Stupid Behavior

I've been trying to avoid talking about this year's simultaneously alarming and depressing stories about celebrity sexual predators.  Not that I think it's not an important issue - it is. It's just that so much is already being said about it elsewhere and there are voices that are more important to be heard in this conversation than mine - namely, those of women, those of the victims, those of the accused, and those of the enablers.

The Zen community went through this a few years ago, with distressing story after distressing story about prominent Buddhist teachers being accused of abusing their authority and the trust placed in them by having affairs with  their students - affairs that destroyed marriages, tarnished the reputations of the exploited women, and interfered with the actual teaching.

Now the entertainment and political worlds are going through the same painful experience.  From what I've read of the stories and my own observations of life, my take-away and general conclusion is that all men, with very few exceptions, have been jerks at one time or another to a woman or to women in general, including myself.  #metoo.

All men have been jerks at one time or another to a woman or to women in general, and as a general rule, the more powerful the man, the more deplorable the behavior.

While no level of harassment is acceptable, there is a difference in degree between unwanted teasing and chauvinistic actions, although unacceptable, and criminal coercion, bullying harassment, and outright rape.

To return to the previous theme, all men have been jerks at one time or another to a woman or to women in general, but all men are not necessarily dangerous predators.  

Can you see a difference between a 30-something man who gets himself barred from a shopping mall for trying to pick up teenage girls and who's been accused of molesting at least one of those teenage girls in his car, and a former comedian who, in front of several other performers, the press, and possibly even soldiers, pretends to fondle a sleeping entertainer strictly for laughs and not for his own prurient pleasure?

Can you see a difference between a man who, when accused, denies all wrongdoing and threatens to sue anyone who challenges his denials, including the victims, and a man who admits what he did, acknowledges it was wrong, and invites an ethics investigation into his past actions?

What I'm trying to say is that it's perfectly obvious that Al Franken, while he did engage in chauvinistic, frat-boy antics in a failed attempt at "humor," is clearly not a predator or a danger to women, and that Roy Moore, a fundamentalist judge who has twice been forced from office for ignoring the Constitution and has been accused by multiple women of lewd behavior bordering on pedophilia, clearly is.

If we say it's all the "same thing," and that both parties are equally guilty, we're grossly trivializing Moore's alleged actions by equating them with the lewd horseplay of others (although that is still unacceptable in and of itself), and unduly branding Franken's actions with the far more heinous deeds of others.   

I've heard it said that 2016 was the year all our loved celebrities died, and 2017 was the year our love of celebrity died.