Back in March US Vice-President Mike Pence was mocked from all sides. According to Olga Khazan in the Atlantic:
In a recent, in-depth Washington Post profile of Karen Pence, Vice President Mike Pence’s wife, a small detail is drawing most of the attention: “In 2002, Mike Pence told The Hill that he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won’t attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either.”
The article went on to say that:
Pence is not the only powerful man in Washington who goes to great lengths to avoid the appearance of impropriety with the opposite sex. An anonymous survey of female Capitol Hill staffers conducted by National Journal in 2015 found that “several female aides reported that they have been barred from staffing their male bosses at evening events, driving alone with their congressman or senator, or even sitting down one-on-one in his office for fear that others would get the wrong impression.” One told the reporter Sarah Mimms that in 12 years working for her previous boss, he “never took a closed door meeting with me. … This made sensitive and strategic discussions extremely difficult.”
In conclusion, Ms Khazan argued that:
Without access to beneficial friendships and mentor relationships with executive men, women won’t be able to close the gender gap that exists in most professions.
I am not convinced that there is a gender gap, but that is a subject for another post. Ms Khazan made a fair point about mentoring, and her tone was reasonable. Ashley Csanady of Canada’s National Post, not so much:
At its core, Pence’s self-imposed ban is rape culture.
Nor is that a label I assign lightly. “Rape culture” is a phrase so overused it’s become almost meaningless, like calling someone a Nazi on the internet. But it has a very clear meaning: the notion, whether conscious or unconscious, that men can’t control themselves around women because “boys will be boys.”
The explicit reasons for Pence’s restriction are religion and family, but the implicit reason is that he must avoid alone-time with women lest his stringent religious moral code fall apart in the presence of a little lipstick and décolletage. That is rape culture.
Given that the list of men accused of sexual misconduct since Harvey Weinstein is growing like a beanstalk, and a great many of these men were loud in their scorn for the “puritanism” of Pence and all like him, Ms Csanady and a few others might like to re-evaluate their earlier remarks. I am not saying it is necessary to behave like Pence in order to avoid behaving like Weinstein. But it does seem that Ms Csanady might have been looking in the wrong place for rape culture.
I love the way she says: “Nor is that a label I assign lightly.” when she is doing precisely that.
I suspect Pence’s rule was less about controlling rape-urges than ensuring he’s never in a position to have to defend himself against accusations or sexual assault or harassment. Seems to have worked pretty well, too.
So if you eschew late night meetings with your attractive interns, it’s rape culture. And if you hold late night meetings with your attractive interns, that’s also rape culture. What about if you only hired ugly asexual interns, would that be rape culture too?
Off topic: this “anti Muslim” tweet business the press is running with has me very troubled. It either means President Trump is very smart, or very stupid. Both trouble me in a president to be frank.
Scenario 1:. President Trump is a moronic gorilla with a Twitter account. He retweets something from an “extremist” without checking that it a) shows what he thinks it does and b) means what he thinks it does. The press has a field day because the president is too stupid to realise the optics of all this, particularly the “extremist” part.
Scenario 2:. President Trump is a Machiavellian genius. Through his extensive research staff and access to the intelligence community, he learns of a scandalous attack on an innocent disabled boy by a migrant that was willfully covered up by a complicit media. He shops around for a “far right” Twitter account that covered the story and hits retweet. The media are now in an impossible bind. They have to attack him for something so willfully scandalous, but they can’t do so without drawing attention to the very video they wanted to keep hidden. If they take the bait and attack, within a few days fact checkers and (pre-planned?) leaks will reveal that the “far right” tweeter they’d tried to ad-hom into silence was absolutely correct, and what’s more that the media knew about it and covered it up. The last of the media’s credibility is destroyed.
Either scenario scares the crap out of me.
Re: JL
I think its option 2. Trump uses Twitter to give the loony press some bollocks to go chase. At the same time, he highlights things (remember the comments about Sweden?) that the press would rather obscure. All this while Robert Mueller is working his way through FusionGPS, the Podestas et al..
He’s a strategic thinker – getting your enemy to think you’re an idiot is to your advantage.
