Title : Katie Hill and the great question
link : Katie Hill and the great question
Katie Hill and the great question
I'm sure you already know about the resignation of California representative Katie Hill -- a decision she took after a bitter ex revealed some somewhat-unsavory sexual escapades. "Revenge porn," they call it. Such episodes don't much matter to me, but they do seem to matter to others.I wish she had decided to stay in office. It's not as though a Dem is likely to win in freakin' Palmdale again. (That city is on the edge of the Mojave, and California has red deserts.)
The great question: When it comes to sex scandals, do women have it worse than men? Are women judged more harshly or less harshly?
There are two schools of thought, two responses to the great question. As is my wont, I shall argue for the response most likely to piss people off.
Response 1: Women are judged more harshly. Those making this argument will, quite naturally, compare Katie to Donald Trump. This Daily Beast piece offers the most convenient -- and damning -- collection of evidence. A few choice snippets.
But both men also put Donald Trump in the room with cocaine, very young women and underage girls, and rich, old men there to—pardon my language, but if the Times can say pussy on its front page, I can say this—fuck them.
Trump would “go from room to room,” said the photographer, who added that “I was there to party myself. It was guys with younger girls, sex, a lot of sex, a lot of cocaine, top-shelf liquor” but no smoking. Trump didn’t approve of cigarettes.And so on. Trump, of course, remains in office. Katie will leave. I think everyone reading these words will agree that the comparison is infuriating and the double standard unfair.
Those men at these parties often knew each other. “It’s a small community,” the photographer says. “They exchanged information, facilitated each other. Trump was in and out. He’d wander off with a couple girls. I saw him. He was getting laid like crazy. Trump was at the heart of it. He loved the attention and in private, he was a total fucking beast.”
Response 1 has one counter-argument: Donald Trump -- through some magical operation that later historians will struggle to comprehend -- seems impervious to scandals that would have destroyed all other politicians, Republican or Democratic. I don't know how he became invulnerable. Neither do you. Neither does anyone else.
Response 2. Women have it easier. Before proceeding, let's make a few things clear: What Katie Hill is going through is rough and unfair and just plain maddening. I hope that, one fine evening, her vengeful ex bites into a pizza clandestinely topped with rat feces.
I should also confess that I'm much more conversant with the reaction on the Dem sites, as opposed to the rabid right sites. So I can't pretend to have read everything being said about her right now.
That said...
I think it is instructive to compare Katie's situation with what happened to Al Franken and the late, great John Conyers. In both cases, not only were good men forced out of office, there was also a barrage of hate-commentary from feminists screeching about Toxic Masculinity. In post after post, in article after article, in comment after comment, Franken and Conyers were held up as representatives of an entire gender.
Katie Hill will never have to undergo that fate.
On Democratic Underground and Daily Kos and similar forums, vituperative feminists slammed home one message: All men all lecherous louses. As recently as last month, Virginia Heffernan (the epitome of everything I can't stand about feminism) castigated Franken for attempting to "redeem" himself. How dare one of those awful, awful penismonsters dare hope for redemption? Why doesn't he just die?
She expressed this attitude after everyone else woke up to the fact that Franken had been smeared by a Roger Stonian ratfucking op.
Whenever any Democratic male is accused of sexual impropriety, female progressives chant their familiar chant: "HIM FUCK! HIM BAD! HIM FUCK! HIM BAD! ALL MEN BAD!" On cue, they will always do Roger Stone's work for him.
Some months ago, I ran into an article (which I can't find right now, even though I saved it to my hard drive) written by a feminist. She argued that, since Bill Clinton had a consensual affair with a very willing adult female, he must be guilty of raping kids on Epstein's island. I mean, that's only logical, right?
Fellow Baltimorean H.L. Mencken once defined puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." If Mencken were alive today, he might approve of my definition of feminism: "The terrified realization that some male, somewhere, might get an erection while thinking about a woman."
Liberals do not judge females by the insane, hysterical standards applied to males. The discussion of the Katie Hill case on Democratic Underground has been subdued and rational. Even on the right side of the web (to the small extent that I have glanced at it), I have not encountered anyone arguing that she did something that exemplifies a problem besetting all females. Nobody speaks of Toxic Femininity.
Let's face it: Sex compels us all. It's a fever. It's intoxicating, entrancing, and irresistible -- and it draws us into dangerous realms. Some of us -- male and female -- have overwhelming sex drives, and some have weak drives; a few have nonexistent drives. Fortunately, the level of compulsion weakens over time. When I was 19, I wasn't safe around backyard gopher holes, butterscotch donuts and the 18th hole at the nearby miniature golf course. Things are much calmer nowadays, thank God.
Sex is a fact of life -- THE fact of life -- that we all must accept and live with. I agree with Shaw's observation that "Marriage will always be popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity." Yet I also believe that sex will never be entirely constrained by the rituals, protocols and institutions our society has erected to tame the beast that can never be tamed.
I don't think Katie Hill did anything to warrant removal from office. Neither did Al Franken, John Conyers, or Bill Clinton.
Donald Trump, on the other hand...
Thus Article Katie Hill and the great question
That's an article Katie Hill and the great question This time, hopefully can give benefits to all of you. well, see you in posting other articles.
You are now reading the article Katie Hill and the great question with the link address https://darmonewst.blogspot.com/2019/10/katie-hill-and-great-question.html
0 Response to "Katie Hill and the great question"
Post a Comment