You mean one of these jerks might actually get a proper comeuppance?

You’ve all been waiting for this: Harvey Weinstein’s perp walk.

He’s actually facing criminal charges for forcible oral sex, a Class B felony in New York state, and he could get as much as 25 years in prison, if found guilty.

This was not a lightly made decision by his accuser, Lucia Evans.

Evans told me, of her experience with Weinstein, “I know how this has changed my life for the worse. How he took away my self-esteem and personal power. And knowing I can take it back, and stop him from doing that to another woman, I couldn’t let that go.”

Boys.

A woman working in a fisheries office in Scotland complained about the sexist, abusive workplace culture there. The boys in the office responded by tying her to a chair and gagging her, and took photos of her humiliation.

In evidence to her ongoing tribunal, she said that one of the men involved, fisheries officer Reid Anderson, told her: “This is what you get when you speak out against the boys.”

The boys. The boys in that office are a bit thick, I guess — “There ain’t no sexist abusive culture here, and to prove it, we’re going to do a little bondage here in the office to intimidate you. And to make it even more clever, we’re going to take incriminating photos of it.”

Sexist, abusive, and stupid. They’ve got a troop of dull-witted boys managing fisheries in Scotland? That’s not good.

Let’s check in on upper management, shall we?

The manager said he would have “a word” with the men involved – Reid Anderson and Jody Paske.

He added: “I am sure they meant no harm and that was the boys just being boys.”

This sounds like one of those workplace comedies that come out of the UK, with a staff of incompetents bungling amusingly while the twits running the show have their own brand of oblivious boobery — think “The IT Crowd” or “The Office”. I didn’t know those shows were actually documentaries.

Sack the whole lot, is my recommendation.

#YouToo, Morgan Freeman? And Jeffrey Tambor?

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.

How not to respond to complaints about handsy guests at a con

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.

Why is Jordan Peterson so unreasonably popular?

I think this article by Robyn Pennacchia comes closest to explaining Peterson’s appeal. There are a lot of meaty quotes in there if you want to see the evidence, including a great summary of his bogus transgender pronoun complaint, but the conclusion is excellent.

Peterson is telling young men the story they want to hear about themselves and the world around them. That they are “individuals,” that hierarchy and inequality are not bad things, that we live and have always lived in a meritocracy. That people aren’t clamoring for equality because they are good people who want people to be treated fairly and decently, but because they want to manipulate them and put them in gulags. That women are going to be just fine with jumping back into “traditional” gender roles and give them their patriarchy back. That women will not be put off by misogyny. That soon they will be living in a world where they can insult people — and yes, refusing to use someone’s preferred pronoun is insulting to them — and there will be no social consequences for that. That, rather than having enjoyed unearned privileges and advantages, those who have risen to the top of our societal hierarchy did so because they were simply the hardest and best workers. Because they were simply lobsters with more serotonin.

It’s an overly simplistic — and often intentionally vague — worldview that intellectualizes the basest id impulses of men, largely white men, who feel that they have been disadvantaged by the recent successes of white women and people of color and now feel left behind. He tells them they are logical, rational, critical thinkers — heroes, in fact. Even by doing things like talking a lot about the importance of IQ, he sates their desires to feel important and special. Take a moment and think of all the men you’ve ever met who were not doing much with their lives but very much wanted to talk to you about how high their IQ is (even though that’s ridiculous because most people probably don’t even know their actual IQ, for a variety of reasons). This is a thing. He doesn’t have to tell them they have a high IQ (because everyone thinks they have a high IQ), he just has to talk about how it is important, and that makes them feel good.

The thing is, he’s promising these men a world they actually cannot have without the permission of other groups of people. He’s not doing them any favors. If he really wanted to help these “lost men,” he’d help them thrive in the actual world they live in, rather than the way they want the world to be. He’d help them learn to adjust to a world in which the old hierarchies have been dismantled and understand that they’re no more entitled to be at the top of a hierarchy than anyone else is. Or help them learn how to function and love and improve themselves without needing to base that on being “better” than someone else, how to deal with the world in which women don’t want traditional gender roles, and help them to understand that life isn’t a zero sum game in which if someone who has been oppressed gets a right you have, you automatically lose something.