I love the “have my cake and eat it too” attitude of the author:
“Without access to beneficial friendships and mentor relationships with executive men, women won’t be able to close the gender gap that exists in most professions.” Whilst presumably also retaining the right to destroy a mans reputation and career with an accusation.
Breitbart has a list of the accusations so far – over a hundred. A vast majority seem to be men of the left. I wonder if the women of the left believe in rape culture because leftist men with power are bastards (remember the rape coverup in the SWP?)
http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/10/25/hollywood-accused-harassers-molesters-rapists-rap-sheet-far/
Everyone dislikes a Vice-President they can’t fit up with sexual impropriety allegations…. How could you control him?
Mike Pence is a wise man. Rich and powerful man in a late night business meeting with a young intern – recipe for trouble. Add alcohol to the mix….
The truth is that men do tend to think about sex every 10 seconds or whatever it is, and it is difficult to have a focussed work meeting with an attractive young woman.
To be honest it does make me feel a bit bad for women, but the Pence approach is the right one, not suffering through the meeting going ‘aha, yes that chart needs improving..what?..oh, ok…so you were saying..oh look Cindy’s joining the meeting too…fantastic we can get even more done’
So if you eschew late night meetings with your attractive interns, it’s rape culture. And if you hold late night meetings with your attractive interns, that’s also rape culture.
I thought the point of rape culture was that there’s a rape culture – ie it exists. So it’s no surprise that whatever you do, there’s a rape culture. It’s a kind of original sin thing. Though amusingly as the sort of people who believe in rape culture don’t believe in a human nature carved by evolution, it’s not “original.” Ubiquitous, but not down to nature. No, sirree no. It’s definitely culture not nature.
What about if you only hired ugly asexual interns, would that be rape culture too?
Shirley this would simply be a variant of the not having meetings at all route – ie making sure the savage beast doesn’t get aroused.
Meanwhile back in the real world where there is a human nature, slightly different between men and women, morsjon is right that men tend to think about sex every 10 seconds (OK every twenty minutes.) Consequently attractive women in the workplace are indeed sex objects. That’s not all they are, of course, but this aspect of their reality cannot be extracted entirely from their substance. (The same goes, obviously, for men in the workplace too; though as women often go for more than twenty minutes without thinking about sex, a man’s status as a sex object may loom smaller. Particularly if he’s fat, bald and poorly washed.)
My own recollection of days in the office with lots of pretty girls floating about (and some pretty older ones, and some not so pretty ones too) is that it wasn’t terribly difficult to focus on work even if your co-worker had shapely pins. One of the consequences of thinking about sex every twenty minutes is that you can flip back to think about sales figures pretty quiclyk. Otherwise you’d spend a lot of time walking into lamp posts.
I think if Cindy’s joining the meeting, she’s going to cause more disruption if she’s a new girl. Chaps spend more time eyeing up new girls than ones they’ve eyed up before. If Cindy’s a long term member of the team, her being in the meeting isn’t going to cause any fainting fits, or even showing off, among the chaps.
I should say from my experience that the primary aspect, work wise, of attractive ladies is that they get forgiven more readily for their mistakes. And they know it. I remember one rather cute blonde, who was generally competent, completely forgetting about an important follow up point from a meeting. Later, when asked about progress she looked blank, then realised she’d totally forgotten and said “Oh, I must have been having one of my blonde moments.” And it worked – everyone laughed. A chap, or an ugly girl, wouldn’t have got away with it. Which reminds me, whenever you hear an attractive woman complaining about all the disadvantages of being an attractive woman, slap her. You’d rather be an ugly one ?
Whether it’s rape culture or New Feminism Unhinged, the execrable Garrison Keillor is its newest victim, so all is good in the world.
I expect more and more of these mental contortionist pieces to appear in the liberal rags over the next few months. It’s important for them to refocus the whole #metoo thing back into what it is supposed to be … a weapon to use against conservatives and libertarians.
That it is primarily liberal icons being exposed as lechers and cads must be really annoying to them.
Don’t call me Shirley.
