A novelist I’d never heard of has things to say.

Modern men are turning to gay affairs because they are “terrified” of women, Jilly Cooper has suggested.

That makes no sense. I’m afraid of X so I do Y? I have a fear of heights so I’ve decided to take up cave diving. Right.

I think gay men are gay because they are attracted to men, not because they’re necessarily repelled by women.

And hey, by this logic, shouldn’t all women be lesbians?

In a somewhat scathing verdict, the famously racy novelist said that men also cry “all the time”.

Men have as much capacity for emotion as women. This one is at least true in the spirit of the answer. I don’t understand what is “scathing” about the comment.

She added that women wear short skirts but have “do not touch tattooed across their knees” – and said she was “worried” about the effect the Me Too campaign may have on views of courtship.

She is an erotic romance novelist, I guess. I’m getting the impression I wouldn’t like her books very much, since her romantic heroes must be bold men who see a skirt as an invitation to get under it, and the heroine better not complain about it.

Back in my courtin’ days, in the long long ago, #MeToo wouldn’t have affected me, and I would not have been afraid of women, because I never intimidated anyone into forced sex, nor did I harass anyone or take inappropriate liberties with women. I think that’s the case with most men.

It’s only the assholes who should be afraid.

One thing I’ll agree with: Karl Kjer was one sick fuck. He was an entomologist at UC Davis who quietly retired “for health reasons” in 2016, and no one bothered to publicly mention what was learned in 2015.

“When I first started working with Kjer, we were going to set up a really nice imaging system for publications or just high-def microphotography [of] specimens we were going to use for his research,” the junior specialist said. “Since we did not get our imaging system first, we decided to kind of prepare for it, and so he [Kjer] asked me to order two hard drives.”

After opening files on just one of the two university-purchased hard drives stored in Kjer’s office over Winter Break, the junior specialist and volunteer found a lot of “terrible images that he recorded of quite a lot of women without them knowing.”

“There was a lot of folders of internet pornography that he downloaded, and we kind of closed the window and looked at each other like, ‘What did we just find?’” the junior specialist said. “At a later point, after we looked through it and made notes [of] when they were taken, when did he last access them — they were spanning at least all the way back from 2010, up to 2012, 2013. A lot of them said that he was still accessing them up to 2015, when I was working.”

In addition to the internet pornography stored on the hard drives, the junior specialist estimates that there were more than 10 videos Kjer had recorded himself, including a video of him installing the camera in the bathroom in his home in New Jersey. It appeared the camera was pointed at the shower and some individuals being filmed were partially clothed while others were nude — “all of them definitely did not know they were being filmed or imaged at the time.”

He had been clandestinely filming students in his bathroom, and filing the videos away in his porn collection on hard drives he purchased with grant money. That’s enough to get one fired, but not enough to bring down public shame on their heads, I guess. Gwen Pearson has some cogent comments on the university’s efforts to dismiss him on the down low.

Pearson discussed what she says is a pattern in the scientific community where a male professional will engage in inappropriate behavior, resign and quickly find another job.

“Right about the time they’re called on it, and proceedings begin, if they resign, it’s over because they’re no longer an employee and the university no longer has any sway over that,” Pearson said. “Very often what happens is […] someone will get in trouble and resign, start over at a new institution and their bad behavior doesn’t necessarily follow them from institution to institution.”

An example of this pattern, which Pearson discussed, is that of the accusations of sexual misconduct as well as research misconduct aimed at University of Kentucky Professor of Entomology James Harwood, who subsequently resigned from his position. The university decided not to pursue an investigation after Harwood’s resignation.

“I’ve seen it happen a couple of times where someone resigns and back channel talk is all — they get caught doing something they shouldn’t have done — and they get a new job,” Pearson said. “It really baffles me why, when there’s such a huge pool of talented scientists, why do we keep rehiring people who we know behave badly?”

I get it. Universities don’t want to have to deal with an ugly mess in their own back yard, so it’s in their interests to quietly shuffle the bad actor away. It’s a strategy for evading responsibility, and that’s how it persists.