That last paragraph is familiar. It’s the same thing feminists have been saying to men, that everyone has been saying to MRAs, for years: the patriarchy is not your friend. A hierarchy that puts undeserving white men at the top does no one any favors. It’s almost a Petersonian thing to say, that if you want respect, you have to straighten up and earn it…and it’s ironic that his career is all about promising the opposite, that if you’ve got status, you must have deserved it, so don’t let women and minorities make you work for it.

The poster child for the invulnerability of white men

It’s James Watson. He’s got a Nobel prize, which means he gets to lecture incompetently about black people and women, write a bestseller full of sexist garbage about Rosalind Franklin, and basically push all the boundaries in a regressive direction, and what happens? He gets publicly shamed one week, but the next week everyone invites him back to praise him. It’s kind of amazing. You would think some of this stuff would stick, but no. He was just recently lauded in a meeting at Cold Spring Harbor.

No, really, look at all the white people joining him on stage and applauding! I guess he did contribute to a global community, of sorts, mainly by driving a lot of people away.

You will be pleased to know that the circle of life continues unending, because after that bit of public shaming, Eric Lander has apologized, predictably. I further predict, though, that we only have to wait a few weeks, possibly a few months, and there will be another event at which Watson will be fulsomely praised by a group of oblivious white guys, to begin the cycle anew.

Maybe it’ll be his funeral, who knows? I’m pretty sure that event will not be the quiet, dignified interment attended by a few loving and bereaved family members, but an opportunity yet again for distinguished white men to ignore all the careers he’s stunted, institutions he’s poisoned, and racist garbage he’s peddled with the authority of his Nobel. I am not looking forward to that at all, and rather hope he lives forever with his reputation.

Science lesson: What you want to be true ain’t necessarily so

How can a criticism of evolutionary psychology come off sounding like apologetics? I found this article annoying because of its lack of awareness.

One of the more intriguing findings in the field of evolutionary psychology over the past two decades has been that ovulating women are more strongly attracted to men with faces that have pronounced masculine characteristics, such as wide jaws and heavy brows, than to men who do not have such traits. Other research suggests men with highly masculinised faces have strong immune systems, a desirable trait in children, but also tend to form weaker long-term bonds with romantic partners, and are thus more likely to desert and leave the mother, both literally and metaphorically, holding the baby. Logic therefore suggests that a woman’s ideal evolutionary strategy is to mate with such men in secrecy, while duping less masculine (but better bonded) males into believing that the resultant offspring are their own—thus garnering reliable help in raising them.

That is not intriguing. That’s actually a fundamental obsession of evolutionary psychology: there are so many tedious studies that try to map women’s sexual preferences onto some aspect of their endocrinology. There is no continuity of thought, they’re just flighty creatures who make decisions based on their menstrual cycle, and their entire life history involves cycling through hormonally dictated associations with men with chins vs. men without chins. And all of that is built on the premise that Natural Selection is so powerful that it oscillates irresistibly on a monthly basis.

There is something wrong with you if you can only think of women as bags containing varying titers of estrogen. Not intriguing, except that it does say something about the men who believe in that crap.

So this article gets into a moderately large study (584 women) that actually controlled for many of the problems that plague other EP studies. They actually measured hormone levels directly, rather than going by self-reporting. They did multiple sessions for each woman. They had a larger sample size to possibly overcome some of the statistical weakness of previous work.

Unfortunately, it still uses the same superficial sorts of criteria other studies have used. They show the subjects pairs of photos of digitally manipulated male faces, some “feminized”, others “masculinized”, and ask the subjects which they’d rather fuck, and which they’d rather marry (they missed an opportunity to include a third option, “kill”). That’s it. It’s a predictably shallow approach to complex life decisions, but hey, bags of estrogen don’t worry their pretty little heads with thoughtful interactions with other human beings.