“That it is primarily liberal icons being exposed as lechers and cads must be really annoying to them.”
Who is coordinating this? This doesn’t “just happen”.
Tim Newman, November 29, 2017 at 9:42 pm: Agree entirely. It’s unfortunate that we humans share some of our chimp relatives’ less attractive attitudes and habits, but given that it’s so, it’s nice to see a Veep who may have working brain cells.
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Aside: I’d be the last to accuse V.P. Pence of allowing his religion to influence his attitudes and behaviour *shock, horror, gasp!*, but I’m not completely convinced that to behave decently, or sensibly, is a mortal sin just because one’s religion happens to encourage it.
That reminds of the story of the thirty-something who remarked to a friend, “I knew I was growing when I realized I was doing it even though my mother would approve!”
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On Lee’s remark to the effect that men in the workplace can be sex objects too, at least if they’re not impossible (and often enough even if they are) and if there are any healthy females around. See Michael Crichton’s careful report (but it pulls no punches) on one example. Published some years back as Disclosure, and still one of my two favorites of the Crichton œuvre. (The other is his early A Case of Need.)
It’s comforting to know that just because I leave out the subject here, the verb there, a few operative words in the middle, won’t mean you-all don’t understand me.
Putting it differently… “Oops!” 😥
(Speaking of the “thirty-something” above.)
Another woman who has no fucking clue what it feels like to have a dick and be around hot women. Feminism is destroying western civilization.
Sometimes a dark part of me wants the Islamic jihadists to win during my lifetime so I can see feminist women long for the days of Mike Pence’s “rape culture”.
Ok I take that back. It was said in anger. Obviously not even part of me really actually wants the Islamic fundamentalists to win. And if European Christians could have above replacement-level birth rates we wouldn’t have to worry about them winning demographically. but alas while we argue about gender pronouns and earn PhDs in feminist dance theory the enemy is making lots and lots of babies.
If occurs to me that if an alien comes to planet earth and encounters this sentence coming from the ideology that is increasingly tending towards the belief that gender is fluid, that binary “gendered” pronouns are sexist, that some people are born transgender, that it is imposing evil gender norms for parents to buy their little boys trucks and their little girls dolls, that maybe just maybe the (tone deaf, aloof to irony) alien would conclude: “this person’s argument is that boys will be girls and believes it’s illogical for people to think that boys will be boys”. Perplexing and yet…
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck… it might be a duck
And yet, if it walks like a female duck and quacks like a female duck, it might simply be a silly male goose.
Or scenario three.
Europe’s approach to Muslim migration is an emperor-has-no-clothes moment where a carefully woven fantasy has replaced an awful reality. Trump is the crass boor who elbows his neighbor, points at the passing emperor and shouts “hey, the fat guy’s naked!” Then burps loudly.
The media are horrified that he burped.
The piece quoted reads like an envious savage from the Amazon reporting on the working of Zurich, a place so alien and apparently hostile that it needs explaining but in hostile tones, yet it is just an American socialist commenting on a fairly typical but prominent mid-Westener, hailing from a civilisation that the liberal loathes and wishes to see destroyed.
What about if we went back to having no females at all in the office “to protect the wimminz” or better still just brought back segregation, instead of black and white, “XX” and “XY”.
Mike Pence may be a bit extreme in his views, many would say paranoid, but in an environment where a single false accusation or even misinterpreted look / comment can bring everlasting ruination, he’s not completely lost the plot.
Many would argue this is little more than a cover for “Misogyny” and it has to be acknowledged that an actual misogynist could do the same to achieve his desired effect of excluding women from his environment, but given the mental gymnastics that the feminazis leap into when any male / female interaction is deemed inappropriate (my the female natch, the male views don’t count), then it sounds like the future will resemble the past for all sorts of reasons.
This latest panic started as an expose of leftist hypocrisy but is morphing into a weapon FOR the scum of marxian feminism.
Their original charge within the ranks of cultural Marxism was to fuck up relations between the sexes and thus the family unit. Welfare etc has helped them a lot. But sex panics are also their major weapon and the left care little if males in their own gang are destroyed in large numbers if it helps them destroy ALL men.
