same time herpes showed up, then AIDS shortly after, which made sexual activity with another human being seem about as safe as strutting through Fallujah wearing a "THE PROPHET SUCKS" T-shirt and nothing else. (Yes, condoms exist, but even the best ones break occasionally.)
At 56, I no longer think I would seek it out even if I won the PCH Sweepstakes. I am relieved, not disappointed, at the fading of the drive.
"Americans hate modern feminism because the movement has been taken over by neurotics, by the perpetually and unrighteously angry, by control freaks, by prudes, by sexually dominant females who'd be better off paying dues at the local BDSM club, and by lesbians who use quasi-political casuistry to seduce naive young straight women.
(And don't you fucking dare try to tell me that that doesn't happen. I've heard first-hand testimony on multiple occasions.)"
This quote is from 2 posts ago but seems relevant here. Is there an article or story about this? Definitely not accusing you of making this up or anything, but I'm curious to know more.
I don't know if there's an article out there which talks about that, nemdam, and there is too much happening right now for me to spend time googling the matter. But I've dated two or three women who have told me pretty much that very story. Okay, to be honest, the story told by one of those women may or may not fit within this category. To explain what I mean by that cryptic comment, I'd have to go into the details, which I really should not do for obvious reasons. But I've also heard the same story told by one woman I did NOT date, and I've heard it second-hand from a guy talking about an old girlfriend.
The point is, I haven't dated very many women and I have not had a whole lot of female friends. Or male friends. (Generally speaking, I'm a disagreeable fellow.) If the same tale kept coming up in MY limited experience, I can only presume that the pattern is fairly common.
Idiots out there will probably presume that I am damning ALL lesbians as predatory. That is NOT what I meant. All I'm saying is that lesbians are human beings, and I don't have a particularly high opinion of human beings. When it comes to sex, people in general will use whatever tools are available to them in order to get what they want. Sometimes, quasi-political casuistry is one of those tools.
I don't pretend to be any better, incidentally.
Some Liberals are incensed when informed they are as tribal, narrow minded, and sheep like as the Evangelical Bible Supremacists they mock. A given percentage of any community are thieves, liars, and pervs. Gays, lesbians, priests it's when the small minded are held up as unquestionable icons the damage done. And some Libs talk about republicans not being self-aware. I keep thinking back to the shit storm that was Dailkos during the 2008 primary when O-bots were cutting&pasting republican smears about Hillary.
Luckily for America Obama rose to meet the challenge of the presidency.
Lucky again that Trump kept going further into criminality that Pelosi had no choice other than impeachment, optics be damned. One of these days America is going to run out of luck.
Just had a thought on this, the "Old Goat" vs the "Cougar" debate and which gender gets the disparaging term. (HT Mike Royko)
Thanks for that, Mike -- especially that last bit. Why does our society admire a 50 year-old woman who can attract a lover half her age while spewing hate at a 50 year-old man with a younger (not underaged: younger) girlfriend? Seems to me that the admiration and the hate ought to be dished out equally.
The more I think about 2008, the more persuaded I am that at last half the O-bots were, in fact, bots. It was intra-party cyberwar. Putin's Internet Research Agency perfected techniques pioneered by David Axelrod.
A long time ago someone ascribed these words to Mark Twain: "Don't talk to me about a man's race. It's enough for me to know that he's a man. The news can't get worse." I'm not sure that he actually said those words, but I agree with the sentiment, and I would apply it to both sexes and across all human categories.
Liberals correctly castigate the Trumpers for ignoring the science on climate change. But then, when you ask a liberal to provide scientific proof for some proposition THEY take as gospel, you'll be accused of being a hater. Take, for example, their "idee fixe" that gender has no relationship to biology. I'll accept an argument backed by good evidence, but invective is not evidence.
Yeah but basically, bosses shouldn't f*ck the help. One of them has to leave the workplace. Otherwise its abuse, power differential etc
Post a Comment