Well, Graham's burned

 Credible rape allegations against Graham Platner should end his campaign for the Senate. It's one thing to say sexist things and then evolve. Physical assault is a crime.

Defenders of horny men in office will say that any woman with a good story can derail the career of any man who doesn't have a rock-solid alibi for every moment of their sex lives. To some degree, this is true. But our understanding of male-female relations is evolving with every generation. This wasn't a hallway kiss or aggressive grope. It was, according to her account, full penetration and ejaculation.

The model that men take and women give in has persisted for untold eons. It predates actual humanity. It is expressed in nonhuman species everywhere. It has male and female adherents to this day. The typical male decision tree goes "Fuck it? Fight it? Or use it for food?" Maybe not all men, but certainly most of the ones I've been around. Granted I don't socialize much, but a quick skim of the archives of standup comedy reveals plenty of what used to pass for jokes about it. The predatory urge is often present. Only the decision to slap it down divides the evolved male from the troglodytic grunt.

Men face a sad reality: we were never as attractive as we thought we were. Each successive generation of women has less and less tolerance for failures of sexual discipline. For those of us most active during the Wild West phase of the sexual revolution, the lines were blurrier. It was a wild fuckfest there for a few years, with lots of people getting hurt because of how fearlessly we dove in. We were ill prepared for genuine personal responsibility, because so many religious moral codes seem to facilitate outsourcing your guilt to a conveniently absorbent deity. When the proscription is just "sex is bad and dirty, don't do it," the sexual revolutionary response is to try everything that piques your curiosity. This was true of men and women at the time, to the detriment of both.

Rape is rape. Consent has always had an absolute definition. We spent most of human existence falling far short of compliance with that absolute definition. Generations of men got away with forced sex because generations of women made various calculations for their own safety or for some other greater good. Platner's victim in this latest story stated that she let him stay because throwing him out would put a drunk driver on the road. Even in her position as a victim of assault, she retained that higher order of social concern. Pretty damn impressive, and exemplary of the role that women have filled through the long history of male excesses. 

Platner's previous accuser lost credibility because of her connections to Republican politics. If this accuser is also acting from political malice, her character has at least been more carefully written to hold up to deeper digging. Her tale as reported in Politico really makes him sound like a drunken brute. Not only is there no way for him to bounce back from this, the stain will impact the entire Democratic Party campaign to regain a congressional majority. Maine voters will feel conned. While the policy goals of his campaign were good for Maine and the country, the fact that he thought he could get away with a high profile senate run with this incident in his not so distant past will make voters leery of any future scratched and dented candidates who profess to repentance and redemption.

Men have to get it through their heads that they are fucking the country when they can't control their horny impulses. No politician is an island. Each one reflects on the party as a whole. The toxic cloud impacts those closest to it, but the miasma spreads nationwide. Each party tries to extend forgiveness to its own erring sons, while spotlighting the moral lapses of the opposing camp. As we've seen with the current occupant of the Oval Office, and others on the Republican side, none of their loyal voters are really concerned by allegations of sexual misconduct. In addition to the percentage who perceive mistreatment of women as just another expression of masculine strength, another fraction is indifferent to "personal matters" as long as they get something they want, whether it's tax cuts or targeted cruelty against one or more marginalized groups, or the false promise of a stronger economy.

The biggest challenge to women's full civil rights and freedom of movement is the reflexive behavior of men. "Instead of teaching your daughters how to avoid being raped, teach your sons not to rape" sounds coldly logical and places the responsibility where it belongs. It also acknowledges that there is no external solution to an internal men's problem.

If Graham Platner has really transformed himself into a decent human being, he has to live with the memory of his past misdeeds. He says he was too blacked-out drunk to know what he was doing at the time or remember it afterwards. Consider that with his inhibitions lowered almost to the point where he was unconscious, his instinct was to go to a woman's house and crawl onto her. That's down around the level of the autonomic nervous system. If he'd been lucky enough to pass out before he got to her, he'd still be running for senate. Sadly, it didn't work out that way.

The only way to know where he stacks up on the global scale of rapey drunks is to get every other hetero male equivalently drunk and see what percentage of them commit sexual assault. Plenty of men will claim that they would never do such a thing when they have remained safe from ever confronting the situation in real life. Graham needs psychological help. A messed up, drunken combat veteran in 2021 could have no way of knowing how far the waves would spread from his act of sexual violence. Maine Democrats need a new senate candidate. The fate of more than Maine hangs in the balance. 