The only surprise here is that they got a negative result — there was no correlation between the women’s choices and their menstrual cycle — and that it got published. At least that last bit surprised me. These kinds of studies are usually exercises in the file drawer effect, or p value fishing.

But the popular press summary still manages to polish up this turd in an aggravating way.

All told, Dr Jones found that women’s masculinity-preference scores were not related to their reproductive cycle. Specifically, he and his colleagues could not find any statistically significant relationship between the levels of any hormones and preferences for more masculine faces. The idea that evolution encourages women to engage in cyclical cuckoldry was certainly an intriguing one. But, as Benjamin Franklin put it, one of the greatest tragedies in life is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts.

“Intriguing”. “Beautiful”. No, the premise was a heap of garbage that was sustained by years of sloppy studies and wishful thinking, and there was nothing beautiful about it. I’d like to imagine that some bad science was literally murdered, but I just know it’s going to be resurrected over and over again by evolutionary psychologists whose research is guided more by what they want to be true than any kind of valid understanding of evolution, or psychology, or human beings.

The Clay Johnson saga

Clay Johnson is a man who gained a powerful reputation during the Howard Dean campaign as a smart guy who knew how to use the emerging internet technology as a tool for politics. He has since gone on to be an important tech guy in Democratic and progressive politics, rising ever upward.

He also has a powerful reputation as an abuser of women. But that doesn’t matter. It never seems to matter.

Let’s begin with his apology.

Johnson, in interviews with HuffPost, described his history in the workplace as “awful” and said it filled him with shame, hurt and regret, although he disputed the details of most of his accusers’ stories.

“I don’t know the answer to that,” he said when asked if he had sexually assaulted two women on the Dean campaign. “What I can tell you is, I had two women complain to management on the Dean campaign about sexual harassment, and I was given a warning.” Later, he said his memory of his encounter with Schacht didn’t include anything he would describe as “assault.”

“My entire career was littered with treating people very poorly,” he continued. “Whether that was the Sunlight Foundation, the Dean campaign, or anywhere else I worked. I did not behave appropriately. I was awful to people, to nearly every single person, and I really wish I hadn’t been.”

What an odd “apology”. There’s no word of apology to the people he hurt, but more of an admission that he was generally awful…but not as awful as his accusers say he was.

That’s kind of a mantra with him. Sure, he was rude and crude, but never as bad as the women he victimized say. Oh, yeah, there was one woman who has a grudge against him, but it’s just stale old personal drama.

…he emailed Miller in June 2008 to warn her that he and Schacht had a history from the Dean campaign. “She hates me,” he wrote, in an email he shared with HuffPost. “Absolutely despises me. Happy to talk to you about it in person, but it’s mainly gossip, innuendo, stale and old. It is weird, I’m happy to talk about it with you. But the short story is: It was a presidential campaign, it was Vermont. She was like 22, I was 26 and we were both shamefully less professional in the workplace. You can put the rest of that story together. I promise there’s not a long slough of disgruntled female campaign staffers in my closets. But there is one, and it is her.”

That woman, Schacht, is someone he attempted to rape. The full, explicit details are in the article. I’ll pass on repeating it here, since, after all, it’s just “gossip, innuendo”. And it didn’t matter at all. Two women accused him of assault in the Dean campaign, but that didn’t check his career in the slightest.

During Johnson’s first job in politics, on Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, Schacht and a fellow campaign worker separately accused Johnson of sexual assault. Word of both women’s complaints reached several of Dean’s top deputies. But Johnson kept his job, and his work on the campaign became his ticket to a high-profile career.

He went on to co-found a pathbreaking political consulting firm. Powerful groups and people sought his thoughts on the future of tech in politics; his Twitter banner shows him cracking a joke to a roomful of government officials including President Barack Obama. Despite Schacht’s warning about his behavior, the Sunlight Foundation chose him to head its flagship technology division. He left amid a staff insurrection over his lewd and menacing behavior. And still, he rose higher.

I guess it’s just a fact of life in politics, even progressive politics.

