More on old standards and what the tell us. Bad behavior. Inappropriate behavior. Mischaracterization and Overreaction

The concept for this post came due to a discussion following the first accusation, which at that time was unspecified against Matt Lauer.  Some of the denizens of the house spoke up defending him, noting that there can be false accusers.  Others said he had to go.

And, to break it down further, Lauer's defenders were the female residents of the house. Those who said he had to go were the male resident.

I need to note here, right from the onset, that I'm not trying to excuse caddish, brutish, rapine,  or generally bad behavior.  But I'm trying to refocus the discussion a bit on some things that have been missed and give it a degree or proportionality.

Anyhow, the female expression of doubt might say something about this matter having perhaps gone too far.

I'd like to fully claim that this is one of my "you heard it hear first times" but the stellar blawg Above The Law got to part of this topic first, before I had a chance, quoting from A Man For All Seasons when it did.  Specifically, it quoted from this oft quoted scene:

More: And go he should if he was the Devil himself until he broke the law.
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law for my own safety’s sake.

This was in reaction to the story on Garrison Keillor, although Lauer was noted in the text of  the entry, where the author of that blawg entry noted, after setting apart examples such as Harvey Weinstein's, that:

Perhaps the best recent example of this overreaction occurred just yesterday, when Minnesota Public Radio not only severed all ties with Garrison Keillor, but took extraordinary efforts to basically erase him and his work from public existence. And it did this based on an allegation that, although it has not been made public, seems to have been made by a single person, and, if you credit Keillor’s explanation at all, does not appear to have actually involved sex.

And so now we have the stories of Matt Lauer and Garrison Keillor.

After pondering this most recent set of accusations, I think I'm with Above The Law, although my reasons depart somewhat from his.  His is set out mostly in terms of overreaction and the defense of the accused, and they're well worth reading.  He raises really good points.  I'll leave those points to his blog and instead to my frequent theme of what these events teach us about standards.

To expand out a bit in other areas, however, the reaction to Keillor's incident, if there even is one, seems to be a gross overreaction.  Keillor himself put it well in a comment he at first posted and then later withdrew, that being:

It’s astonishing that 50 years of hard work can be trashed in a morning by an accusation,” he said in a Facebook post Wednesday evening. “I always believed in hard work and now it feels sort of meaningless. Only a friend can hurt you this badly. I think I have to leave the country in order to walk around in public and not feel accusing glances.

There's never been any suggestion that Keillor is a Harvey Weinstein and there isn't now.  Nonetheless Minnesota Public Radio is going so far as to actually change the name of the radio show that Keillor once hosted and founded.  Truly, that's extreme, and particularly so given that the supposed incident seems to be truly innocent, and indeed the fact that it has become an incident suggest that we're now at the outer limits of what can suddenly be used to publicly trash a person.  Apparently he only went to pat somebody on the back and his hand slipped, a long time ago, to the embarrassment of both Keillor and the subject, who he claims remained his friend right up until the lawyer's letter came.

That's punishing somebody for an accident.  Merely contacting a female in some forbidden zone doesn't make the contact an act of hostile sexual aggression.  Indeed, if it is, there are now certain occupations and endeavors that will have to be segregated by gender, as indeed, they once were.  In our state, for example, there's was a high school stand out wrestler who could never place in state wrestling as he felt that his Mormon faith precluded him from wrestling girls, and there are a few girl wrestlers.  Frankly, I admired him for the courage of his convictions.  But if this is now the standard, i.e., if we have a new Keillor Rule, don't we have to re-segregate all sports?

Indeed, we'd practically have to re-segregate all education.  Passing in the halls, for example, now takes on a new aspect of hazard, at least for me.  And I'm absolutely convinced that its' going to be a very short passage of time in this current atmosphere until we get a "he looked at me" as the claimed assault.  Sounds extreme, I know, but it's coming.

There might be a lot of Keillor level accusations going around right now.  Truly, is an incident of such low weight really worth hiring a lawyer over, let alone firing somebody for in this context?

