Horndogs and Hosebeasts – a Spectrum (part 2)

You know you’ve got an innate sense of bad timing when one day after you post an article ridiculing a social movement’s more insane tenets, one of it’s most infamous villains is released from prison on a technicality. Well, nobody ever called me prescient. Bill Cosby drugged and raped women. If ever there was an example of a powerful man abusing his position and committing criminal assault in the process, Bill Cosby is it. Whether or not he should have been released based on the original prosecutor breaking a verbal agreement NOT to prosecute is not debatable if you believe in the rule of law. But that doesn’t stop it from being very disappointing. Whether you feel the complete destruction of his career, professional reputation and the loss of millions of dollars and his freedom for over 2 years is enough of a punishment for his crime IS up for debate. Suffice to say, my critique of the #metoo movement is not intended to exonerate scumbags like Bill Cosby. It is to point out that most of us men are nothing like him. On with part 2 of my 2018 essay Horndogs and Hosebeasts – a Spectrum:

A recent Quinnipiac poll found that nearly half (47%) of women say they have been sexually assaulted – which sounds like an enormous number until you understand that ‘assault’ was defined in the poll as ‘someone touched you in an inappropriate or sexual manner without your consent’. Based on this definition, I’m pretty sure I’ve been assaulting women, and have been assaulted BY women most of my adult life. I tried to kiss my current girlfriend of 6 years after our first date. I didn’t submit a written proposal first, or even ask. It seemed like the thing to do. I was apparently wrong. She deftly turned the other cheek and I collided with the side of her lovely face. There was a second date and I didn’t make the same mistake; I went full stealth, snuck in quickly from behind ala Joe Biden, and kissed her neck before she had a chance to counter. Fortunately she didn’t slap me and the rest of the night went rather well. But in hindsight, by this definition of assault, I have to wonder if I could have found my face on the cover of ‘Assaulter Weekly’ with the headline ‘Creepy uncle Johnson’ the next morning. Imagine if I ran for public office and the world found out I wrote a blog for an adult DVD website? What magazine would I end up on then? All of them?

Comedian and actor Aziz Ansari received the dreaded assault charge from a woman who said a date night with him turned into ‘the worst night of my life.’ One read through the cringe-worthy details and two things become clear: This girl leads a remarkably joyful life if fellatio is an integral part of her ‘worst night ever’, and the goal posts of what constitutes ‘assault’ just got moved again. Even the tragically progressive New York Times ran an opinion piece titled “Aziz Ansari is guilty. Of not being a mind reader.” Like high profile college ‘rapes’ that turned out to be day-after regret, this episode appears to be an another example of mixed messages or worse – revenge for hurt feelings. We all know what Aziz was thinking…what the hell was she?

 

So let’s review several take-aways from #metoo: Touching is off the table. Somebody better tell Joe Biden. It’s too late for Al Franken, who lost his day job for just pretending to touch a sleeping woman’s breasts while pulling a goofy face – and he was a comedian at the time. When a comedian gets fired over a lewd joke that was unfortunately captured on film – I submit we may already be well down the slippery slope of PC stupidity. Some of the women who came forward accusing Trump of sexual assault said he ‘stared at them like they were a piece of meat’. So really…leering is off the table too. I don’t know if I can live in a world without leering… How about impure thoughts? Fantasizing? If some hapless horndog daydreams his way into a boink-fest with Mila Cunis, is he also persona-non-grata in the #Metoo-of-the-month club? Hell, even her name makes me think carnal thoughts…  Have I therefore committed ‘virtual’ assault? It’s a rhetorical question.

Are all men really mindless sexual predators, incapable of resisting violent evolutionary urges to mate? In a word, no. In the US, around .03% of us are rapists. Granted, that’s .03% too many, but I’m looking for some perspective here. I wonder how much higher that percentage is in Hollywood? DC? That’s not to say that the rest of us are not horndogs perhaps, but predators? The overwhelming majority of us are not. The way I see it, horndogs comprise a spectrum of masculinity,  from fashion designers, figure skaters and hair band guitarists all the way up to rugby players, Russian weight lifters and Navy Seals. Most of us men fall somewhere in the middle. Very few of us have ever considered texting a picture of our Johnson to a woman in a spectacularly misguided attempt at impressing her, (does that EVER work?) and even less of us are twisted enough to think that flogging the dolphin into a potted plant in front of a terrified woman is somehow OK. However, most of us at some point or, at every point of our lives, concern ourselves with chasing after women. It’s what we do – it’s literally coded into our horndoggy brains. How we go about it separates the men from the assholes. #metoo shines a bright light on the despicable behavior of sexual predators, rapists and perverts, and that’s a good thing. But it also seems to target the nature of masculinity itself as socially aberrant. Men and women are different, and no amount of tweeting is likely to change this.

Johnson Bangerwell