talesofthestarshipregeneration:
Male bumblers are an epidemic.
These men are, should you not recognize the type, wide-eyed and
perennially confused. What’s the difference, the male bumbler wonders,
between a friendly conversation with a coworker and rubbing one’s penis
in front of one? Between grooming a 14-year-old at her custody hearing
and asking her out?The world baffles the bumbler. He’s astonished to discover that he had power over anyone at all, let alone that he was perceived as using it. What power? he says. Who, me?
The bumbler is the first to confess that he’s bad at his job. Take
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who testified Tuesday of the Trump
campaign’s foreign policy team, which he ran and which is now understood
to have been in contact with Russian agents: “We were not a very
effective group.”
…
The bumbler doesn’t know things, even things about which he was directly informed. Jon Stewart was “stunned” by the Louis C.K. revelations, even though we watched someone ask him about them last year. Vice President Mike Pence maintains he had no idea former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was lobbying for a foreign power — despite the fact that Flynn himself informed the transition team back in January
…
…
Allow me to make a controversial proposition: Men are every bit as sneaky and calculating and venomous as women are widely suspected to be. And the bumbler — the very figure that shelters them from this ugly truth — is the best and hardest proof.
Breaking that alibi means dissecting that myth. The line on men has
been that they’re the only gender qualified to hold important jobs and
too incompetent to be responsible for their conduct.…
As the accusations of sexual misconduct roiling politics, publishing,
and Hollywood continue to stack up, a few things are going to happen.
The first stage of a phenomenon like this will always be to characterize
the accused men as exceptions, as bad apples. #NotAllMen, the saying
goes.But the second is that everyone is going to try to naturalize sexual harassment. If there are this many men doing these things, then surely this is just how men are! that argument will go. There’s a corollary lurking underneath there: They can’t help themselves. They’re bumblers.That won’t wash. But the only way to guard against it is to shed our
weird cultural blindness to manipulative male behavior. We must be
smarter than our cultural defaults. We need to shed the exculpatory
scripts that have mysteriously enabled all these incompetent bumblers to
become rich, successful, and admired even as they maintain that they’re
moral infants.We do that by looking at the deliberate, active steps they took to conceal what they did.
Hearseeno 