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. 

No one is born knowing everything

 Graham Platner has generated a lot of press coverage because his evolution as a person has been preserved in digital media over a span of many years. By all appearances, he has refined his beliefs and behavior since he separated from military service and the particular model of masculinity that culture tends to cultivate.

All-male organizations orient themselves around dick-measuring and pissing contests. They certainly don't reward sensitivity. Vulnerability is something that you hide while you try to eradicate it in yourself. In the day to day you have to get along where the discourse is frequently dominated by the most coarse and assertive assholes in the group.

The armed forces ceased to be all male in the latter part of the 20th century, but male dominance permeates them anyway. The women who serve hold their places not by the respect that the hierarchy has developed for their unique perspective, but by being able to push back in the long established format.

In a volunteer force, applicants are likely to be athletic types who feel confident of their ability to fight if necessary. Some of them even look forward to it. Much of the organization serves in support roles essential to keep a fighting force in the field, but everyone picks up a rifle and marches at some point in their training. The job is to kill when required. Serving even as support personnel in some bases puts you at risk of enemy action, as we've seen recently when Iran has struck US bases in retaliation for the Trump regime's foolish war. As a member of the armed forces, you are part of the nation's department of targeted violence. It is better to give than to receive, as they say. But some of it is bound to blow back. So there you are: in a culture of toughness where you have to be ready to match an opponent's brutality at least, and exert your own if so ordered.

PTSD happens when a participant's ability to withstand the broad array of negative aspects falls short of their expectations. Behavior adapts to cope in the culture and to deal with the after effects when you leave it.

Just attending an all-male prep school for a couple of years in the 1960s, and growing up in the 1960s and '70s in general imprinted a generic sexism on me that functioned in spite of my overlaid intellectual support for the rising power of women and the gradual recognition of differing sexualities. After that prep school I made a point to avoid boys' clubs like the military. Military service wasn't all that attractive to a cohort that had watched fathers and older brothers chewed up in the Vietnam War. I knew people -- mostly young men -- who embraced it. Hard to say whether they were really gung ho or just felt safe acting that way now that we had no large-scale conflicts going. Militarism fits well with macho cosplay.

After September 11, 2001, recruitment surged as an angry nation set out to make someone pay for bursting our bubble of perceived invulnerability. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq wore on, participants learned about their own personal ability to deal with the horrors that go with the job. As a multiple amputee British commando vacationing in Wolfeboro said when one of our shop staff offered sympathy over the loss of his legs, "It's just part of the job, I guess." He wheeled himself back out to his rented motor home and we saw him no more, but the flat matter-of-factness stuck with me. I have often wondered how much he really believed that and how much was just deflection to get people to stop talking about it.

High ideals will always conflict with low compliance. The best we can do is pick ideals that seem to advance the greater good, whatever the hell that is. If you say that a man is kind to women and animals, you've put women in the same category as animals, or at least subject to the whims of men. If you believe that society should be run by the strongest, you accept the hierarchy of physical violence. If you believe that society should be run by the richest because they're clearly the smartest, any staircase you leave in place for new players to climb has tall, fortified risers. Concentrated wealth defends itself. If you believe that "the people" should rule, you have to persuade huge numbers of them to agree to something and stick with it, over and over again.

On some level we all have known for decades that the stakes are high as we set our course for the future. The future keeps turning into the present, which makes it seem ordinary. A person's evolution doesn't come with chapter headings and episode titles. It might advance and retreat, and follow a curving path. Before social media and densely packed digital records of emails and chats, much of that exploration went undocumented, vaguely remembered if that, unless some incident was particularly intense to one or more witnesses. Even then, testimony depended on their recollection and whatever notes might survive. No one could be Googled. Hop in a time machine, bop back to 1983 and tell someone to just Google something.

The information environment we live in now is so completely normal to generations born into it that they have no concept of what life was like before. Even people who lived much of their lives in the time before have grown accustomed to the convenience. There it is again: we're led by our bias toward convenience. It is great in many ways. But it also makes us vulnerable. We have to learn how to deal with the flood of information that we can get about anyone who happens to become prominent for any reason. Those reasons grow more numerous with the wide access to global exposure. It can make you feel like you were born knowing everything. In seconds, you can find support or refutation for any point of view. Then you have to assess the validity of the new information.

At some point, in our representative democracy, we have to elect someone and give them the power that pertains to the office we have given them. We are currently suffering greatly under the abuse of power and gross incompetence among the majority of office holders and appointees. As suffering goes, it ain't shit compared to the parts of the world where we have allowed, neglected, or promoted suffering in order to support our own consumerist lifestyle, but morally we are wounded by the cruelty and greed that we have exalted over ourselves. It will only get worse if we do not place people in office, flawed though they may be, who are at least striving toward a more evolved society that cares for people and the planet.

Some people do appear to be almost perfect. Even deeper digging fails to disclose the buried skeletons of past evil. However, there aren't enough of them to field a baseball team, let alone run a government. We have to accept the rejects of perfect righteousness to find the majority of willing workers who try to be better people and make a better world. We have to trust that they are actually trying as hard as they say they are.