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.
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