Not for the first time, I find myself shaking my head at the apparent either:

A. lapse in recollection
or
B. somewhat startling contemporary obliviousness

exhibited by a whole lot of people with respect to "norms" of social-sexual behavior, and especially, what those norms were back in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

last night while driving home from work, i was listening to the odious, rude, and remarkably stupid Alan Colmes "conversing" with a caller who was trying to assert that in fact, much of what Trump has said over the years (or has been accused of saying or doing in the past) was not that extraordinary for its time. Colmes, as is his wont, dismissed this claim out of hand, reframing it as an accusatory black-and-white question and refusing to allow the caller to respond in a thoughtful way, demanding a "Yes" or a "No". "WAS IT NORMAL FOR A MAN TO PUT HIS HAND UP A WOMAN'S SKIRT??!? NO, I'M ASKING YOU, WAS IT NORMAL FOR A MAN TO PUT HIS HAND UP A WOMAN'S SKIRT??!?!?! YARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE!!!"

well, I'm here to tell you folks, whether you want to face it or not, that in fact, back in the day, yes, it was fucking "normal". this stuff was far more routine than people seem to want to believe. i know this isn't a popular thing to say. i recall that sometime in the last several months, some semi-conservative female commentator of some sort or another was reviled for suggesting that if you really want to crucify every male public figure for the crimes of a not all that distant cultural milieu, you'd better be prepared to crucify your own fathers and grandfathers. howls of outraged senses of decency ensued, and the woman's point was carried off in the huffed and puffed storm of indignation.

the problem is that the commentator was absolutely fucking right. i mean, What the Actual Fuck? have people really lost track of the conditions of pre-feminist western culture? Jesus! In a world where:

the law officially held that the phrase "rape of a wife by her husband" was a legal nonsense;

where a woman who had ever had sex outside of wedlock was effectively presumed by judges and juries to have consented to, well, just about anything else that might have happened to her in the "company" of any random man;

where more generally, any inappropriate physical contact between a man and a woman -- and especially a married man and a woman not his wife -- was presumed to be the result of Naughtiness and Imprudence on the woman's part;

where bizarre homoerotic hazing rituals were established traditions in the US Navy (google up "shellback homoerotic" if you want a taste -- or fuck it, go to this page, where a particularly damaged fuckwit defends these now-banned rituals -- ironically, given that in the immediately preceding part of his essay he praises Ross Perot, who as a Navy officer refused to submit to the ordeal, cementing his outsider status.);

where criminal violent sexual battery was a routine element of male athletic culture -- and i'm not talking about million-dollar athletes assaulting women in bars, or high school golden boys raping cheerleaders while parked up at the submarine races (not that those weren't appalling and common, as they are yet today), i'm talking about athletes -- from high school varsity right through into the pros -- physically sexually assaulting their teammates as part of established hazing traditions;

where "we" were much less sensitive (indeed, almost entirely ignorant of) such concepts as "personal space" and "ownership of one's own body" and so on, such that, other than bible-thumping cranks, nobody imagined it was a meaningfully traumatic psychological experience if a male -- a boss, a "coworker" (quoted because men and women rarely worked in conditions where the women enjoyed a status that legitimately warranted the prefix "co"), a guy at school, some asshole on the subway, or, yes, a "celebrity" -- "copped a feel" as the expression went;

etc. etc. etc.;

in that world, one well within the living memory of anyone more than 45 years old, the kind of shit Donald Trump is accused of (or has bragged about) was absolutely fucking commonplace. i simply cannot abide the fucking denial going on about this. for god's fucking sake, talk to your fucking grandmothers! Have so many people really forgotten the true nature of the battles that women like Gloria Steinem were fighting? Do you really not get the simple reality that up until about 15 years ago, some form or another of droit de seigneur was presumed to be the natural and well-earned reward -- indeed, one of the primary motivating factors -- for any male achieving high socioeconomic status? And that to a large extent it still is? Who the fuck do you think constitutes the clientele of the sex tourism industry? Do you think the planes to the Dominican Republic are filled with slope-browed open-mouthed-drooling perpetually-single basement-masturbating middle-aged virgins? If you socialize at all in circles that include "successful businessmen", then the Who the Fuck in question is, men with whom you are acquainted.

Get a fucking grip, people. It reminds me of all those folks, mostly but not exclusively women, who went to see Saving Private Ryan and were stunned to get, for the first time in their lives, some tiny little clue about what war is about, and what it looks like, and what the men in their lives -- husbands, fathers, sons, grandfathers -- had gone through. The information is not new and it's not a secret -- the literature, fiction and nonfiction, is abundant -- and nobody has an excuse for being unaware of its reality. If your father or grandfather or husband was, prior to 1990 or so, a varsity athlete (particularly, from what I've read over the years, in football, wrestling and hockey), or belonged to a fraternity at college, there's a much better chance than most people seem to want to accept that he was either a perp or a victim or both. I appreciate Chris Whatsisname's essay upbraiding Trump on the matter of modern locker-room talk, but I've also heard the songs sung by British rugby teams, and I can tell you this: If an offhand ironic reference to pussies turns your stomach, the lyrics to those songs would hospitalize you.

Further, as I've written elsewhere in the past, at least a third of the guys in my class in junior high -- myself included -- did things "to" girls that would nowadays be viewed as felonies; whether they would be prosecuted would be largely up to the discretion of the judicial authorities, but if so, the result would be to descend into the waking nightmare of modern life that awaits the classified "sex offender". (And "one third" isn't one of those randomly generated statistics folks like me throw around on blogs, that's a number I generated by iterating through a list of my classmates.)

Trump brays about "grabbing their pussies" and everybody collectively gasps as if every time in the past 50 years that a rock star or athlete or movie star or powerful politician put his hand up a woman's skirt, he either had asked permission, or he was thrown in jail. Well that's fucking bullshit. Men with that kind of status used to take such liberties as a matter of course, and, if the contact were unwanted, about the worst they usually got was a slap in the face. That may be hard to believe in an era when an NBA star might find himself facing charges AND a lawsuit for grabbing a woman's breasts in a bar -- and I say might because it still goes on plenty; one supposes that most women would rather just walk away than put themselves in the middle of a public furor -- but that's really how it was, and any conversation about how relatively horrible Der Trumpf is wrt The Clenis or Her Heinous needs to start with an acknowledgement of the cultural reality. Trump is a loathsome pig for certain, and he might indeed be a loathsome criminal pig, just as WJC appears likely to be, but there's a very wide spectrum between loathsome pig and monstrous sexual predator, and from the information we have at the moment, we cannot assign either of those two pigs a fixed position on that spectrum.

For myself, it's a non-issue. Both of the duopoly candidates are morally unfit to hold any office at all, and they would be just as much so even if they didn't both have disgusting public records of treating certain women in certain circumstances with a level of disregard that is unacceptable.