Are the men horrified, or are they sounding out whether they can get away with it themselves?
How much of the male reaction is related to diet mentality? "I had to turn down the ice cream, so you should have to turn down the ice cream; if you had the ice cream and didn't get fat (hit on the 16yo and didn't get caught/punished), I'm going to be big mad."
My only moment of glory was getting hit on by Bernard Williams at a philosophy colloquium in the 1980s. I know no one outside of philosophy has ever heard of Williams. But he was a big deal in philosophy! He was married at the time. I kind of cringe a bit whenever Kate Manne writes about how awesome Williams is, though if you like his philosophy that's totally fine. It's independent of his behavior at conferences. Manne's young, she's your age, so she probably never met him.
Bernard Williams is incredibly famous in the UK, not because of his philosophy but because his wife was one of the most powerful people in the country. She claimed that having an unsupportive husband who was having regular affairs is what stopped her from becoming Prime Minister.
> Men, I’ve noticed, seem way more interested in the Epstein story than women are. This does not surprise me, and I’m trying to figure out why.
Most sexual violence is perpetrated by boring normal guys, but most guys *are* boring normal guys, and most of their friends are boring normal guys. The release valve for that cognitive dissonance is to focus on fantastical sex crimes that boring normal guys couldn't possibly pull off, as opposed to boring normal domestic abuse, which boring normal guys can and do pull off all the time. (This is also why a particular type of Substack commenter is weirdly fixated on sex crimes committed by trans women -- all two of them -- to say nothing of stuff like QAnon.)
A thought on the Bluesky post on gut-checking about the praise of one's mentor: I don't want to say there isn't something in it, but it's also true that falseness is the default in academia, it doesn't have to have anything to do with gender. One can listen to years of encouragement and praise from someone before discovering it was all insincere (not that, in the unlikely event that she sees my substack comments, I accuse my PhD advisor of this! but just generally)
And regarding the interest of men in Epstein (ok sample size of one) until this week I only vaguely followed news about him, but now that I can read his correspondence with Larry Summers suddenly I can't look away.
The spectacle of one of the most famous academics in the country embarrassing himself in this fashion is impossible not to take pleasure in. But it is what you wrote about yesterday, gossip for the sake of gossip.
I don't think that the wider vortex of interest in Epstein is particularly male: the Republicans in Congress who are breaking with Trump on the issue are anti-Semitic women. (How to respond to this when it comes to a real sex crime conspiracy lead by a Jewish financier is difficult! It is sort of like PizzaGate but maybe real?)
But Epstein himself seemed to incarnate a kind of amoral male fantasy. I suspect this is why he fascinated not just men who read the papers but Summers, Clinton, Bill Gates, Noam Chomsky (!?), those high-profile bankers who had to resign for associating with him...
(Yes a thousand times on the falseness of academic praise: it is possible to make real friends but the large world of friends-of-friends is full of backstabbing, lauding people to their face and insulting them behind their back, even when lust has nothing to do with it!)
One striking thing about these Epstein emails from 2016 - 2019 is that we had just gone through an election where ‘the emails’ literally torpedoed the leading candidate. And yet all these powerful people were frantically emailing Epstein.
"So yes, a thought for all the women leched upon by their supposed mentors. And one as well for those never mentored in the first place."
Fair enough. We men love to complain that women succumb to the "apex fallacy" by assuming all men enjoy the same perks as the men at the top of the pecking order. When it comes to imagining the experiences of women, I'm starting to think I'm wearing the same blinders.
I think something like this operates in all sorts of arenas. You also get the notion that white privilege consists of going to prep school, when it's like, most white people are not attending Andover. What's tricky with the example of beautiful women is that it is not solely experienced as privilege. It's all told almost certainly better than being ugly but it has its own drawbacks.
Men don’t sexually harass women in the workplace for their youth or beauty but for their powerlessness. Age, looks, ethnicity, it doesn’t matter. You are rated by your vulnerability.
I'm familiar with this assertion, but don't think it quite holds up. Sometimes, sure - the housekeeper harassed or assaulted because she's a woman, vulnerable, and in the house. And domestic violence, assault, etc. are not crimes particular to any one demographic of women, or just to ones of any sort of looks.
But if you're talking about which women are asked out/drooled over by a lecherous boss, as opposed to ignored (or not hired to begin with) by such a boss, as in the story Marie Le Conte tells, and indeed as in other MeToo type accounts (for example:https://bsky.app/profile/honoriavalemon.bsky.social/post/3m5timx3dvc23), yeah there is a thing in the world where young and beautiful women are given unpleasant excessive attention at work and older/plainer ones are given insufficient work-related attention. This is *a* thing that's out there. I have seen it play out!
