@Battle of Blair Mountain
precursor to the CIA -- the OSS -- was created.

feminism was "created" by women who thought they ought to have some control over their own lives -- their bodies, their minds, and their activities. its modern roots go back at least to Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of Mary Shelley). as Zinn documents, it emerged organically in many different social contexts, including, for example, the civil rights movement and the labor movement.

i have little patience with people -- especially youngish professional women -- who assert themselves to be "not feminist". what a luxury, to be so very far removed from such recent history -- to not realize that Hillary Clinton (ugh, but still) was ineligible, by virtue of her ovaries, to obtain an undergraduate degree from Yale College.

initially to subvert the suffragge movement, which was very successful, but then to divide us and isolate us.

It is no coincidence the hate men mania has sprung up from the feminist movement. It's really a shame that women's rights has been turned into hatred and vilification of all males.

My children intend to flee this nation. I am glad for them. I am beginning to fucking hate this country.

@mimi
If not dead nuts.

about these hyperactive female androphobes, who abuse their sexist powers and make you feel scared?

That is all bullshit and it destroys the best feelings men and women should have about themselves.

Have a hug from me, I am no androphobe, actually mostly I am an androphil, just when my instincts warn me, I might go to the other side of the street ... so to speak.

This is one of the saddest essays I have read here in a long time.

Peace and Love between the genders, please.

@Betty Clermont

That argument is about as strong as "not all men". Yes, I get it that the vast majority of women have no interest in abusing the obvious problems in these laws and social mores. But it only takes one to do irreparable damage to my entire life. It's a lot like rapists in that regard with stakes that are similar. Sure, most men are not rapists. But you only need one man to be a rapist at the right place and time and so you take precautions.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I hear you saying is that you and many other men no longer have any faith and confidence in the fairness and good judgement of females, children and anyone in a position to decide whether or not sexual assault or harassment has indeed occurred. As you people watch, or watch TV and movies, think honestly about whether or not you have the ability to judge between a human to human interaction and a sexual aggression in the events you are watching. And then ask yourself if its fair on your part to decide that a significant portion of your fellow human beings don't have this same capacity. Yes, there are always dangerous people out there but, like terrorists, are we going to allow them to make the rest of us live in constant fear?

@Betty Clermont @Betty Clermont
to fuck you up forever, because that bad actor will be supported by the full weight of the various relevant social and political institutions -- and bear in mind, i'm not even saying the bad actor is malicious; the poisonous modern rhetoric of what constitutes harassment or abuse (noted above in the essayists anecdote about advice from a lawyer) will lead many individuals to honestly, sincerely, and in good faith believe they have been wronged. Indeed, they may even suffer some of the emotional trauma from having been wronged, because they have been socially preconditioned to view such incidents as abusive exploitation

read Garrison Keillor's version of the events that have led to his being purged, and you may understand just how fraught the situation is for ordinary men.

Your remarks represent the logical go-round of the entire situation. not only are men at risk in every social (and especially, workplace) encounter with women, but attempting to mitigate that risk by avoiding such encounters, or trying to control them by such measures as insisting that other people be always present, is also a violation of men's obligations. Catch-22? This is Catches 23, 29 and 31.

I'm about a hundred to a thousand times more likely to have my life ruined by an angry co-worker than by a foreign terrorist, and i'm well aware of it. what's funny is that nowadays, so many of the women are unaware of it -- they're surprised when i explicitly draw a very clear line. They'll say, for example, "Oh, it's no big deal, we're not at work right now," as if that would save my job when I'm sitting across the desk from the pissed-off HR manager.

The old line goes, "Men are afraid women will laugh at them; women are afraid men will kill them." It's an illuminating framing, but it has always been a half-truth. What men have always been afraid of is that women will "make" them do stupid things (or even evil things -- ref. Lady Macbeth). Now, however, men are afraid that women will destroy them, socially. What an extraordinary development.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but what I hear you saying is that you and many other men no longer have any faith and confidence in the fairness and good judgement of females, children and anyone in a position to decide whether or not sexual assault or harassment has indeed occurred. As you people watch, or watch TV and movies, think honestly about whether or not you have the ability to judge between a human to human interaction and a sexual aggression in the events you are watching. And then ask yourself if its fair on your part to decide that a significant portion of your fellow human beings don't have this same capacity. Yes, there are always dangerous people out there but, like terrorists, are we going to allow them to make the rest of us live in constant fear?

@Pariah Dog
is, he presumes, the origin of the complaint. If accurate, he's a poster person for the argument being made in this essay.

I too have watched this thing wax and wane over the years.

Hi, for those of you who don't recognize or remember me, I joined this site shortly after its inception - came here from another place we all knew. I've been gone for a long time, but now I've decided to return. All that is another story though, and maybe I'll cover it another time.