I finally got around to reading that Cathy Young op-ed about Jordan Peterson — I’ve been distracted, and the names “Cathy Young” and “Jordan Peterson” do not inspire enthusiasm. It was rather awful.

The whole thing can be summarized briefly as, “Gosh, Jordan Peterson is kinda goofy on some stuff, but he is exactly right when he bashes on feminism”. It’s about what you’d expect from Young, who is an anti-feminist in the same vein as Christina Hoff Sommers. There are lots of moments where I’m just flabbergasted at her biases.

For all his flaws, Peterson is tapping into a very real frustration: More than half a century after the modern feminist revolution began in the 1960s, we have yet to figure out new rules for partnership between men and women.

No, we’ve got no problems figuring out the rules, they’re easy. Treat women with the same respect you would men. She also glosses over the real problem, that women in the workplace are not there to form a “partnership”, especially not a sexual partnership, with their male colleagues. That’s the real problem, that some men are incapable of relating to women without assuming that their role as women is to be sexual…when it’s not. We don’t have an issue with men flirting with their male colleagues, yet for some reason it’s not possible for women to be present without sexual banter flying about, and when it happens, it’s all the woman’s fault.

Although Peterson can sound like a chauvinistic crank when he seems to suggest that women incite sexual harassment by wearing makeup to the office, his larger points — that evolving norms are generating confusion and mixed signals, and that women play a role in sexualizing work environments — are far from absurd.

Young is incorrect. They are totally absurd. He claims that women wear red lipstick because they turn red during sexual arousal. No, that’s not it. It’s because we have social conventions of attractiveness that differ for men and women, and we all heed them out of a general interest in fitting in, and in being presentable in the workplace. Why do men shave their faces, wear neckties, and shun wearing skirts? I’m sure you can invent a biological rationale for all of that, but that doesn’t make it true. A woman accepting the social standards for appearance of her peers and community is no more flaunting her sexual availability than is a man doing likewise — she is trying to generally look good, just like every other person on the job.

I mean, otherwise, look at the man in that interview, wearing a long tie to boast about his possession of a penis. Disgusting. Maybe we need workplace regulations that prohibit ties, pants, and stereotypically masculine hair styles in the office.

Consider: We have rejected traditional sexist proprieties that forbade coarse language in front of “the ladies,” yet a man can now be fired for telling a crude joke that offends a female co-worker. Calling women “the weaker sex” would be considered shockingly retrograde, yet ambivalent sexual encounters are easily recast as violations of women, with men presumed entirely responsible for ensuring consent. Workplace romances abound, yet flirting could be one step away from someone’s idea of sexual harassment.

I thought this was enlightening, although perhaps not in the way Young intended. Go ahead, take a look at the link she gives for some radio hosts getting fired for telling a crude joke that offends a woman. The story actually says there were “multiple complaints against both hosts over the course of more than a dozen years” and that there were many “allegations of inappropriate comments and bullying”.

This kind of minimizing is a common strategy by the anti-feminists. A pattern of frequent abuse and belittling behavior is recast as a one-off incident, and a man is being punished for a brief mistake. But that’s not the case. In her example, these men had multiple warnings and explicit prior actions to change their behaviors. One was given “one-on-one anti-harassment training for him and a warning…that he was creating an uncomfortable work environment”, which is a darned serious step to take prior to their firing. These were apparently popular radio hosts, so the station wasn’t going to fire them on a whim — there was sustained provocation.

But sure, it was just a crude joke.

The conclusion of Young’s piece is blatantly dishonest, and I’m surprised no editor caught it and said they couldn’t possibly publish this lie.

For all its successes, contemporary feminism’s main message to men is not one of equal partnership. Rather, it’s: Repent, abase yourself, and be an obedient feminist ally — and we still won’t trust you. It’s no wonder that Peterson has found an eager audience in this climate. If feminists don’t like his message, they should offer a better one.

Wow. First she says the message of feminism is Repent, abase yourself, and be an obedient feminist ally — it isn’t, by the way, and it’s nothing but the ridiculous faux feminism Young always bashes — and then she blames feminism for having a poor message, when the message is purely hers.