Where it gets complicated: young fashion models are notoriously harassed at work. Is this because they're beautiful, or because they're a subset of beautiful women who, all things equal, may feel they have little else to leverage, may be far from home, etc? I suspect both factors enter into it.
I guarantee that women who are not stunning can still to this day post on Twitter that they got their doctorates without men on the platform losing their minds. I'm sure it's all things equal nice to be pretty, but there's a specific sort of awfulness that youth and beauty in combination are magnets for.
But very few people, male or female, are beautiful. Most of us are ordinary. Yet the sexual harassment of women is commonplace. It happens to the poor, the homely, the infirm, the non-young. It’s not confined to offices or the middle-classes or universities. Predators don’t divide women into two classes. They just look for weakness.
I'm not sure if we disagree or are talking past each other. It's clearly the case that women of all sorts get sexually harassed and worse, and that vulnerability plays into it. I would never claim that only the stunning get harassed, any more than that only the stunning get married! Most people are not stunning, most interactions good bad and in between are between normal-looking people.
What I'm getting at, also in my follow-up comment from yesterday, and what Marie Le Conte gets at better still in her post, is that there's a certain *type* of negative male attention that targets attractive young women. That, and a corresponding type of negative male *lack* of attention (as in, treated as invisible) that happens to older/plainer women. No one's going to argue me out of this one because I have *seen* it, time and again, in countless contexts, for decades. But it doesn't mean that that's the only sort of male misconduct or violence around.
Does it really happen that often to the homely? (Especially the obese; just dealing with reality here). I agree with Phoebe here. I don't know how good looking or old or in shape you are but I've known a decent number of women of different looks/ages/sizes and the amount of advances (including unwanted/sexual harassment) varies a LOT. Even if they are equally vulnerable/powerless. I have a hard time believing you don't realize that.
which was promoted as a “living while Middle-Eastern in Bush’s Texas after 9/11”, but was actually about a teenage girl navigating older male attention. There’s a moment when she picks up a girlie mag and, instead of being repulsed, as my goodie-goodie mind expected, is transfixed by all the attention she imagines she can gain by behaving in the manner of the Playmates in the mag. It was such a surprise that it forced me to consider that some girls who receive this type of attention decide to play with fire. To your point, this is a small subsection of adolescent girls, but I am glad that I saw this portrayed. I also do think about the fact that the movie was written and directed by Ball, a gay man, and the attention that adolescent gay boys receive from older gay men who are more explicitly mentors into the gay world (no judgement on my part; Savage’s “campfire rule” is wise), so perhaps he is superimposing his experience onto girls, which may be an error.
- There were a *lot* of stories that came out of #MeToo and continue to drip out, mostly from the New Golden Age era of cinema but radiating far and wide, as well as stories both my wives have told me (and, to be frank, Anzari-esque cluelessness bordering on willful ignorance on my part as a twentysomething in the ‘90s). But something about Fran Liebowitz’s casual descriptions of what she and fellow waitresses put up with from their employer made it even more visceral (she also, as is her way, made a point to pronounce that the actresses Weinstein harassed “knew what they were getting into”). There’s a lot I didn’t like about #MeToo as a method of meting out “justice”, but there was a “there” there. How to proceed is the tricky part, I agree. There’s that meme about how a handsome male colleague and schlubby male colleague get different reactions from an attractive female coworker that’s ostensibly about unfairness (it’s very incel), but if women are to have full agency you need to say “thems the breaks, maybe next time” (or stop worrying about it so much). I dunno, I’m spitballing at this point.
Alan Ball also wrote "American Beauty," which, barf. I would recommend against drawing general conclusions about teenage girls and/or middle-aged men from anything Alan Ball had creative control over.
N=1, but my wife is the one who brings the topic up, I just gravely nod my head and either agree it's bad and/or point out there's probably a lot of speculation in there still, which I guess she might take as defending someone involved there.
Are the men horrified, or are they sounding out whether they can get away with it themselves?
How much of the male reaction is related to diet mentality? "I had to turn down the ice cream, so you should have to turn down the ice cream; if you had the ice cream and didn't get fat (hit on the 16yo and didn't get caught/punished), I'm going to be big mad."
