This is just a reaction, but I wonder if other people react the same way. Amanda Marcotte wrote a really interesting story today on the way that many of the accused sexual abusers like Charlie Rose, Glenn Thrush, Mark Halperin and Matt Lauer were central to pushing the email story. It is a thoughtful article, based in the Freudian notion of men’s deep fears of women (although she didn’t quite frame it that way). I urge you to go read it if you get a chance.
But much more compelling for me, I followed the link Marcotte offered to the Charlie Rose interview. I watched it for a couple of minutes and then I had to turn away. Knowing what I know now, — the tone of voice dripping with hate and condescension, the badgering, the dark facial expression as he leaned forward, the deep fear of the evil woman that seemed to hang in the background. If he were acting in a play it would have won a Tony. But it wasn’t a play. It was real. And even now, thinking about it, it gives me a chill.
It made me sure that even now Rose is huddled over a bottle in his home, angry at and terrified of the women who he feels betrayed them, wishing he had a way to lash out at them. That these women had used their dark, evil to seduce him, pretended to be good, waiting, waiting to turn on him with their claws because that is what they did. How much he would like to have them in a chair across from him where he could confront them about their evil, their deception.
Perhaps for the first time I realized that misogyny can very easily be a pathology. A pathology that in 2016 took our society down a very dark path.