Not All Men Are Scum

OK, I'VE HAD IT. Turnabout is fair play and it's time for me, as a man, to yell back at all the feminists who've been cussing out my sex for the last two weeks.

I'm tired of hearing, as an editorial writer for The New York Times recently said, that all "men are pigs, and they like it that way."

And I don't like people assigning chauvinist characteristics to me on the basis of my disagreement with the feminist legal agenda.

Allow me to explain. Last week, I co-authored a dissent to The Crimson's staff editorial. The focus of the staff editorial was the sexual harassment charges which Professor Anita Hill made against (now Associate Justice) Clarence Thomas. The staff advised the U.S. Senate to reject Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court.

In our dissent, we felt inclined to believe Thomas's story, and that we thought the evidence was against Hill's. But I certainly fail to see how Hill could have begun to plot against Thomas 10 years ago.

She may indeed be telling the truth. But to state, as many feminists have recently, that whether or not Anita Hill's story is true, it is good that she made the charge, smacks of the worst type of sexism possible. Even though some men are pigs, we should not all be tarred with the same brush.

Name-calling doesn't begin, however, to solve the legal question. The evidence in this case certainly left lingering doubts about who was telling the truth. I could not in good conscience have convicted Thomas in a court of law. And that led me to believe he should have the benefit of the doubt in the Senate.

But the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission thinks the standard of law in cases of sexual harassment should be "the state of mind of the woman." I find this a difficult and entangling legal standard. Even in contract law the standard includes the state of mind of both parties.

The EEOC and those feminists who back this subjective standard of harassment would like us to abandon a thousand years of Anglo-Saxon legal precedent. Such an abandonment will not end harassment. It will merely destroy the rule of law.

However, I recognize that there are particular difficulties with proving sexual harassment, and that these difficulties might warrant some deviation from the innocent-until-proven-guilty standard. But the current subjective standard is inevitably open to abuse. Like most who wish to recognize the rights of both plaintiff and accuser, I will remain skeptical of sexual harassment law and some sexual harassment charges until a more objective standard can be devised. And until then I will continue to give at least some benefit of the doubt to the accused, as I did in the case of Justice Thomas.

DOES THAT MAKE ME A PIG?

Allison B. Clark '92 thinks so. She wrote a letter condemning us as being, essentially, pigs. "The opinions expressed by these editors in discussing the credibility of Anita Hill's testimony force me to repeat the phrase that I have heard exasperated women say to men again and again this weekend: You just don't get it," Clark writes.

She goes on to elaborate what she claims to be the effects of our (presumed) views about women. In effect, she accuses us of objectifying women and thus allowing--and by extension, perpetrating--many abuses, including harassment. Attempting to hit close to home, Clark ends her litany of abuses by saying that "women are told that if they go to final clubs, they should expect to be physically harassed. Let's not make excuses for harassment simply because men are men."

After relating the evil things that men do to women and telling me I'm responsible for them, Clark goes on to relate two hypothetical situations resembling Hill's alleged harassment by Thomas. In the second, she posits a male worker harassed in the same way in which Hill says she was harassed by Thomas. "I suggest that this man would not speak out," she states.

Clark is not the only person railing against men. Since Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio first broke the Hill story, I've heard time and time again from women that "all men are pigs," that we "wouldn't understand, now, would you?" and, as Clark says, "You just don't get it."

Well, Miss Clark, and all you sexist feminists, I'm here to tell you that I don't make excuses for men who harass or abuse women. Or men who harass or sexually abuse other men. For that matter, I, and many other men, make no excuses for any-one who harasses or sexually abuses another person. And I'm also here to tell you that YOU just don't get it.

Because some men have been repulsed since sixth or seventh grade, when they first heard a peer "brag about his sexual prowess" and discuss pornography. Some men have tried, to the best of their ability, to treat women as women and also as equals.

Some men have never been in a final club and have avoided them like the plague, decrying the way in which some members of these clubs and some members of fraternities at other universities, treat women. Some men have based their decision to come to Harvard in part on Harvard's lack of fraternities.

Some men, such as I, have been sexually abused and harassed.

WHEN I WAS IN fifth grade, the 13-year-old son of a neighbor family abused me repeatedly over a period of two weeks. My brother played with the family's younger children often. I was never particularly friendly with them. The neighbor kid would throw me down on the ground, and sit on top of me. He'd stare down into my face and recite obscenities as he manipulated my genitals. This happened four or five times, two of them in front of my brother and the kid's siblings.

I finally worked up the courage to tell my parents, and they told his father, who punished him severely.

Several years later I was the victim of a perverse case of harassment perpetrated by two of my classmates.

We were freshmen in high school at all all-boys' school, and although I was taller than many of the guys in my class, I was quiet, reserved and never discussed girls' body parts. Or my sexual prowess. These two classmates were flaming heterosexuals and took great pride in their explicit descriptions of their sexual conquests.

I'll never be certain why they did what they did, but for close to a month, they made my life a living hell. They decided to pretend to be gay and to hit on me at every possible moment.

They were less discrete than Hill alleges Thomas to have been, but they were no less explicit. In study hall, at lunch, and between classes they described how we could have sex. They would come up to me in the locker room after I'd taken a shower and threaten to grab my towel. In class, one of them would always attempt to sit behind me. If successful, he would begin the explicit descriptions in a whisper, and when the teacher had his head turned, begin to rub my back. In the halls they would attempt to pinch me where bosses have been pinching secretaries for ages.

Now, Clark says that her hypothetical worker would not have come forward. I did, even though I knew my classmates would revile me. Those in other grades especially found my charges difficult to believe. My two harassers for days denied that they had done anything. In my case, enough people had noticed what was going on. When questioned by our principal one or two of my friends corroborated my story. So, even though the abusers were the two most popular guys in my class and both came from families who had been connected with my prep school for years, I spoke up.

Mine were exceptional cases, however, and I recognize that. All too often our society suspects the harassed of having some-how "asked for" what their harassment, or even for their rape. This unwarranted suspicion forces too many of us to remain silent.

UNTIL LAST WEEK I had not spoken to anyone at Harvard about these incidents. Although I rarely thought about them until last week, these experiences forever distanced me from the warped culture which fosters the devaluation of women into mere objects of male lust and domination.

There have been times at which I have not treated women as well as I should, but I believe that I have never been guilty of harassment. I cannot remember ever having told even a dirty joke in front of a woman. I am a stranger to pornography.

Someone who has felt the pain of harassment and abuse can feel the empathy needed to understand what women feel all too often in our society. I would venture to say that my fellow pro-Thomas dissenters are capable of such empathy, even if they have never been so abused or harassed.

Some studies have shown that one eighth of the men in the United States have been sexually abused. The feminists who defended Hill disagree with me about the legal means to end harassment. We don't disagree about ends, just about means. Every time a woman says men "just don't get it," she forgets the many men who "get it" all too profoundly.

You have picked the wrong conservative to label as an insensitive, chauvinist pig.