How about if we ask a real feminist, someone like bell hooks, for instance, what the real message of feminism is?

Simply put, feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.

But maybe she thinks men are supposed to abase themselves and be obedient?

When men embrace feminist thinking and preactice, which emphasizes the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in all relationships, their emotional well-being will be enhanced. A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving.

It seems to me that feminism already has a better message than that bullshit Cathy Young makes up. It’s definitely a lot better than the nonsense Jordan Peterson peddles.

This is a good essay on incels, which makes kind of a universal point.

It is men, not women, who have shaped the contours of the incel predicament. It is male power, not female power, that has chained all of human society to the idea that women are decorative sexual objects, and that male worth is measured by how good-looking a woman they acquire. Women—and, specifically, feminists—are the architects of the body-positivity movement, the ones who have pushed for an expansive redefinition of what we consider attractive. “Feminism, far from being Rodger’s enemy,” Srinivasan wrote, “may well be the primary force resisting the very system that made him feel—as a short, clumsy, effeminate, interracial boy—inadequate.” Women, and L.G.B.T.Q. people, are the activists trying to make sex work legal and safe, to establish alternative arrangements of power and exchange in the sexual market.

It’s been that way for a long time. Hasn’t everyone been saying for decades that all of the men’s complaints about feminism are actually misplaced — that feminism is all about addressing concerns that affect men and women, that anti-feminism is a self-inflicted wound? That’s certainly been my perspective on it, and my own self-interest is in enabling feminism to reduce the insanity in the relationships between the sexes that is, in part, produced by the asymmetry between them.

And no, incels and MRAs, no one owes you sex. Quit trying to shoehorn human relationships into a pattern of capitalistic transactions. (We can also blame rampant capitalism for anyone believing this is a problem that can be solved with buying and selling commodities, or that “sexual market value” is even a real thing. Libertarians have fucked up everything.)

What a weird sensation: I am no longer disappointed when famous men act like jerks. I’m just going to assume from now on that if someone is famous enough that I know who they are, they’re probably assholes.

The latest: Morgan Freeman. Holy crap, Morgan Freeman! The man with the golden voice, narrator of so many programs I’ve watched, gentle-souled star of so many movies…was just casually toxic around women.

In all, 16 people spoke to CNN about Freeman as part of this investigation, eight of whom said they were victims of what some called harassment and others called inappropriate behavior by Freeman. Eight said they witnessed Freeman’s alleged conduct. These 16 people together described a pattern of inappropriate behavior by Freeman on set, while promoting his movies and at his production company Revelations Entertainment.

Of those 16, seven people described an environment at Revelations Entertainment that included allegations of harassment or inappropriate behavior by Freeman there, with one incident allegedly witnessed by Lori McCreary, Freeman’s co-founder in the enterprise, and another in which she was the target of demeaning comments by Freeman in a public setting. One of those seven people alleged that McCreary made a discriminatory remark regarding a female candidate for a job at the Producers Guild of America, where McCreary is co-president.

Four people who worked in production capacities on movie sets with Freeman over the last ten years described him as repeatedly behaving in ways that made women feel uncomfortable at work. Two, including the production assistant on “Going in Style” whose skirt he allegedly attempted to lift, said Freeman subjected them to unwanted touching. Three said he made public comments about women’s clothing or bodies. But each of them said they didn’t report Freeman’s behavior, with most saying it was because they feared for their jobs. Instead, some of the women — both on movie sets and at Revelations — said, they came up with ways to combat the alleged harassment on their own, such as by changing the way they dressed when they knew he would be around.

It’s a long and thorough account. From now on, his voice is going to sound less like honey and more like cloying, thick drool. I think — I hope — work is going to dry up for him now, although there seems to be no harassment so severe that the perpetrator can’t be plotting a comeback.

As for Tambor, the word has been going around for some time that he’s terrible to work with. It looks like most of the cast of Arrested Development are also kind of awful. In an interview in which Tambor was confronted with the facts of his ghastly, abusive treatment of Jessica Walter, the cast circled the wagons for him.