What to do for women

It was very confusing, coming of age in the late 1960s and early ‘70s. There were many women who hadn’t figured out yet that they would prefer to be left alone, and men — even white men — could have the mistaken impression that their kind had actually achieved something of value over the centuries, and that someone could actually like them. Sure, we needed to be less pushy and more open minded. The true depths of male — particularly white male — depravity were concealed behind the facade built brick by brick by the patriarchy to secure dominance in perpetuity. It is hard to come to terms with the harsh truth that one’s entire world view was built on lies, but there it is.

As an average heteronormative schmuck, I found women desirable and acted like various kinds of idiot to try to get to spend some time with them. I am limited by my own lack of social skills in this, but you can find all kinds of support for the idea that you may be socially awkward, but deep down you're actually really cool and people will want to be with you.

That's a comforting lie. The key to its survival is that it is comforting. It seems empowering and encouraging of diversity. But hooking up is a competitive activity. There's a lot of weeding. If your motivation includes what we call the pleasures of the flesh, you need to qualify. Hell, if all you want is conversation and a break from the endless loneliness of shy dorks, and you happen to like the company and insights of women, you still need to avoid wearing out your welcome.

Obviously, based on the avalanche of stories of women who have been attacked and forced into sexual contact, a lot of men don't worry about qualifying. They just grab. In so doing, they give all of male horniness a bad name.

Maybe male horniness is only worthy of a bad name. It's as common as dirt, and less healthy to get on you. Actual dirt contains beneficial microbes.

I was once young enough that a woman might give me a second glance, and even an audition. I was no prize, but I was deceptively attractively packaged. It fooled both them and me. I apologize retroactively for believing my own shit. We were all being raised to believe that we had promising futures, and that life was to be enjoyed. My blunders haunt me to this day.

What I finally realized was that the best thing men can do for women is purposely, consciously, and in large numbers, get out of their way. 

What have you read on social media since Thursday? Women saying that they wished they could walk around without constant fear of some aggressive creep assaulting them with anything from words and gestures to actual physical force. Women in vast numbers calling for an end to paternalistic, misogynistic oppression. Women drawing comics about how great the world would be if all men vanished.

Paternalistic misogynists will continue to make what they consider to be their case. They can cite a lot of history, and call upon female allies who have, for generations, worked within that system in their own ways, and present it as the norm. Women are not unanimous in their support of Brett Kavanaugh's accusers. They're not uniformly supportive of survivors of sexual assault. This is jarring and incomprehensible, but it's part of the bewildering variety of human experience."Good girls" won't have any problems. Feisty ones will suggest that a woman simply needs to be armed and ready to fight off any male who tries to go too far. It's a pretty sad view of human nature, that the best we can ever do is learn all the ways in which to defeat the inevitable attack.

A woman named Nancy Theeman wrote that she taught at Holton Arms when Christine Blasey Ford was a student. One thing she mentioned was the value of single sex education to create empowered women. Because the students were all women, they held all leadership positions by default. They competed among themselves on their own merits to achieve these positions, unfiltered by any judgment stemming from mere anatomy. But at the same time, at an all boys' school, young men are in an undiluted environment of male assumptions. And the empowered women coming out of the all-female incubator emerge into a world that is not ordered that way at all. If no one is teaching all the men how to be anything but entitled chauvinists, the system never changes.

Men need to listen. Don't jump in the minute you think you get it. Shut up and listen. Then shut up and listen some more. We have centuries of shutting up and listening to catch up on. Don't expect to knock it out in a couple of days. You can't pull an all-nighter for this. And if all goes well, the world that you knew will never exist again.

A lot of men simply aren't going to listen. It's easy for me to say shut up and listen, because I was not indoctrinated in the notion that it was my right and duty to lead the world. And by observing my father's frustrations as a skilled and loyal officer of a government increasingly controlled by the military-industrial complex, I was not drawn at all to the established power structure, even if that was where the money was. Like him, I believed that the ideals of our nation were sound, but that the execution of them fell far short of the promise of the words.

Naively, I believed that everyone would eventually agree. And I figured that far better minds than mine were working on it. Far better minds than mine have been working on a lot of stuff. Some of them have been working on this. A lot more of them have been exploiting the existing trends toward wealth consolidation and reinforcing existing hierarchies of race and gender.