The Pence option is what they want. A world where you will need written permission to be alone in a room with any female.
The upside of all this could be that lefties would stop procreating, if it were not for artificial insemination – but still, one can hope.
I cannot help but wonder about that myself.
I see that Mr. Ecks beat me to it, in a way.
I saw the video of the Dutch boy on crutches being assaulted by a “Muslim” some time ago. If the “MSM” in the person of YouTube had wanted a cover-up, they would have deleted it (as they habitually do with wrongthing videos).
Indeed it does, but this looked OK to me even at the time. Pence knew that the same media that covered for Bill and etcetera longed to create a story about him. (It is also possible that, in a profession where, second only to Hollywood, wives might understandably wonder, he chose to be able to say to his wife not “Trust me” but “You can trust me”.)
That we now have more details about some of the etceteras makes it look even better in the public domain, but I presume we all knew before that the etceteras were there, just being concealed.
I wonder if the women of the left believe in rape culture because leftist men with power are bastards (remember the rape coverup in the SWP?)
I’ve written plenty at my place about how many feminists think all men are violent rapists because those they hang out with (either through choice or because that’s all they can find) are low-grade scumbags. Laurie Penny actually writes articles in which she mentions being friends with men who have admitted to sexual assault and in the next breath attacks white, conservative men under the banner of feminism. Another woman told me my friends sound “boring” because there are no sex-pests in their number.
https://spectator.org/woe-to-liberal-predatory-men/
The only real rape culture is in the Middle East, and in prisons. All else is hysterical anti-male, anti-life bullshit.
The only real rape culture is in the Middle East, and in prisons. All else is hysterical anti-male, anti-reality bullshit.
There. Fixed that for you.
It is also very much anti-life, JG.
I think that many modern feminists would embrace such a thing, because oppressed brown people dominating and sexually oppressing white women is to be celebrated, since it strikes a blow against evil white male “rape” culture. Or something. I certainly think they would be able to make a lot of excuses and allowances.
Either that of their brains would just explode.
…as long as it doesn’t affect them personally. That is the silent caveat that applies to much of the Feminazi and SJW world view.
“the implicit reason is that he must avoid alone-time with women lest his stringent religious moral code fall apart in the presence of a little lipstick and décolletage”
Someone ought to tell her that her ideas about implicit reasons are not dispositive or automatically correct.
Pence would probably say (I can’t read his mind!) that the point is to avoid even the appearance of impropriety or the opportunity for inappropriate intimacy.
That’s “taking physical intimacy and sex very, very seriously“, not an obvious lack of self control or a “lulz us boys just can’t help it!” excuse.
(Even under “rape culture” theory this doesn’t work – “men just can’t ever control themselves” qualifies, since it absolves them of having to try, and places all the onus on women to avoid them and their wicked ways.
“I am controlling circumstances to avoid even a hint of impropriety” is … exactly taking responsibility for one’s actions, not abandoning it, and exactly not normalizing anything remotely resembling or encouraging rape.)
Or, more likely, “why give someone an opportunity to lie through her teeth for money?”
I was thinking about this, and while Pence’s approach is understandable (I believe he learned it from Billy Graham who had a similar rule for all his team), but it is also plainly rather disadvantageous to the regular woman who has not desire to make a false accusation, but simply wants to progress in her career.
So, perhaps if the Vice President can hear me, I can suggest a different approach. Namely meet with women individually if the meeting warrants such a thing, but insist that all meetings where it is he one on one with a woman only, be recorded on video. The video doesn’t need to be published, but can be stored for future reference.
That seems a reasonable solution that offers both sides what they want.
…as long as it doesn’t affect them personally. That is the silent caveat that applies to much of the Feminazi and SJW world view.
Oh no, they achingly worry that their assailant will be deported now, they will certainly be happy if it affects them. They’ll be so… tolerant.
whenever you hear an attractive woman complaining about all the disadvantages of being an attractive woman, slap her. You’d rather be an ugly one ?
No, like classic leftists everywhere they don’t want to be ugly, they just don’t want anyone else to be pretty.
