So I guess you can take men off the endangered species list.
It wasn’t that long ago we were hearing that men were in trouble. It was said that our manly maleness was under siege from a culture of runaway political correctness hellbent on snipping off our masculine accoutrements and turning us into sissified wimps who ate kale, clipped coupons and talked about our feelings. Fox “News” sounded the alarm about what it dubbed the “feminization” of the American man.
From commentator Todd Starnes warning about colleges that were turning men into women, to anchor Brit Hume explaining that people only think Chris Christie is a bully because they’ve been “feminized,” to morning show co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck asking if all those unmanly men might pose a threat to national security, Fox was on this “story” like hyenas on a gazelle. Beyond Fox, people were writing books with titles like “The War Against Boys” and “Save the Males.”
The recent spate of sexual harassment and assault headlines suggests, not shockingly, that this concern was a tad overblown. Since last month, when film producer Harvey Weinstein was revealed as a porcine abuser of women, we’ve seen dozens of men unmasked as alleged predators against hundreds, maybe thousands, of victims, their reported crimes ranging from sexual harassment to sexual assault to child molestation, and stretching back for decades.
It’s a dishonor roll that includes the gay (Kevin Spacey), the straight (Ben Affleck), the reporter (Glenn Thrush), the comic (Louis C.K.) the hypocrite (Roy Moore), the guy you never would have expected (Al Franken) and the guy you really never would have expected (George H.W. Bush). This column is too short for a complete list and besides, it’d probably be easier at this point to name the men who have not been accused.
