Shall we tally up the casualties in the ongoing War on Men for the weekend?

• John Hockenberry of NPR

• James Levine of the Metropolitan Opera

• Jay Fliegelman, a distinguished professor of literature at Stanford

  (if you read his victim’s account, it’ll break your heart)

Wow. Big names are falling like dominoes. You might be thinking this is good news, that bad men are finally being held to account for their misdeeds, but there is still criminal injustice going on all the time. Matt Lauer thinks NBC owes him $30 million dollars. And then there’s the student who raped a drunken women at ASU — he’s getting off because he has a 3.9 GPA. His rationalizations have to be seen to be believed.

In a lengthy statement, he described how he considered himself a supporter of women’s rights. I am an advocate of gender equality, including equal opportunity, equal pay for equal work and access to essential, basic healthcare for women, he said. However, as has historically been the case for previously under-represented groups, there is an over-compensation where the pendulum swings too far in the opposite direction and creates another injustice. This does not create gender equality, but rather allows a person to make heinous, unsubstantiated claims without consequence.

James even went as far to suggest that his punishment is prohibiting him from helping to solve world hunger.

He said his suspension greatly impairs my ability to contribute to my research team in sustainable engineering, where we are attempting to invent and implement ways of ensuring we can feed a population of soon to be ten billion on a rapidly degrading planet.

Gosh, study hard, do well in school, and you too can get a rape license. And ladies — you’d better submit to rape if you want to end world hunger. It’s OK because James is sort of a feminist, he says. Toppling a few big wigs is not going to lead to a long-term solution as long as we keep promoting Junior Weinsteins like James.

New/old excuses are being deployed as I write. There’s the old “Men are inherently brutal and sexist” story, which isn’t true: we are what we make ourselves. There are plenty of healthy, normal men who don’t want to walk all over women — but there are also social structures that enable misbehavior, and actually reward successful men with tolerance for their abuses. That has to change, and then we can discover good men who succeed on their abilities, rather than by their viciousness in climbing an ugly ladder to the top ranks.

There are also lots of moanings about how hard it is to be a man right now, which is also not true. It might be believable if loads of innocent men were being loaded into the tumbrels, but look at all of them: they’re all guilty as hell, there is evidence supporting the accusations, and often these men are reluctantly confessing to their abuses. I, for instance, am resting easy because I know I don’t have any terrible crimes in my past, and I suspect that’s true for the majority of my male readers. It’s the ones with guilty consciences who are sweating bullets and trying to argue that they are unjustly persecuted, and the worrisome thing is how many Top Men are looking shiny with sweat.

The atmosphere is indeed a peculiar one. (Though if one more person calls it a “witch hunt” I will scream, because co-opting a historical occurrence that disproportionately, gruesomely punished single women with death as a metaphor for uncovering abuses by powerful men is not acceptable.) The air seems to vibrate with powerful (and abusive) men’s fear as more allegations are brought into the public eye, and that’s essentially unprecedented. And as new stories come out again and again, I fully encourage men to re-examine themselves and their past behavior. Just like not being racist in a deeply racist world takes work, not being sexist in an environment that normalizes sexist attitudes requires conscious commitment and awareness.

But what you don’t get to do is complain about it — because, congratulations, you are now getting a free sample of how women have to act around men all the time.