Hmmm, the press secretary has stated that it doesn’t matter if the video was fake because “the threat is real”.
So I guess I have to go with my “Trump is a gorilla” option. I have to say I’m disappointed. The idea of a Bond villain in the White House has a kind of appeal.
I don’t think he’s stupid though. He simply doesn’t care about the truth, which is not an admirable trait. Not that he’s the first politician to think that way, and expecting this to be a rationalist presidency was probably a tad optimistic. It’s very frustrating though. Still, could be worse. Could be Hilary.
PS – my job involves meeting with university postgraduates all day every day. Many of them are female. I work with my door wide open as much as physically possible. I don’t seriously expect to become the victim of a false (or true for that matter) accusation, but it doesn’t hurt to be careful.
Feminists did this with their inverse-Islam “a woman’s testimony is worth twice that of a man” nonsense. It used to be that if all your accusers had was “he said she said”, they had nothing. Now the accusation is enough to destroy lives.
If this has turned around and bit feminists on the ass then good.
Is the video real or fake? There are links claiming to debunk it, but they don’t provide any evidence either way. They do say the assailant was born in the Netherlands, but do not give his cultural background, where his parents came from, and so on. They also say he is not a muslim, but no evidence is shown.
Yes, which is why “Everything has a downside”™ is one of the very few statements that merits consideration as a nearly universal truth.
I am sorry to have to bring it up, but it does happen sometimes that X’s perfectly moral and sensible action could create a problem or difficulty for Y, or even thwart some project or outcome that Y holds dear to her (or his) heart; to the point that Y is thrown into a terrible slough of despond, to the point that she (or he) decides that to thwart another person’s desire is in and of itself evil, and shows that X is probably him- or herself evil to the core, and must be punished legally and to the fullest extent possible.
There oughtta be a law.
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Yes, Virginia, there are times when a perfectly reasonable and morally excellent way of heading off a problem results in the loss of an opportunity for somebody else.
Such is life. 😥
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So why should a man knowingly risk one or more of: his reputation, his career ambitions, his marriage, his family life, his friendships, and even his pocketbook just so as not to run the risk of depriving some perfectly decent girl of an opportunity to further her career simply by learning how to do her job better?
I’ll tell you, I feel dreadfully guilty and ashamed when I buy eggs at the Jewel supermarket instead of Dominick’s (at least before that chain sank), thus depriving D. of the sale, and possibly thus being a factor in its demise.
Likewise, buying the eggs from D. might, indeed would, do J. some damage, and I can’t have that on my conscience. After all, J. certainly oughtn’t to be punished for simply selling eggs.
One can play this game forever, of course, but it does bring on a headache after awhile. So excuse me, while I enjoy a nice hot comforting cup of hemlock tea.
(I’ve decided not to donate my body to Science. After all I don’t want to make it even more difficult for the funeral director and his employees to put their kids through college. And I don’t even have enough tea to share with them.)
. . .
Oh. The problem with the proposed solution is the fact that faking videos is just not a problem. The camera may not lie at the outset, but what shows up on the Tube or on UT is highly suspect.
Something about “Fake News,” for instance.
P.S. see “Disclosure ” for more on this.
Having echoed newrouter’s comment above I’ve just ran into this article, which seems to provide at least a partial answer.
Julie : Yes, which is why “Everything has a downside”™ is one of the very few statements that merits consideration as a nearly universal truth.
Everything except bacon.
Yes – the old fashioned approach of Mike Pence is now looking sensible.
“But it is paranoid” – how is that a bad thing in public life?
Lee. How very true. 😀
It might. I read a comment today that likened this stuff to a forest that hasn’t burned in a long time. The American press has made sure every sex scandal on the right sees the light of day, so there’s no underbrush on the right. But they’ve been covering for the centers of power on the left – news media, academia, Hollywood, plus Democratic politicians. So there’s been a lot of dead, dry underbrush accumulating waiting for just the right spark. And that spark turned out to be Weinstein.
