Without a doubt, 2017 is shaping up to be a year showcasing the worst specimens of the male species ever produced in the American Experiment.
From Donald Trump to Bill Cosby to Richard Spencer to Stephen Paddock and now, Harvey Weinstein, the American public has grown accustomed this year to the spectacle of grown men, many of them rich and powerful, behaving in foul ways that can only be termed pathological. For some of them, such as Paddock, the origins of their defective psychologies remain murky, their motives opaque. For others, like the neo-Nazi Spencer or the race-baiting GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore (the newest entrant to the year’s sociopathic sweepstakes) racism is the primary trigger. For still others, like Trump, Cosby and Weinstein, their behavior today is the natural culmination of decades of leveraging their wealth and power to gain whatever they wanted, most tellingly manifesting itself in the blatant abuse and sexual harassment of women who are reduced to collateral damage in their wake.
Heather Havrilesky, writing for New York Magazine, has a name for this phenomenon we’re witnessing: “The Year of the Sociopathic Baby-Men”:
[I]t feels like we’re cursed by an increasingly grotesque subspecies of this infantile beast at every turn. Does the world even feel real to powerful men, or is it more like playing an exciting video game? How else do two world leaders with nuclear weapons capable of murdering millions of people trade juvenile insults like toddlers battling over a toy? What else makes it seem fun and exciting to break a window in a hotel tower and point one of 43 assault weapons out a window at a crowd below? Are we really going to hold our collective breaths and watch these angry fools determine our fates? How is this reality?
The fact that scores of women came forward to attest to instances of being harassed by the current occupant of the Oval Office has faded from our collective memory as we’ve been forced to cope with the real-world consequences of his other personality defects. But he’s now simply the most recognizable face of a growing pattern of men who’ve seemingly decided the rules of basic human decency and respect simply don’t apply, and in fact are meant to be flouted and ignored. They come from different backgrounds and different political persuasions, but one thing is constant—they don’t give a damn about anyone else in this world, and they’re hell bent on demonstrating that fact:
Weinstein led Sivan to the kitchen of the restaurant, which was closed at the time. There were two staffers in the kitchen, whom Weinstein excused, leaving him alone with Sivan in a small area just outside the kitchen. Sivan claims Weinstein then attempted to kiss her, at which point she pulled away and told Weinstein she had a boyfriend. Weinstein reportedly answered by saying, "Well, can you just stand there and shut up," then exposed himself, masturbated and quickly ejaculated into a nearby potted plant. He then zipped up his pants and exited through the kitchen.
What kind of person does this? This is fucked up behavior under any system of norms that the rest of the modern human race is expected to adhere. It’s the same type of behavior that Trump exhibits when he encourages attacks on journalists, or on immigrants, when he blames Puerto Ricans for their response to a natural disaster, when he viciously attacks Hillary Clinton with a video depicting her getting knocked down, or bawls about “fake news” every the media brings up the subject of his collusion with the Russian government to influence the election that put him into the Office. It’s not normal behavior. What it demonstrates is a bizarre sense of entitlement that deliberately and obnoxiously belittles and insults those of us who expect decent behavior from our fellow citizens, and even moreso from our elected officials.
It’s the same sort of disregard that thinks it’s fine to promote a Nazi march made up of pampered white men ginned up with imagined grievances that pale in reality to the brutal experiences of people of color in our society. It’s the same wholesale selfishness that prompts a famous actor-comedian to drug women so he can have sex with them. It’s the same psychosis that allows someone to open fire on innocent people for apparently nothing more than a way to mitigate the pain of self-inflicted gambling debts.
And that’s the crux of it—to these people, the Spencers, the Cosbys, the Trumps, the Paddocks—we don’t matter. What we think doesn’t matter:
When you really slow down the tape on Weinstein — or Trump, or Cosby, or Stephen Paddock, or Richard Spencer, and make no mistake, you have to work very hard not to draw lines between these men by now — what you see more than anything else is a profound lack of connection to other human beings. It’s not just that women or strangers or people of color or children of immigrants or Muslims don’t rate in their world. It’s that other human beings in general are utterly irrelevant. You are useful and part of the club or you’re cast out like trash. The second you’re not useful, you are waste. Or you were always waste. Your feelings about the matter couldn’t be less relevant. Whether or not their behavior will ruin you or literally end your life and the lives of countless others is utterly insignificant to these people.
Havrilesky stresses that labelling this a pure consequence of maleness unfairly indicts the vast majority of men who’ve managed somehow not to behave like louts all of their lives. More than that it ignores the danger that tolerating these types of men represents to all of us, both sexes included:
I don’t buy that. What we’re seeing in the Sociopathic Baby-Man bestrides the world of ordinary men like a colossus. It’s more important than ever to make this distinction. Equating every man with the very worst, most repugnant, infantile robot-men alive is, pragmatically speaking, a very bad idea. Because these Sociopathic Baby-Men are not fucking around. Those who have power seem to become more and more powerful by the day. Their money grows. They seek out and surround themselves with other Sociopathic Baby-Men who recognize in them the same core values of zero values and zero concern for the future of humanity.
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It’s not just that he’s greedy and sick and corrupt and selfish and unfair and lacks any semblance of empathy. It’s that the world hardly even exists for him at all. He navigates a dreamscape. He doesn’t just feel very little empathy for other humans. He feels nothing at all, for anyone. He is entirely subsumed by his self-created fantasy.
The real problem, though, is when the world of these sociopaths intersects with the world the rest of us live in. Because as they’ve shown us, when they interact with reality, bad things start to happen to those of us who still cling to basic standards of decency and character. And when we don’t push back, or we avoid the subject, or we retire into our own lives, all this seems to do is enable them and prompt them to worsen their behavior:
[I]t becomes clear that Weinstein and everyone who colluded with him and empowered him over the course of the two decades have just offered us a frightening picture of exactly how we lose our grip on this beautiful world forever. For the powerful, it’s simple: You say whatever you want, and they let you. You grab what you want, and they let you. And the people around you stand by and they roll their eyes and silently back away — or they pat you on the back as you do it.
We should never “back away” from these types. We should be up in their faces, constantly, obstinately, relentlessly.
Because that’s the one thing they can’t bear.