My only moment of glory was getting hit on by Bernard Williams at a philosophy colloquium in the 1980s. I know no one outside of philosophy has ever heard of Williams. But he was a big deal in philosophy! He was married at the time. I kind of cringe a bit whenever Kate Manne writes about how awesome Williams is, though if you like his philosophy that's totally fine. It's independent of his behavior at conferences. Manne's young, she's your age, so she probably never met him.
Bernard Williams is incredibly famous in the UK, not because of his philosophy but because his wife was one of the most powerful people in the country. She claimed that having an unsupportive husband who was having regular affairs is what stopped her from becoming Prime Minister.
I had no idea! I'll have to read up on all that.
> Men, I’ve noticed, seem way more interested in the Epstein story than women are. This does not surprise me, and I’m trying to figure out why.
Most sexual violence is perpetrated by boring normal guys, but most guys *are* boring normal guys, and most of their friends are boring normal guys. The release valve for that cognitive dissonance is to focus on fantastical sex crimes that boring normal guys couldn't possibly pull off, as opposed to boring normal domestic abuse, which boring normal guys can and do pull off all the time. (This is also why a particular type of Substack commenter is weirdly fixated on sex crimes committed by trans women -- all two of them -- to say nothing of stuff like QAnon.)
A thought on the Bluesky post on gut-checking about the praise of one's mentor: I don't want to say there isn't something in it, but it's also true that falseness is the default in academia, it doesn't have to have anything to do with gender. One can listen to years of encouragement and praise from someone before discovering it was all insincere (not that, in the unlikely event that she sees my substack comments, I accuse my PhD advisor of this! but just generally)
And regarding the interest of men in Epstein (ok sample size of one) until this week I only vaguely followed news about him, but now that I can read his correspondence with Larry Summers suddenly I can't look away.
The spectacle of one of the most famous academics in the country embarrassing himself in this fashion is impossible not to take pleasure in. But it is what you wrote about yesterday, gossip for the sake of gossip.
I don't think that the wider vortex of interest in Epstein is particularly male: the Republicans in Congress who are breaking with Trump on the issue are anti-Semitic women. (How to respond to this when it comes to a real sex crime conspiracy lead by a Jewish financier is difficult! It is sort of like PizzaGate but maybe real?)
But Epstein himself seemed to incarnate a kind of amoral male fantasy. I suspect this is why he fascinated not just men who read the papers but Summers, Clinton, Bill Gates, Noam Chomsky (!?), those high-profile bankers who had to resign for associating with him...
(Yes a thousand times on the falseness of academic praise: it is possible to make real friends but the large world of friends-of-friends is full of backstabbing, lauding people to their face and insulting them behind their back, even when lust has nothing to do with it!)
Epstein's evil is specifically as a man so men might be more horrified by him because of that.
That's a good point.
One striking thing about these Epstein emails from 2016 - 2019 is that we had just gone through an election where ‘the emails’ literally torpedoed the leading candidate. And yet all these powerful people were frantically emailing Epstein.
Yes, thus the countless 'but his emails' posts I've read on social media in the past week or so!
"So yes, a thought for all the women leched upon by their supposed mentors. And one as well for those never mentored in the first place."
Fair enough. We men love to complain that women succumb to the "apex fallacy" by assuming all men enjoy the same perks as the men at the top of the pecking order. When it comes to imagining the experiences of women, I'm starting to think I'm wearing the same blinders.
I think something like this operates in all sorts of arenas. You also get the notion that white privilege consists of going to prep school, when it's like, most white people are not attending Andover. What's tricky with the example of beautiful women is that it is not solely experienced as privilege. It's all told almost certainly better than being ugly but it has its own drawbacks.
I think it's also just more fun to imagine charmed lives, even if we're starting from a place of ressentiment.
Men don’t sexually harass women in the workplace for their youth or beauty but for their powerlessness. Age, looks, ethnicity, it doesn’t matter. You are rated by your vulnerability.
I'm familiar with this assertion, but don't think it quite holds up. Sometimes, sure - the housekeeper harassed or assaulted because she's a woman, vulnerable, and in the house. And domestic violence, assault, etc. are not crimes particular to any one demographic of women, or just to ones of any sort of looks.
But if you're talking about which women are asked out/drooled over by a lecherous boss, as opposed to ignored (or not hired to begin with) by such a boss, as in the story Marie Le Conte tells, and indeed as in other MeToo type accounts (for example:https://bsky.app/profile/honoriavalemon.bsky.social/post/3m5timx3dvc23), yeah there is a thing in the world where young and beautiful women are given unpleasant excessive attention at work and older/plainer ones are given insufficient work-related attention. This is *a* thing that's out there. I have seen it play out!