Julie near Chicago
So why should a man knowingly risk one or more of: his reputation, his career ambitions, his marriage, his family life, his friendships, and even his pocketbook just so as not to run the risk of depriving some perfectly decent girl of an opportunity to further her career simply by learning how to do her job better?
How about because she is a capable, competent person who can add a great deal of value to their mutual employer? Or that he has a duty to his employer as her manager to work with his employees to help them improve and add value to the company?
Seriously? Every morning you get out of bed you are taking on some sort of risk. So it might be wise to put on your seat belt, but it is not wise to entirely eschew the automobile.
Oh, and as an aside, with respect to your eggs — I never shop at Jewel, they are UNBELIEVABLY expensive. Don’t you have an Aldi near you? They are better than Jewel by almost every measure. Even Walmart grocery is better than Jewel. Seriously, shop at Aldi, you’ll save 40% on your groceries, and the checkers are unbelievably fast. If you are used to Aldi checkers, and you go in another store, the difference in speed is such that you think the other store is taking the piss.
Fraser, the context! It sounds as if you think our guy (assume it’s a gent) has no moral right to keep himself out of certain situations if there’s the slightest possibility — the slightest hypothetical possibility — that somebody else might not have the benefit of some percentage of his extraordinarily valuable tutelage, which might — MIGHT — come her way if he weren’t so determined to avoid any appearance, let alone any actual act, of impropriety.
The bustard! How dare he!
Also, if “his employer” is happy with the guy’s determination to keep himself and therefore the employer’s business out of trouble, there’s no harm and no foul. Or, of course, the guy might be working for himself. But in the instant case, Mike Pence is working for ME, JULIE, among many others, and I am delighted that he’s set himself to keep his hand well away from any available cookie jars.
(A “public servant,” especially one in as high an office as V.P. Pence occupies, ought in any case to care to avoid even “an appearance of impropriety,” as the phrase goes. I hope I don’t have to specify all the if’s and’s and but’s necessary to state the posish with acceptable accuracy.)
Your argument boils down to a general proposition: that a person oughtn’t to take prudential care in managing this or that aspect of his affairs, because if he does take such care then somebody, somewhere down the road, MIGHT not be presented with some desirable opportunity.
So I’m being at the very least inconsiderate if I wear cleated shoes when I have to trundle about Rockford (no Jewel up here *g*) in the winter ice. Because if I do that, probably I won’t slip and fall and break my gazizzus, thus depriving some nice nurse of a unique opportunity to improve her nursing skills and also to earn a buck to buy a doughnut for the kiddies.
And, if you are intelligent and self-interested at all, you try to make selections of acceptable risk based on reality.
I’ve been mentoring people for decades. When you find a person who has so much promise that they outshine their peers, you do what you should do, no matter if they are male or female.
But, when all else is equal – when a number of people could use counseling and advice, and they all present an equal promise of value and worth – it is simply safer to my own personal circumstances to lean towards a male and away from a female.
It’s an unfair and discriminatory outcome. But I also cross streets to avoid gangs of youths after dark, even though I do not know them individually at all.
I have to point out that life is unfair and discriminatory.
Everything has a downside.™
Julie and Lee, there is no upside for the pig who ‘supplied’ the bacon!
Julie near Chicago
Fraser, the context! It sounds as if you think our guy (assume it’s a gent) has no moral right to keep himself out of certain situations if there’s the slightest possibility…
Yes, if I had said anything like that I’d be so much in agreement with you. I’d be SOOO wrong. But I didn’t really say that, did I? On the contrary, I suggested you put your seatbelt on, rather than giving up forever on the automobile.
And Bobby, were your theoretical situation of two identically matched students Sam and Samantha, you can perhaps make that choice. However, such perfectly balanced choices are rare. I don’t know your personal situation, but were I a university professor I would surely recognize that Samantha paid her fees too, paid my salary, and so I do have an obligation to her, even if I feel the need to leave the door open.
If you are giving up your time for free, its your time, do whatever floats your boat.