When Deb asked specifically about the Walter story and she tried to talk about it, Bateman, Cross, Hale and Arnett, between the four of them (though Arnett did the least and Bateman did the most by far), eventually intervened in all of the following ways: (1) said (jokingly?) that they’ve all done the same to her; (2) said all “families” have arguments; (3) joked about all the other terrible things they’ve done to each other; (4) pointed out that Tambor has already said he’s working on it; (5) said “difficult” people are part of the business; (6) said “atypical behavior” is part of people’s “process”; (7) said they’ve all lost their temper sometimes; (8) said expecting “normal” behavior means “not understand[ing] what happens on set”; (9) claimed to have “zero complaints” about working together; (10) called yelling at people “a wobbly route to [a] goal”; and (11) repeatedly emphasized context and everyone playing their role in conflict.

Through a good part of this, Walter was crying, as you can hear if you listen to the audio recording of this part of the interview. And at one point, as Bateman explains patiently that “certain people have certain processes,” Shawkat interjects: “But that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. And the point is that things are changing, and people need to respect each other differently.” In the audio, she seems even more irritated than these words make her sound, and he cuts her off anyway.

It’s a truly cringeworthy interview. A woman is so stressed out over her vicious treatment that she’s in tears, and all of her ‘friends’ are working so hard to excuse the abuse.

Humans suck.

It’s like a master class in stuffing your foot down your throat. I’m kind of impressed at how badly FanX/ComicCon screwed up.

So an author, Shannon Hale, wrote to con organizers to complain about how a regular guest was a little too touchy, making women attendees a bit uncomfortable. Look at how the organizer, Bryan Brandenburg, responded:

Maybe it is best that you sit this one out and then wait to hear how it went. I don’t think there is anything we can say to convince you to come and quite frankly I’m not willing to try. I know in my heart that we take this seriously and I don’t think you get it. I have four daughters and I’ve been sensitive to these issues for decades, long before it became trendy with #metoo.

First thing he does is basically say, “Yeah, lady, it’s your problem, not ours, and we aren’t interested in trying to deal with it.” Second thing: the “I have daughters” defense. So if you didn’t have any female offspring, you wouldn’t be interested in protecting women’s rights? And then, diminishing #metoo as “trendy”.

That is one messy paragraph, a regular pigs’ wallow of oblivious splatter. If you’re a conference organizer, you ought to print it out, have it framed on your wall, and consult it any time you get a complaint as what you ought to never, ever do. It’s just perfect example of insensitivity.

But Brandenburg is not done! He then posted Hale’s complaint with her email address on Twitter.

Argh, argh, argh. Would you feel comfortable reporting misbehavior to this guy? He just blew up the whole con’s credibility.

But wait! We haven’t even gotten to the target of the complaint yet. The complaint was about an author, Richard Paul Evans, who got a little too chummy with attendees.

She wrote that Evans “touched me several times and went so far as to kiss my cheek. I had never met him before. … but he made me very uncomfortable and even said, ‘You’re so pretty’ after he touched me, as though he couldn’t help himself.”

Brace yourself for another exercise in podiatric autophagy.

On Monday, Evans wrote that her complaint was not true. This false reporting makes me sound creepy, he said. I told her she was pretty, kindly, as I said, ‘You’re pretty, that’s not going to hurt sales.’ I was trying to make her feel good. Again, I was congratulating her and I was in public. I have a witness to the event. I also remember her coming back with one of my books to get it autographed.

Uh, you just confirmed her account, Mr Evans. You were condescending and told a writer that her appearance, not her writing, was her advantage. And you’re not even aware of how patronizing you sound.

Guest speakers are bowing out right and left from the con right now. It looks like the wrong people are leaving, though — like maybe the organizers need to find a different line of work.

Best suggestion yet.

Every male journalist who writes an opinion piece about the “distribution of sex” should have to wank off an incel.

— Joe Wells (@joewellscomic) May 21, 2018