Where it gets complicated: young fashion models are notoriously harassed at work. Is this because they're beautiful, or because they're a subset of beautiful women who, all things equal, may feel they have little else to leverage, may be far from home, etc? I suspect both factors enter into it.
Another recent and linkable example: https://bsky.app/profile/juliet-turner.bsky.social/post/3m5twya7n4s2q
I guarantee that women who are not stunning can still to this day post on Twitter that they got their doctorates without men on the platform losing their minds. I'm sure it's all things equal nice to be pretty, but there's a specific sort of awfulness that youth and beauty in combination are magnets for.
But very few people, male or female, are beautiful. Most of us are ordinary. Yet the sexual harassment of women is commonplace. It happens to the poor, the homely, the infirm, the non-young. It’s not confined to offices or the middle-classes or universities. Predators don’t divide women into two classes. They just look for weakness.
I'm not sure if we disagree or are talking past each other. It's clearly the case that women of all sorts get sexually harassed and worse, and that vulnerability plays into it. I would never claim that only the stunning get harassed, any more than that only the stunning get married! Most people are not stunning, most interactions good bad and in between are between normal-looking people.
What I'm getting at, also in my follow-up comment from yesterday, and what Marie Le Conte gets at better still in her post, is that there's a certain *type* of negative male attention that targets attractive young women. That, and a corresponding type of negative male *lack* of attention (as in, treated as invisible) that happens to older/plainer women. No one's going to argue me out of this one because I have *seen* it, time and again, in countless contexts, for decades. But it doesn't mean that that's the only sort of male misconduct or violence around.
Does it really happen that often to the homely? (Especially the obese; just dealing with reality here). I agree with Phoebe here. I don't know how good looking or old or in shape you are but I've known a decent number of women of different looks/ages/sizes and the amount of advances (including unwanted/sexual harassment) varies a LOT. Even if they are equally vulnerable/powerless. I have a hard time believing you don't realize that.
You are revolting. Enough with the mansplaining.
So good Phoebe
Thank you!
Two quasi-related thoughts:
- I think of the Alan Ball movie *Towelhead*,
which was promoted as a “living while Middle-Eastern in Bush’s Texas after 9/11”, but was actually about a teenage girl navigating older male attention. There’s a moment when she picks up a girlie mag and, instead of being repulsed, as my goodie-goodie mind expected, is transfixed by all the attention she imagines she can gain by behaving in the manner of the Playmates in the mag. It was such a surprise that it forced me to consider that some girls who receive this type of attention decide to play with fire. To your point, this is a small subsection of adolescent girls, but I am glad that I saw this portrayed. I also do think about the fact that the movie was written and directed by Ball, a gay man, and the attention that adolescent gay boys receive from older gay men who are more explicitly mentors into the gay world (no judgement on my part; Savage’s “campfire rule” is wise), so perhaps he is superimposing his experience onto girls, which may be an error.
- There were a *lot* of stories that came out of #MeToo and continue to drip out, mostly from the New Golden Age era of cinema but radiating far and wide, as well as stories both my wives have told me (and, to be frank, Anzari-esque cluelessness bordering on willful ignorance on my part as a twentysomething in the ‘90s). But something about Fran Liebowitz’s casual descriptions of what she and fellow waitresses put up with from their employer made it even more visceral (she also, as is her way, made a point to pronounce that the actresses Weinstein harassed “knew what they were getting into”). There’s a lot I didn’t like about #MeToo as a method of meting out “justice”, but there was a “there” there. How to proceed is the tricky part, I agree. There’s that meme about how a handsome male colleague and schlubby male colleague get different reactions from an attractive female coworker that’s ostensibly about unfairness (it’s very incel), but if women are to have full agency you need to say “thems the breaks, maybe next time” (or stop worrying about it so much). I dunno, I’m spitballing at this point.
Alan Ball also wrote "American Beauty," which, barf. I would recommend against drawing general conclusions about teenage girls and/or middle-aged men from anything Alan Ball had creative control over.
I forgot about that, which shows how undeserving its accolades were.
I liked True Blood, and many speak highly of Six Feet Under
N=1, but my wife is the one who brings the topic up, I just gravely nod my head and either agree it's bad and/or point out there's probably a lot of speculation in there still, which I guess she might take as defending someone involved there.