I've watched this thing with "empowering women" through speaking up about harassment over the years. It can be a good thing. People should stand up when they're being abused, manipulated, or having to live and work around an obnoxious superior/co-worker. But this Me Too movement, while maybe advanced in good faith, has run totally off the rails and become a lynch mob for any guy who even looks at a woman sideways. I don't know, maybe that was the goal - hey nothing would surprise me these days.

I began to suspect it with the accusations, flimsy as they are, against Franken, and persisted even after his attempts to observe standard procedure. I knew it when, at another forum, I tried to interject a word of reason and a reminder of the rule of law and due process, and was called a misogynist.

For the record, the gender neutral user name aside, I'm a woman. I'm an elder woman who endured sexual abuse from the age of six until my late twenties, and countless harassment episodes until as recently as four years ago. I know the subject matter quite well. But I was called a misogynist because I didn't fall in line to "believe the woman" every time, without question, without a moment's hesitation.

The ragged end came for me three days ago when two things happened. First was an ultimatum by the Boss of Bosses at another site - believe the women immediately, never question, never cite the woman's motives or past, never ask about glaring inconsistencies in the story. Doing so will cause banishment from the community.

I can't do that - especially not until all the facts are in. I'm old enough and experienced enough to know that women will sometimes lie about this matter. They have various reasons, revenge, money, self-promotion, dare I say political retribution, but the motive doesn't matter. What matters is, they can and do lie about this.

The second thing was the announcement that Garrison Keillor had been fired from Minnesota Public Radio for "Improper Conduct." No details, no hint as to the "allegations" or who filed them, official statements from the station that grow more confusing and suspicious by the day, yet he was ruthlessly tossed out.

Here we have a man who created and has worked on a hugely popular radio program for 50 plus years. Unlike so many of these other men, there has never been any complaint of this sort against him in all that time. Never. He's now had a single, un-detailed, "allegation" filed against him, which apparently he hasn't even seen. The reaction is - he is unceremoniously booted out the door, his previous work will no longer be distributed (apparently by any NPR station), his current endeavors will not be given air time, his products will not be given space, his current concert tour venues have all cancelled, and the Washington Post will no longer publish his columns.

And for what? Who knows?

That isn't justice. That's not empowering women or anybody else. That's Mob Rule. That flies in the face of every right guaranteed to us in the Constitution - due process, innocent until proven guilty, the right to face one's accuser and their charges. But to say so, to even advance the idea that judgment should be left to the judges after all the evidence is reviewed, is misogynistic and not to be tolerated.

No, I don't blame you one bit gjohnsit. Back in the eighties I knew of grandfathers who hesitated watching their own grandchildren for an afternoon for fear of being accused of something. I spoke to a man who resisted dusting the dirt off his granddaughter's bottom because he didn't want to be thought a pedophile.

I don't know why this country has to run either broiling hot or sub-zero cold on things, nor why it's so unnaturally obsessed with sex, but it does and it is. This particular aspect waxed and waned over the decades, but the Internet has empowered it like nothing ever before. And now, absolutely no one is safe from the accusation that can destroy your life in a minute.

@MrWebster is that non intimate interactions might become much more formal. I always insisted that my kids call adults by last name preceeded by the appropriate title, in order to create a social distance between adult and child.

Seems just a law of sociology that every movement has unintended consequences, even if the movement is positive. If I see a child who may be in distress, my reaction is to hope that some female sees the child. I think we see the dark side of this in ultra conservative societies like Saudi Arabia. One reason women are covered up? The female body arouses male sexual desired which apparently can't be controlled if they see a woman's ankles. Which is a first cousin to the idea that all men can be a rapist or sexual predator so physical contact must be restricted between adult males and any child. Will this even start effecting how fathers interact with their daughters?

Yah, I can easily see one consequence is more gender segregation within workplaces where men find it more comfortable working only with men. One the female side, maybe a greater sense of workplace alienation as male co-workers retreat even from the most simple of interactions.

@Big Al
I just finished my 1st week at a new job. Day one, onboarding, touched on the sexual harassment issue, but day two included four hours of training over it - a couple hours also covered diversity in the workplace, and student record confidentiality. This training included multiple different scenarios and contained facts and court citations of actual court cases on which the scenarios were based.

Frankly, not a single sexual harassment scenario in the course included some poor dupe of a great guy (or gal) getting railroaded by some vengeful or overly sensitive snowflake. And, not all the scenarios ended in the accuser "winning" because, despite what we've been fed here in this essay, everything is not sexual harassment. (A fired staffer from the show Friends did not win her case, and based on what I read, the courts got it right.)

Mutual respect goes a long, long way.

dignity they deserve, you've got nothing to be afraid of.