Completely agree. My situation was more like an older experienced lawyer filling slots in a litigation team with new baby-lawyers. Lots of late nights, lots of team travel. Tough environment in which to survive much less thrive, and many didn’t, resulting in people who were looking for external reasons why they hadn’t. It was just far safer if “I wouldn’t sleep with him” wasn’t an option.
On the contrary, Nicholas.
Truly, Everything Has a Downside; but it’s not true that everything has an upside.
So the upside for the pig is that once baconized, he no longer has to worry about stayin’ alive.
The relief must be immense.
This is exactly why I prefer living in Asia. Watching the US and Western civilization go insane is much more pleasant when done from afar than up close and personal. At my age, I’m glad I don’t have to endure this spectacle much longer but I feel sorry for my children and grandchildren.
Yeah, that’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Vinegar Joe,
Same here.
No, Mike Pence avoiding situations where the unscrupulous can get well known and trusted people sacked by mere unproven and unprovable allegations, isn’t a sign of “rape culture”, unless one counts being metaphorically raped by Gloria Allred type lawyers. Pence doesn’t do that because we’re in a rape culture, but rather because we live in a witch hunt culture.
BTW, I’m wondering how much of Matt Lauer’s ‘mia culpa’ knee bending is genuine and how much is merely a perceived path to coming back to the money train.
I will go so far as to state that anyone who thinks there IS a gender pay wage gap, (i.e. that people who do exactly the same job to the exact same level of efficiency and efficacy is paid differently due to nothing other than gender, i.e. their physical sex) is not only completely economically illiterate but also think that male patriarchy “masher” bosses would prefer to see other fat old men in the office rather than hot women in too tight business suits and heels. Yes, these mythical soulless toxically maculine scrooges would supposedly sell their grandmother for a buck, yet somehow refrain from preferentially hiring female eye candy that will do the same job for substantially less money.
Hmmm-curiouser and curiouser. To take a phrase from Netflix’s Stranger Things, Leftists live in the Upside Down.
Julie Near Chicago, “everything has a downside”.
Oppertunity cost.
Spotted somewhere on the web: Apparently Mike Pence has a secret button under his desk that keeps the door open.
Thai, December 2, 2017 at 12:15 pm:
Bravo!
Props also on the deliciously snarky and rhetorically effective remainder of the quote. And on the two grains of truth that you note therein.
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Not just the unscrupulous, either. We humans tend to overindulge our tendency to assume guilt unless innocence is somehow “proven” (and often enough, to assign guilt even where innocence is proven — more-or-less proven, anyway, given human fallibility interacting with the messiness of the real world).
An awful lot of people subscribe to the notion of “where there’s smoke, &c.” Even when they perfectly well know better, there is always stomach-think yammering at them and derailing their internal Judge. (Can a Judge be derailed? What if he’s sitting on the head of a pin, or even worse, on the point of one?)
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“A witch-hunt culture.” Yes, and it ties in with the assumption-of-guilt tendency, and another name for it might be “the moral-panic culture.”
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Wotthehell is a “rape culture,” anyway? Or, far more accurately, what does a given person, or bunch, or gang who uses the term mean by it? I can’t say I think the Western world generally is so uncivilized that its people mostly condone actual, physical, literal rape, let alone engage in it, let alone encourage it, let alone indulge in it themselves, let alone assume that “everybody does it”; nor yet hope for nor encourage the practice; nor yet expect it as a normal, ho-hum sort of mundane everyday experience. Stipulating that there are subgroups of people who do condone/commit/encourage/expect/etc. rape (at least in some circumstances), it’s only those particular groups that (in my view, anyway) can reasonably be said to have a “rape culture.”
Which prompts me to suggest there are (at least) two kinds of “rape culture”:
The rape-expecting culture;
The rape-supporting culture.
Thail, December 2, 2017 at 12:27 pm: So enthusiastic & excited over your comment directly prior that I didn’t even get to reading this one.
Keep going, you’re on a roll today! :>)
“but rather because we live in a witch hunt culture”
What’s different this time is that it is the witches who are doing the hunting. 😀
“What’s different this time is that it is the witches who are doing the hunting.”?
I think your spell-check may be off.
(OK,ok, Stolen from Bell, Book, and Candle)