Keillor, I'd note, had issued a written statement somewhat defending, in a way, Al Franken.  His comment was that it would be absurd for Al Franken to resign over what was basically sophomoric gross humor, referring to the Tweeden incident (alone, I believe).  I'm not so sure that Keillor isn't right, taking at least that singular event,even though I noted the disparity in treatment he was at first receiving in the press as compared to others from the political right.  That seems to have stopped.

Note that this doesn't condone the behavior. But the question is whether or not its really a sexual assault, the way most people would view it if not engaged in a frenzy of public condemnation.  I don't really think so.  Actually, its the sort of gross humor we'd expect out of Saturday Night Live, from which Franken hails.   And it might make him a personal creep. But would you fire him for it?  Maybe. But if he's essentially self employed, or the employee of the electorate, should he have to resign?  I don't think so.  If voters of his district are sufficiently angered, well they can fire him next go around.

Which raises a certain irony we'll briefly divert from the main point of this essay to note.  Franken comes up from a comedy medium which is pretty far left wing and not very funny.  It's long used gross humor, and now he's being hung for gross humor.  Keillor, whose writing I like and whose radio show I also liked, is a figure of the political left and now he's sort of ironically a victim of a political standard that's from the political left that's groping for the the standard that he romanticized about in his radio shows and writings but didn't really adhere to himself. There's some sort of weird irony at work in this. Franken, now that his crudeness is revealed, can only retreat to a standard upheld by people he's generally socially opposed.  Keillor would really be better off visiting with Father Wilmer from his show.  Not that Keillor is justly accused (I don't think he is) or that Franken is some sort of sexual monster, he doesn't appear to be.

This gets into something I noted just the other day, but it's now being addressed by syndicated columnist Mona Charen.  At least a little bit of the male bad behavior problem here has been preserved and amplified by the feminist movement having been co-opted by the Sexual Revolution, which did it, and women, no favors.  It's been bizarre.

I noted this in my screed of earlier this week entitled  The Amazing Density of the Reaction to the Abusers and the fellow traveling of Cosmopolitan and Playboy. I don't intend to repeat that here, but what that pointed out is that the feminist movement went from one that was really in favor of full political and social rights for women, and which worried about their workplace safety, to one that adopted the position, or was co-opted into it, that sexual libertinism was somehow essential for womanhood.  That is, the movement went from trying to require men to live up to their declared standards of conduct and afford equal treatment to women, to one which went to demanding that women be regarded as routinely acting every bit as bad, sexually, as men at their worst. That made meaningless sex, backed by up free access to lethal redress for the natural byproducts of it, the feminine standard.  Now, to some degree, some of the women (but not all by any means) who are now complaining are victims of that decreace of the standards into the mud. Some, almost certainly most, are innocent victims of the changed standard, although some have participated in it, and some are complaining of the natural results of a standard they embraced.

Charlen states in  her article:

Like the new left they emerged out of, feminists joined hands with sexual revolutionaries in rejecting all of the old sexual mores — including marriage. "Destroy the patriarchy," they chanted. They agreed with the Playboy Foundation (a contributor to the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund) that linking sex with morality at all was an outdated idea.

I pointed out this link just the other day.  I'd go on to note that Charen is blunter about what I've been somewhat subtle about.  A lot of the current complaints we're hearing range from "ungentlemanly conduct" to a complaint that the woman didn't feel right about sex outside of marriage and felt that the man vaguely forced her into it.

Charen went on:

And so professional feminists actually helped midwife the loose sexual culture we have today. Arguably, this culture has permitted men to behave even more shabbily toward women than the old mores did. This may sound odd, but I think it's true. Even the sexual harassment has become grosser than it was a few decades ago. I know of a few women who faced harassment in the 1970s and 1980s (myself included), but honestly, it was practically as polite as a Victorian drawing room compared with the stories we are hearing now about Louis C.K. or Harvey Weinstein or Mark Halperin. Womanizers used to at least make an effort at seduction. Now they seem to act out repellent narratives from porn movies.

There's an extremely important aspect of this that seems to have been missed in all the recent discussions.  Prior to the Sexual Revolution and the feminist movement's unholy alliance with libertinism, men and women knew where the lines were.  The lines were crossed, but they were definitely there.  Married men instantly crossed a line if they did anything untoward with a woman who was not their spouse and adultery, a word that now seems old fashioned, was totally disapproved of.  It happened, but that these were line crossing events were clear without question.  Women who did the same were also across that line.

