From the initial revelations on October 5th of Harvey Weinstein's predations up to December 11th the New York Times has tallied 42 men in the media, entertainment, politics, or the corporate world who've been fired or resigned due to sexual misconduct and another 24 whose conduct is under review.
As of the 17th The Daily Beast claims 97 men and one woman who've fallen afoul of the #MeToo movement. And the toll continues to mount almost daily. Indeed, The Daily Caller reports today that MSNBC made a separation payment of $40,000 to an unwilling recipient of boorish behavior by Chris Matthews in 1999.
It's really quite a remarkable development and we might wonder why so many men in positions of influence and power are behaving so badly toward women.
Perhaps one reason is that many of the men guilty of these assaults don't think that what they did was in any objective sense morally wrong, and, sadly enough, the culture in which they've all their lives been steeped has facilitated the very behavior that it now condemns.
Men today have been marinated in pornography from the time they were first able to access the internet, and, concomitantly, they've been inculcated with the Playboy philosophy that sex is really just a form of recreation, like dining out. They've been taught, moreover, that human beings are just animals, the product of blind, impersonal, amoral forces, with animal appetites that yearn to be sated.
They learned during the Clinton years that power has its prerogatives and that as long as you're on the right side of the political spectrum (or actually the left side) you're insulated and protected by your allies from any serious consequences to your behavior. They've also been told, in so many words, that there's really no objective right and wrong because there is no God and morality is just a creation of one's own conscience.
Then men who have absorbed all these lessons throughout their lives, who have been cosseted and feted by society, who have had pretty much whatever they want in life handed to them, who have accepted the notion that Christian morality is an anachronism, find themselves in environments with provocatively attired young women whom, we're told by feminists, have the same drives and desires as men and shouldn't be considered to be different in any significant way.
Indeed, men have had it drilled into them that it's demeaning to put women on a pedestal or to otherwise treat them deferentially.
Then they're told that, even so, they should refrain from acting consistently with all of that.
It's a little bit like putting a plate of fresh-baked cookies in front of a hungry child, telling the child that the cookies are delicious but that he must not touch them, and then being dismayed when the child has crumbs on his chin.
Temptations are hard enough to resist when the tempted individual believes with all his or her heart that it'd be wrong to give in, but they're all but impossible to resist for the person who believes all the cultural, moral, and anthropological claptrap that contemporary men and women have been exposed to and have absorbed over the course of their lifetimes.
After all, if it's true that men and women are just soulless, sexual animals, if there are no objective moral wrongs, if there is no ultimate accountability to a God, if the woman "really wants it" as badly as the man and just needs to have her resistance worn down, what sort of behavior can we realistically expect from men, especially those who have power over their subordinates?
If we sincerely want to change how men behave toward women then we have to change the hyper-sexualized environment in which they grow up, we have to change their belief that they're just material beings, we have to change their belief that something is only wrong if one gets caught, and we have to change the belief that men and women differ only in their anatomy.
Simply punishing men for being found out is only a palliative, a temporary remedy. All it does is send others the message that they themselves need to be more careful, that those who've been shamed have merely transgressed a transient politically correct norm of our very confused and fickle culture, and that with time things will probably revert back to the "good old days," especially if another Bill Clinton is elected to high office.
What punishment alone doesn't accomplish, despite all the insincere mea culpas that the outed villains have dutifully delivered, is to convince either them or others that they've actually done anything objectively wrong.
By the way, Vice-President Mike Pence's rule about never dining with a woman unless his wife is along, a rule for which he was roundly and fatuously mocked, looks pretty smart right now, doesn't it.