Multiple women are filing sexual harassment charges against a prominent geologist, David Marchant. After reading the accusations, if true, Marchant is not at all suited to a life of teaching.

Willenbring alleges that Marchant, her thesis adviser, then 37, greeted her daily with the words: “Today I’m going to make you cry.” He slept in his own tent and Lewis in the cook tent, leaving Willenbring to share a tent with Jeffrey Marchant, she writes. According to Willenbring, Marchant told her repeatedly that his brother had a “porn-sized” penis, and said she should have sex with him and feel lucky for the opportunity.

One week, Willenbring alleges, David Marchant “decided that he would throw rocks at me every time I urinated in the field.” She cut her water consumption so she could last the 12-hour days far from camp without urinating, then drank liters at night. She says she developed a urinary tract infection and urinary incontinence, which has since recurred. When blood appeared in her urine, she alleges, Marchant prohibited her from going back to McMurdo for treatment.

“Most days,” Willenbring writes, “I would listen to long discussions about how I was a ‘slut’ or a ‘whore.’” When she disagreed, she alleges, “he would call me a liar and say, ‘There’s no place in science for liars, is there Jane? Is there Jane?’” repeating the phrase for up to 20 minutes.

As they neared camp near the end of one arduous day, Willenbring alleges in the complaint that Marchant waited above her on a steep slope. He said, “I noticed someone hasn’t cried today,” grabbed her by the backpack and threw her down the slope, she writes. She climbed up twice more; each time, she claims, he shoved her down again, leaving her bruised, with an injured knee and a twisted wrist.

In another instance, Willenbring alleges in the complaint, Marchant declared it was “training time.” Excited that he might be about to teach her something, Willenbring allowed him to pour volcanic ash, which includes tiny shards of glass, into her hand. She had been troubled by ice blindness, caused by excessive ultraviolet light exposure, which sensitizes the eyes. She says she leaned in to observe, and Marchant blew the ash into her eyes. “He knew that glass shards hitting my already sensitive eyes would be really painful—and it was,” she writes.

That isn’t just sexual harassment, it’s sadistic abuse of a student who is dependent on her instructor and isolated from any support network of any kind. There is also corroboration from other students who were in the field with them.

Willenbring writes that she waited to file her complaint with BU until October 2016, shortly after she received tenure, for fear of professional reprisal from Marchant before she had established herself as a scholar. Several of the women involved and two male witnesses say they feel guilty about not speaking out at the time, guilt that fuels their desire to speak now.

I would hope they feel guilt. Allies ought to speak up when they hear of these things.

Speaking of allies…

Nearly all of the women say they considered reporting the abuse at the time. Doe met with then–department chair Carol Simpson after returning to BU to discuss filing academic charges against Marchant. Doe’s letter alleges that Simpson, noting Marchant’s “sizeable” reputation and funding, “asked me if it wouldn’t just be easier on me to complete my degree and leave. I was astonished, deflated, and, I believed at that time, left without recourse.”

Jesus fucking christ. An academic reputation ought not to shield you from criminal failures to meet your academic obligations as a scholar and a teacher and a citizen of a research community. Bringing in grant money is not the weregild for mistreating those in your care.

I’m impressed with Willenbring for persisting in the face of such traumatic abuse to earn a career of her own in science. I’m not at all impressed with Marchant, no matter how many publications and grants he might have.

Story after story plays out in the same tawdry way. A man becomes rich and influential, with a reputation and fans and a secure life. I try to imagine myself in that position, and it’s not too hard; I’m not rich or famous, but I’ve got reasonable income that means I don’t have to worry, children who’ve grown up and made me proud, and a stable, happy, long term relationship. What if I were an order of magnitude more wealthy? What if I was powerful enough to have clients who relied on me to further their career?

I like to think that if I were in such a position, I’d use it to help people who needed it, would use my greater influence to shape the world in ways I like, would be able to do more to help my family. There’d be a bit of selfishness, too, of course — I’d have more computer toys, more books, more nights out at fabulous restaurants with my wife. At least, I think that’s what I’d do with more luxury.

But apparently not. As a man, if I were wealthy and powerful, this is what I’m supposed to want.

Two decades ago, the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein invited Ashley Judd to the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for what the young actress expected to be a business breakfast meeting. Instead, he had her sent up to his room, where he appeared in a bathrobe and asked if he could give her a massage or she could watch him shower, she recalled in an interview.

There’s more. There are years of Weinstein using his abilities to play cheap sexual games with the women in his employ.

In 2014, Mr. Weinstein invited Emily Nestor, who had worked just one day as a temporary employee, to the same hotel and made another offer: If she accepted his sexual advances, he would boost her career, according to accounts she provided to colleagues who sent them to Weinstein Company executives. The following year, once again at the Peninsula, a female assistant said Mr. Weinstein badgered her into giving him a massage while he was naked, leaving her “crying and very distraught,” wrote a colleague, Lauren O’Connor, in a searing memo asserting sexual harassment and other misconduct by their boss.

I don’t get it. It’s so pathetic — Weinstein is an otherwise normal man, wealthier than most, with a career that lets him fund (and profit from) the production of art, and this is how he uses his power, to play cheap, needy games with those with less power, to attempt to get momentary pleasures out of the suffering of others? To rise so high in one’s own domain and then to use it in such a shabby, contemptible way…why? And it happens so often, with recent examples of Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly. What disease lurks in men’s hearts that this kind of childish, cruel, pointless behavior emerges as they get older and richer?

At least it makes me happy that I’m unambitious enough that I don’t desire to rise out of my ordinary middle-class life — who knows what kind of monster I’d turn into if I had a million dollars? But it does suggest that we need to start a charity to save the poor pitiful Hollywood moguls and spoiled heirs and corporate big guns. We need to restore their humanity and rescue them from the emergence of the poisonous imago dwelling within them by taking most of their money away and distributing it to the poor. It’s the only decent thing to do.