Moreover, a woman, and it was more often women than men, who had sex or even came on to a married man were regarded as dirt by society at large and by other women most particularly.

But it went further than that.  Sex outside of marriage was frowned upon society wide.  It happened, to be sure, and males were more likely to engage in it than females.  That was the double standard so widely talked about, but what's important to note there is that in neither gender was it really approved of.  It may have been somewhat winked at in regards to men (but not if they were in some demographics, such as the Catholic, Orthodox, Orthodox Jewish, etc, demographics), and it was universally condemned in women, but that the line existed is clear.  Indeed, had the original direction of the feminist movement been adhered to, the logical result would have been to condemn men as much for this conduct as women.

Moreover, there was a fairly clear "keep your hands to yourself" rule that operated amongst unmarried men and women and most definitely in regards to married men and women. That some people violated this in one fashion or another is also clear, but there were reputational consequences.  men who were "grabby" were marked by women in that fashion.  Close boyfriends or girlfriends had more license, under consent, but only if they were fairly close.  There was not an expectation of anything more.  Once again, what is important here is that there were fairly clear lines that existed, and for which there were no good reasons whatsoever for departure from, which operated to protect women more than they protected men.

Charen further notes;

Our 50-year excursion into sexual excess may yet provoke a counter-revolution. Women are clearly finding their voices, and men (at least many men) are recognizing how dishonorable and grubby this behavior is.

But, it should be noted, both genders are groping back to find where the lines are. And what turns out to be the case is that the desired line seems to b e the old line that was there in the first place.

And Charen further importantly noted in her article:

Women are often victims, but they are not angels. Yes, powerful men abuse their positions to get sex. But any serious reckoning with sexual misbehavior has to take account of the women who use their sexuality to gain advantage, too. Just as everyone knows men who have harassed, they also know women who have slept their way to the top.

Indeed, that's true, and we'll get to Matt Lauer now in this context.

Lauer has come out admitting inappropriate behavior, but already one of the accusers has revealed that the inappropriate behavior was when she was called to his office and had sex with him, she claims. If that's right, that's not rape under the classic definition and might be only under the current frenzied definition. That's a two way consensual immoral act.

At least its not rape in the classic sense.  In the modern sense there will be a lot of discussion about "she was afraid of her job" and the like, and the accuser has already claimed this. But this has never been an excuse for an immoral act. A person can't claim that they went along with other bad acts as they were afraid for their job.  Probably a lot of people do, but that's not a justification for the act, unless we're willing to really broadly excuse a lot of conduct we never have in the past.

And less it come up, this shows how this is not "about power".  Using power is one thing, but that doesn't make the use of it about it.  It's not surprising that creeps like Weinstein used their position to pressure women for sex.  Maybe Lauer did as well. That makes them creeps.  It doesn't necessarily make them rapists however. Force makes a person a rapist.

All of which takes us back to the old standard.  Knowing when to say no goes a long way, even if you are afraid to, and even if you don't.. And knowing that demanding sex is wrong goes a long way too.  What appears clear is that Lauer is accused of immorality, but if that's the new standard, let's remember it was the old one.  Where is the line drawn?  You can't draw it retroactively and you can't apply it to some if not all.

And so all the old standards that existed for a reason suddenly reappear as shadows.  Those shadows existed for a real reason.  Standards laughed at by "progressives' that argued they were mere relics of an unenlightened age suddenly are taken back off the shelf and applied by people who can't remember where the standards came from or how they were to be applied.  Adultery turns out to be actually wrong.  Keeping your hands to yourself once again is the rule to be applied.  Hefner and Brown should be revealed for the perverted agents of immorality and decay they were.  But we likely wont' get quite that far. 

If we did, it'd clear up where the lines are. But it would also impose responsibility where it is now lacking, in the individual. Are we going to go back to go forward. We should, but that would require us to admit that we were wrong in the first place.

Well, perhaps, not so much we.  Actually.  Fallout from the 1960s and 1970s again.