Other Topical Matters

I do wish I could write these posts earlier in the day, when my mind is fresher and sunnier, and I think more reasonable, than it is at night. But I can't.


I have kept out of commenting on the sexual harassment mania, which I don't consider myself as having much to do with anyway. I'd be happy enough if other guys would stop doing it, not because I am so virtuous, but because I am worried that for some men these harassing-type acts, which I am incapable of even mildly trying to engage in, kind of work, or at least have worked in the past, in the sense of achieving, or getting a lot closer to achieving what they want than men who are subject to the same lusts but are constrained to be appropriate and inoffensive on every occasion. Obviously the idea is that with very few and very special exceptions, the run of men should never even be thinking about these things in any work or ordinary social environment, especially ones that are supposed to be professional and serious. People presenting themselves as reasonable and enlightened seem to think this is a completely reasonable expectation to have, as are the base principles on which it has to be constructed. If this is not entirely right, it is obvious that under strong enough social pressure and coercion most people will outwardly at least conform to the expected behavior. Most people I am sure have always considered me to be a completely sexless and vitally dead person, if mostly an inoffensive one. Yet today even I was at the grocery store and when a woman I found attractive passed in front of me my brain as if involuntary launched into the intro to a 1970s disco song.









I caught myself fairly quickly and thought of this post I was working on and all of the scandals and how the juvenile, entitled mentality I was indulging in was the very scourge all the better people were so up in arms about and I suppressed the beat. At the same time I really do believe that the reasons I have never reached full adult emotional maturity, developed gravitas, was unable to or uninterested in pursuing a career with the necessary doggedness, all relate in some way to my never having been daring or aggressive in the pursuit of erotic desires.  Though I probably wouldn't bother doing it at my age now, there have been numerous occasions over the years where I wondered if I shouldn't be taking testosterone supplements or other drugs to increase my aggression, capacity for envelope-pushing, and all-around combativeness, qualities that, since I did not have them and was rarely able to get what I wanted not merely with women but in every important and contested area of life, seemed desirable to me.


I was almost certainly warped in these matters by the environment in which I grew up in the 1970s. I never witnessed anything explicitly sexual or, god forbid, was the subject of any abuse myself, but I certainly developed a sense, mostly from my father and his friends, that men who were brash and bright and alive enough were constant objects of feminine desire, and later on I suppose implicitly active participants in the great sensual arena. The scandalous thing to current sensibilities is that these men were all high school teachers. Several of them, including my father, ending up marrying or cohabitating with much younger former students, at least for a time. But this happened near the end. All through my childhood we constantly had my father's female students over at our house, frequently as baby sitters, but often for socializing. He was still pretty young at the time, as he is only 21 years or so older than I am, but he was married, and the talk with some of these girls struck me even as a young boy as pretty sophisticated and suggestive, much more so than anything I would have seen on television, and certainly more charged than any conversations he had with my mother, who was not a lively talker and endured these gatherings (which often included the other lecherous teachers and occasionally even a bright male student or two who my father liked) rather blankly. Many years after the fact it was suggested to me that the reason my father had rather suddenly moved to Maine in the mid-80s was spurred by a situation of this type that was no longer found tolerable, which I had been too self-absorbed to consider at the time, if I had even cared about it. By the early 90s he got out of teaching altogether and pursued several other careers with some success, as he has always been an energetic and forceful man, if many people would not consider him a decent or moral one. In temperament he actually has quite a bit in common with Trump, albeit obviously on a smaller scale.


It is now Friday night and I have to publish what I have. I have another tidbit to write about in relation to these cases but maybe I will address that in a shorter post. It involves one of the women who has come forward with allegations (one of the milder cases, for sure) who grew up in my neighborhood and went to my elementary school, and how what I know of how she and her family operated even 35-40 years ago colors my interpretation of her story, even though the guy accused was clearly in the wrong as far as it goes. Still, when I heard the name and read the accompanying story, it was not without a little eyeroll too.