Creeps or Angels?

Responding to Starshine’s article “How not to raise a sexual assaulter.”

Your article is simplistic and reflects the popular zeitgeist of the moment: “Men are bad and women are good. Men have ‘toxic masculinity,’ and we must destroy the ‘patriarchy.'”

Furthermore, your photo of Kavanaugh and singling-out Trump, while not mentioning, say, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy and Bill Clinton, reinforces your obvious political agenda. And, of course, you will be receiving plenty of criticism on these points, so I won’t belabor the point.

What’s missing from the national dialogue is looking at these issues as a systems analyst would. For millennia, men and women were in “traditional roles,” but that has abruptly changed. Without any moralizing (on my part), men and women today find themselves in situations that heretofore never existed: Women in the fire department, women in the police force, women in the armed service and countless “male role” situations.

More important than blaming one gender, the “system” of excessive alcohol consumption is a major contributor to college campus misbehavior. Both boys and girls get drunk and “sleep over.” In past generations, young women did not get drunk with boys. Again, I’m not blaming boys or girls; but the “system” of gang drunkenness cannot be disregarded.

Also, the system of “positions of power” is something people need to understand and modify … and not simply blame one gender only. Indeed, there are many stories of middle-aged women (teachers) having sex with teenage boys. The “Harvey Weinstein” story is not limited to creepy men.

Castigating an entire gender and requiring their “re-education” is, again, missing the point. If you will truly stand back and look at the changes in society, all of this becomes clearer. Of course, parroting the slogans of the time may be more satisfying, but it misses the social reality and is lazy thinking.

For myself, I choose not to point fingers but to look at the drastic changes in society that have taken place in the last 70 years or so. We aren’t going back, but as a rational society we have to understand that institutional changes have impacted all of us. Men have not suddenly become creeps and rapists, and women are not suddenly angelic victims. All genders are going to have to learn how to function in our new reality.