Grabbing Women by The Pussy

Here is a postscript to my quick review of the essential fickleness of American voters when it comes to the character of their leaders, which mentioned Donald Trump’s boast (in 2005, to Billy Bush, alongside a hot microphone) that he was so famous that he could “grab women by the pussy” with impunity.

On Sunday, Bruce Bialosky wrote at TownHall.com that “there are bigger issues here.” His main bigger issue is that the utterance is true. Channeling a recurring theme of our publisher, women in the workplace do advertise their attractiveness as a potential sex object, almost as continually as some men evaluate them on that basis.

What Trump said about some women throwing themselves at celebrities or rich men is sadly true. There I said it. The Left is unwilling to admit it except for in the case of Bill Clinton. There were many things Trump said, but the one that cut to the heart of the matter was this phrase – “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” Well maybe not anything and maybe not at your discretion, but there are too many women who encourage men of fame or fortune to have their way with them.

Of course no one wants this to be the way things work. Bialosky emphatically does not. But unfortunately, it is the way things work. Legal requirements for protection from a “hostile work environment” that extend to men complimenting female coworkers, or asking them out for a drink after work, do not extend to women with plunging necklines or walking like prostitutes to advertise their sexuality to male coworkers.

The #MeToo movement, which seeks the lifetime shunning of anyone who tickles a woman without her consent, will not change the essence of human interaction, as well as the fact that there are sellers as well as buyers, both weighing their self-interest.

By the way, #MeToo, like “hate crimes” and “diversity,” works in one direction only. When the lesbian on the softball team, during a team hug, grabs the buttocks of a teammate to her obvious discomfort and embarrassment, the lesbian is not thrown off the team, nor is the coach fired for failing to prevent it by scheduling an awareness workshop before the first practice.

Now, in fact, grabbing women by the pussy is not effective—not indeed because of prurience or because the goal is to esteem women as competent coworkers, but because the key to sexual conquest is to maintain the veneer that one esteems the woman at all. This pretense is vital for everyone except Bill Clinton (and maybe even Joe Biden; wait a few months for proof or disproof).

Trump asserted that (1) famous people have no need for time-wasting gentility when scoring with women, and that (2) he had reached that level of fame (the point of his boast). Testing those assertions is outside our scope. But the underlying assertion, the thing that everyone is shocked at, that this state of affairs would appear to be a boon to many horny men, is unquestionable no matter how many hashtags emerge.

Bialosky has one other novel observation on the Billy Bush episode:

…someone taped a private conversation like this and kept it for over ten years. Why would they keep it other than to blackmail someone?….Who among us, even the most pious, would want their private conversations taped and released upon the timing choice of others?

Every U.S. Presidential campaign has awaited the inevitable October surprise (November being the month of the election), the timed release of scandalous material, timed for the widest possible exposure to voters, with minimal time for analysis or rebuttal. An alcohol-fueled anecdote on George W. Bush or an assertion about his service in the National Guard. Dirty tricks and false-flag violence at campaign rallies. #FakeNews planted to force the theme of a campaign to change. A felony turned into a national epidemic. The dodgy dossier of incontinent Russian prostitutes was not funded by the Hillary campaign to be a basis for anti-terrorism wiretapping of Trump associates but to be a decisive October surprise, the theme of the final week of the campaign.

This author has never aspired to be able to “grab women by the pussy” with impunity. But life’s ambiguities and miscommunication often made me think something would be acceptable that wasn’t. These aren’t on tape (probably) but social media, such as Facebook (a left-wing corporation that aspires to be a censor) and Disqus are in the business of assembling a longitudinal profile including every politically incorrect thing one has ever written (and Continental Telegraph is a warehouse of these). Incessant repetition seeks to make these anecdotes a definition of an adversary’s character. Youngsters schooled to believe that no one needs personal privacy are in for a surprise if they seek political office or executive management, two decades from now, and the scandal bomb is detonated on cue.