Platner's "Frat Boy" Crap Is Why We Should Elect More Women

[NNadir]

24. There are many men for whom "no" means "NO!" and who respect as much.

I raised my sons to be men of this type, and I was such a man in myself, including with the woman who became my wife, until she said "yes."

All of my romances that turned sexual in my youth were consensual and generally long lasting and I never thought of women as "conquests;" nor did I have any respect for "frat boy" types at all.

I knew "notch in the gun" types, and uniformly I rejected them as friends.

There is an issue with our, and many other, cultures with respect to the treatment of women, but we should not claim that only women can understand striving for decency in sexual relationships. There is, afterall, the Orange Pedophile's Madam, Ghislane Maxwell.

There are - and we are all aware - women who voted for the orange intellectually weak and immoral rapist in the White House. There are women in the Senate who support him, Senator Collins being among them. Re-electing her will not raise the status of women; it will perpetuate the opposite trend.

I have considered myself a male feminist since my 20's, having had Millet's "Sexual Politics" and Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" on my reading list at that age. I'm an old man now and never forgot what I learned from those readings: None other than Rita Mae Brown of "Rubyfruit Jungle" fame wrote in her philosophical work "Plain Brown Rapper" that she had a hard time understanding that not all men were enemies and not all women were allies, but she did so.

It is intellectually and morally important to understand Brown's point.

Saying that all women candidates are good and all male candidates are bad is simplistic to the extreme. We have after all, on the Supreme Court, an awful religious bigot who voted to surrender women's rights to their own bodies. Barrett is not a decent person because she is a woman. She's a thug, pure and simple, just like the known rapists on the Supreme Court.

Eleanor, not Franklin, Roosevelt is to my mind, the greatest Democrat ever to have lived, and her husband, arguably the greatest Democratic President ever to have lived seems to have had a problem with fidelity, albeit not with a "frat boy" mentality. In her times, Ms. Roosevelt was the greatest feminist in politics, but we cannot say that her husband's sexual peccadillos - which apparently were quite real, he died in the presence of his lover, not his wife - should have precluded his rise to the Presidency. We cannot call Franklin Roosevelt to have been a feminist in the modern sense, but he was the first US President to appoint a woman to the Cabinet, and if he did not respect his marriage as a husband, he respected his wife for her politics and regarded her as a key partner in developing his policies and politics.