I wonder what the threshold for spawning the horrible man-child incubating within us men-folk is? I don’t think it would be ethical to do the experiment to find out.

Or it could be that Harvey Weinstein is and always has been a terrible human being.

OK, I’ve had enough. A resolution before the UN to condemn executions for apostasy, blasphemy, adultery, and consensual same-sex relations has passed, but Botswana, Burundi, Egypt, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, China, India, Iraq, Japan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates voted against it.

Oh. And one more. The United States voted against it, too, all for allowing countries to continue to execute people for being an atheist or a gay person. The United States. My country.

Can I have myself frozen and thawed out a century, or maybe a thousand years from now, when this madness is over?

(Damn it, no. That cryogenics stuff doesn’t work. We don’t have time machines, either. Technology, you have failed me again!)

Wanna read some classic science fiction from 1958? No you don’t. You will decide that all men are evil; you won’t believe that this monstrosity got written at all, and that it was then actually published. It’s The Queen Bee, by Randall Garrett. The basic story: spaceship with a handful of men and women gets stranded on an earth-like, habitable planet. The men of the crew immediately announce that their destiny is to populate the world, with the assistance, willing or not, of the women. There’s a law, Brytell’s Law, that says they must. They need the women, because they’ll have no purpose in life if they can’t procreate. And they have rules about how to maximize genetic diversity that require pairing off in strict rotation.

You can tell this is some kind of perverse male fantasy.

But there’s a problem: one of the women refuses to be used this way! She’s also useless (she’s a clothing designer, and not useful clothes, but frilly flimsy women’s clothing), and violent in her resistance. So the men come up with a solution. I read it.

Damn. It’s a pdf. I can’t set it on fire, and I can’t afford to throw my computer in a dumpster with a bucket of napalm and set it on fire. Maybe it would make more sense to gather up all the men and throw them in that dumpster with the napalm, me included. Gah. Unclean.

Thanks, Gary Farber. You’ve destroyed the last trace of hope I have in humanity. Although I suppose Randall Garrett is more to blame.

One common refrain among MRAs and such trash is that it’s the women’s fault: they’re using men, they’re money-grubbing gold-diggers, they tease and never put out. So let’s test that: in the absence of manipulative women, are men angels of probity and restraint? We can test this: use a proxy for a woman, one that doesn’t lie, has no ambitions, isn’t going to abuse men. It’s been done. A female sex robot at a tech fair was put on display, and the results were not nice.

Santos complained, ‘The people mounted Samantha’s breasts, her legs and arms. Two fingers were broken. She was heavily soiled.’

‘People can be bad. Because they did not understand the technology and did not have to pay for it, they treated the doll like barbarians.’

Strike one against men.

I did say that only half the experiment has been done, though. We need a complementary test in which a male sex doll is put into the hands of women convention attendees. The result of that experiment will tell us whether it’s just us men who suck, or whether it’s the whole human species that needs to be puked on. I have an open mind, it could go either way.

You may have heard that the founder of AintItCoolNews, Harry Knowles, is being accused of sexual harassment. His little entertainment empire is collapsing fast in the wake of some serious problems.

Melissa Kaercher was acquainted with him and has been attending his events for years, and she has written up an honest analysis of Knowles’ problems. It’s clear how the pattern evolved. Start with a few crude jokes — we’ve all been there. Graduate to gross-out humor. Notice that sexual abuse gets the strongest response. From there, you’re off to the races, and start thinking you can do whatever you want to people. It’s funny!

We have all been there, at least at the early stages. But most of us learn early that we can repel people easily with such behavior, and we tone it down and work to extinguish it. But if you’re famous and popular, if you have rewards, like Knowles’ special, private events, people are less likely to speak out in the early stages, and you’ll also find that other privileged, nasty people gravitate towards you — it’s asshole magnetism. And before you know it, you’re living in a little clique where the decent people try to look the other way, while the similarly bad people are egging you on, until you cross a line that no one can ignore anymore.

It’s tough to handle. People tend not to respond well to criticism. If you do catch them early, and tell someone that, for instance, you don’t appreciate their rape joke, you know what’ll happen: “It was just one little joke! I’m a good guy! Why are you so tight-assed?”, and it all comes back on you. And they don’t invite you to their super-cool party.

But it needs to be done. Don’t let your friends slide down that easy, slick path to abusiveness. Snip it off early.

Speaking of people we don’t need to hear from ever again…James Damore was interviewed by Thomas Smith, and Damore was an example of posturing aggrieved entitlement. Smith kept pointing out that there are real problems of discrimination, and that there are a number of strategies that companies like Google are trying to use to resolve them, and Damore kept objecting to them either by denying the problems, or by suggesting that these programs should be rejected because they are resented by “some people”, like Libertarians who see them as unfair to white men. If a deplorable doesn’t like something, that’s sufficient to reject it. Damore keeps bring up vague generalities and blanket condemnations of sociology, which he clearly doesn’t understand.

“Sensitivity training is unnecessary!”, the pronouncement of insensitive people everywhere.

Smith keeps his feet to the fire throughout, demanding evidence and asking him to back up assertions. It was annoyingly frustrating because he couldn’t — he just dodges, brings up something irrelevant, and wanders off topic, or piles on more claims that need to be debunked. And near the end, Smith tries to get Damore to defend his claim that “men are more logical than women”, and all Damore can muster is a weird circular argument to simultaneously defend the fact that more men are Libertarian than women, and that Libertarianism is more logical, by pointing out that therefore we’d expect more men would be Libertarian.

I never need to hear from Damore ever again.