“We just pass creeps from campaign to campaign,” said Meg Reilly, vice president of the Campaign Workers Guild, a new union seeking to organize political workers across the country. “The excuse becomes, ‘We’ll deal with this once the candidate gets elected.’ People tell themselves that if they’re working for this candidate who’s really fantastic, who opposes sexism and racism, then everyone on the campaign is immune from committing the same sins.” Once the election ends, little prevents abusive employees from starting a second act in government, political advocacy or nonprofits.

Responses to his increasingly egregious behavior were ineffective. Johnson himself dismissed them.

Johnson couldn’t recall anyone asking him questions about his behavior. But there had been one repercussion, he said: Rogan, in the presence of his co-deputy campaign manager, Tom McMahon, gave Johnson a warning. “They were like, ‘This complaint has come in, so like, cool it,’” Johnson said. “I would say it made me more defensive. I’m not sure I would say it altered my behavior.”

Then there’s this weird defensive behavior from his employers, even the ones who kicked him to the curb.

At the end of 2007, Blue State Digital forced Johnson out. “Clay was asked to leave the company because his partners didn’t want to work with him anymore, not because of any allegations of inappropriate behavior,” the firm said in a statement. “Clay would not be hired today, we’re glad we fired him over a decade ago and we regret he was ever associated with the company.” The firm wouldn’t provide further details.

Wait, wait, wait. They don’t want to work with him, they wouldn’t hire him again, they regret ever hiring him…but they won’t give details? They say it wasn’t because of inappropriate behavior? This is insane. This is how abusers can keep going from prestigious job to prestigious job. This is how a pattern of bad behavior perpetuates itself.

Other companies give a few details.

Many of Sunlight’s staff members would come to have issues with Johnson as well. Johnson routinely made obscene comments toward his co-workers, according to multiple former Sunlight employees. Nisha Thompson, one former employee, described him as “leery” and “a bully.” Once, she ran into him at a bar outside of work. As soon as she said hello, she claims, Johnson replied, “I’m going to fuck you in the ass.” He sought her out at work the next day to say he’d been blackout drunk, Thompson said.

Johnson’s most frequent target was a young digital designer who reported directly to him. Her desk was next to Johnson’s, and other members of the labs team said she was the butt of all his lewdest comments. In summer 2010, he said something so inappropriate that the team, in dramatic fashion, dragged her desk away from his and surrounded her with their own desks. No one could recall the exact comment. But both the designer and a former Sunlight employee, Hafeezah Abdullah, said the incident involved Johnson spraying the designer in the face with a can of compressed air used for dusting keyboards. The designer and at least one other team member told HuffPost they complained to the head of operations, who was Sunlight’s de facto HR rep.

I’m trying to imagine a workplace so dysfunctional that people rearrange the furniture to block a sociopath’s access to a colleague; where one of the workers gets blackout drunk (and admits it), and makes obscene suggestions to a coworker. I can’t. I guess I’ve been fortunate, or possibly, oblivious. It sounds to me, though, that Clay Johnson has been disruptive everywhere he works, leaving a trail of chaos through every organization he’s been associated with, and nothing he’s done has substantially harmed his career. Every setback is an opportunity for him to move upwards.

The rape story was appalling. It’s this little incident that tells you something about his destructive personality.

All this time, “his party trick was bringing women down a notch,” said Erie Meyer, the tech worker. At Personal Democracy Forum in 2013, Johnson humiliated her by saying to a group of CEOs she was meeting for the first time, “This is Erie Meyer. She’s Gray Brooks’ fiancée and she has herpes.” She was neither engaged nor did she have a sexually transmitted infection, but “this was Clay’s way of letting people know that I was a plus-one — I was not a person of note.” Meyer sobbed in a stairwell and skipped the rest of the conference.

A year later, Johnson became a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.

That’s why I started with his “apology”. I can believe he knows he has been awful to people. I don’t believe he cares, except when it might interfere with his career — it’s total selfishness.

If you’ve never cared about other human beings all of your life, if you’ve treated your peers as garbage, why should I believe you’ve suddenly discovered empathy now?