;widows: 2;-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;text-decoration-style: initial;text-decoration-color: initial;word-spacing:0px”> No, we were not being clairvoyant, just noting certain dynamics. The early exposure of Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and Harvey Weinstein — achieved by meticulous, scrupulous journalists and smart, determined women — quickly extended to more ambiguous and trivial cases. Distinctions among many different types of offenses — from bad behavior at private parties to brutal assault and rape of employees and co-workers — were being instantly lost in the fervor. Punishment was almost always the same — social ostracism and career destruction — whether you were Mark Halperin, who physically and sexually assaulted women in his workplace, or Al Franken, damned because of mild handsiness and pretending to grope a woman’s breasts as a joke. Any presumption of innocence was regarded as a misogynist dodge, and an anonymous online list of accusations against named men in the media was created and circulated with nary an attempt by its instigators to substantiate a single one. Within a few weeks, the righteous exposure of hideous abuse of power had morphed into a more generalized revolution against the patriarchy.
This kind of mania will always at some point exhaust itself and this kind of zeal will always overstep. In a free society, a pushback was inevitable, and healthy. The extraordinary journalist Masha Gessen led the way, with ruminations on sex panics. (My own discomfort with this is, like Gessen’s, affected by my experience of what similar panics have done routinely to gay men in the past.) Daphne Merkin has notedhow our current discourse all but strips women of agency and sex of eros. Dave Chappelle, in his sublime new Netflix special, used comedy to make a similar point: Sexual abuse is real and evil, but if you’re talking to someone on the phone who appears to be masturbating, you can always, you know, hang up. You can also do what a British female journalist did when she felt an unwelcome hand from a powerful government minister appear on her knee. She told him to knock it off, and if he didn’t remove it, she’d punch him in the face. (She later dismissed the incident, which led to the minister’s resignation: “He tried it on, I turned him down. Now move on.”) Then there’s the nascent notion, among many Democrats, that Al Franken’s banishment from the Senate was obviously overkill. Then came the open letter signed last week by a hundred French women, including Catherine Deneuve, who don’t see themselves as helpless, powerless, forever-victims of men. Money quote: “A woman can, in the same day, lead a professional team and enjoy being the sexual object of a man, without being a ‘slut’, nor a cheap accomplice of the patriarchy.” Imagine that: enjoying being the sexual object of a man!