https://www.the-american-interest.

com/2017/12/06/the-warlock-hunt/

MORAL PANICS

The Warlock Hunt

CLAIRE BERLINSKI

The #MeToo moment has now morphed into a moral panic that poses as
much danger to women as it does to men.

#Metoo, of course. Women are not going nuts for no reason. We’re fed up with feeling
prickles down our spine as we walk alone on dimly lit streets. Fed up with thinking, “If
he feels entitled to send me that message, what might he feel entitled to do to if he
knew where I lived?” Fed up with strangers who smack their lips and murmur
obscenities at us. Fed up with thinking, “No, I don’t want to go to his hotel room to
discuss closing the contract. I’ll have to tell him my husband’s waiting for me to call.
‘My husband? Oh, yes, he’s pathologically jealous, bless his heart, and a bit of a gun
nut…’” My husband is perfect in every way but one—he doesn’t exist—but he has
served me so well over the years that I’m willing to overlook his ontological defects. I
shouldn’t need him, but I do.

I’ve been fortunate. My encounters with law enforcement have been contrary to
reputation: The police have taken me seriously, once arresting a stalker when he failed
to heed a warning to cease and desist. But too many women have been murdered
because they could not persuade the police to take them seriously. That stalker
doubtless believes he was “unjustly accused” and “his life destroyed” by a hysterical
woman. He’s full of it. I’ll bet he did the same thing to many women before me. Sexual
predation tends to be a lifelong pattern.

Among us, it seems, lives a class of men who call to mind Caligula and Elagabalus not
only in their depravity, but in their grotesque sense of impunity. Our debauched
emperors, whether enthroned in Hollywood, media front of ces, or the halls of
Congress, truly imagined their victims had no choice but to shut up, take it, and stay
silent forever. Many of these men are so physically disgusting, too—the thought of
them forcing themselves on young women lls me with heaving disgust. Enough
already.

All true; yet something is troubling me. Recently I saw a friend—a man—pilloried on
Facebook for asking if #metoo is going too far. “No,” said his female interlocutors.
“Women have endured far too many years of harassment, humiliation, and injustice.
We’ll tell you when it’s gone too far.” But I’m part of that “we,” and I say it is going too
far. Mass hysteria has set in. It has become a classic moral panic, one that is ultimately
as dangerous to women as to men.
If you are reading this, it means I have found an outlet that has not just red an editor
for sexual harassment. This article circulated from publication to publication, like old-
fashioned samizdat, and was rejected repeatedly with a sotto voce, “Don’t tell anyone. I
agree with you. But no.” Friends have urged me not to publish it under my own name,
vividly describing the mob that will tear me from limb to limb and leave the dingoes to
pick over my esh. It says something, doesn’t it, that I’ve been more hesitant to speak
about this than I’ve been of getting on the wrong side of the ma a, al-Qaeda, or the
Kremlin?

But speak I must. It now takes only one accusation to destroy a man’s life. Just one for
him to be tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion, overnight costing him his
livelihood and social respectability. We are on a frenzied extrajudicial warlock hunt
that does not pause to parse the difference between rape and stupidity. The
punishment for sexual harassment is so grave that clearly this crime—like any other
serious crime—requires an unambiguous de nition. We have nothing of the sort.

In recent weeks, one after another prominent voice, many of them political voices,
have been silenced by sexual harassment charges. Not one of these cases has yet been
adjudicated in a court of law. Leon Wieseltier, David Corn, Mark Halperin, Michael
Oreskes, Al Franken, Ken Baker, Rick Najera, Andy Signore, Jeff Hoover, Matt Lauer,
even Garrison Keillor—all have received the professional death sentence. Some of the
charges sound deadly serious. But others—as reported anyway—make no sense. I can’t
say whether the charges against these men are true; I wasn’t under the bed. But even if
true, some have been accused of offenses that aren’t offensive, or offenses that are
only mildly so—and do not warrant total professional and personal destruction.

The things men and women naturally do— irt, play, lewdly joke, desire, seduce, tease
—now become harassment only by virtue of the words that follow the description of
the act, one of the generic form: “I froze. I was terri ed.” It doesn’t matter how the
man felt about it. The onus to understand the interaction and its emotional subtleties
falls entirely on him. But why? Perhaps she should have understood his behavior to be
harmless—clumsy, sweet but misdirected, maladroit, or tacky—but lacking in malice
suf cient to cost him such arduous punishment?

In recent weeks, I’ve acquired new powers. I have cast my mind over the ways I could
use them. I could now, on a whim, destroy the career of an Oxford don who at a
drunken Christmas party danced with me, grabbed a handful of my bum, and slurred,
“I’ve been dying to do this to Berlinski all term!” That is precisely what happened. I am
telling the truth. I will be believed—as I should be.

But here is the thing. I did not freeze, nor was I terri ed. I was amused and attered
and thought little of it. I knew full well he’d been dying to do that. Our tutorials—
which took place one-on-one, with no chaperones—were livelier intellectually for that
sublimated undercurrent. He was an Oxford don and so had power over me, sensu
stricto. I was a 20-year-old undergraduate. But I also had power over him—power
suf cient to cause a venerable don to make a perfect fool of himself at a Christmas
party. Unsurprisingly, I loved having that power. But now I have too much power. I
have the power to destroy someone whose tutorials were invaluable to me and shaped
my entire intellectual life much for the better. This is a power I do not want and should
not have.

Over the course of my academic and professional career, many men who in some way
held a position of power over me have made lewd jokes in my presence, or reminisced
drunkenly of past lovers, or confessed sexual fantasies. They have hugged me, irted
with me, on occasion propositioned me. For the most part, this male attention has
amused me and given me reason to look forward to otherwise dreary days at work. I
dread the day I lose my power over men, which I have used to coax them to con de to
me on the record secrets they would never have vouchsafed to a male journalist. I did
not feel “demeaned” by the realization that some men esteemed my cleavage more
than my talent; I felt damned lucky to have enough talent to exploit my cleavage.

But what if I now feel differently? What if—perhaps moved by the testimony of the
many women who have come forward in recent weeks—I were to realize that the
ambient sexual culture I meekly accepted as “amusing” was in fact repulsive and
loathsome? What if I now realize it did me great emotional damage, harm so profound
that only now do I recognize it?

Apparently, some women feel precisely this way. Natalie Portman, for example, has re-
examined her life in light of the recent news:

When I heard everything coming out, I was like, wow, I’m so lucky that I
haven’t had this. And then, on re ection, I was like, okay, de nitely never
been assaulted, de nitely not, but I’ve had discrimination or harassment on
almost everything I’ve ever worked on in some way,” she said during
Sunday’s candid talk at Vulture Festival L.A. The more she reexamined her
experiences, other incidents come into sharp relief. “I went from thinking I
don’t have a story to thinking, Oh wait, I have 100 stories. And I think a lot
of people are having these reckonings with themselves, of things that we
just took for granted as like, this is part of the process.

If I were suddenly to feel as Ms. Portman now feels, I could destroy them all—just by
naming names and truthfully describing a irtation or moment of impropriety. All of
the interchanges I’m replaying in my mind would meet the highly elastic contemporary
de nition of “harassment,” a category vague enough to compass all the typical
irtation that brings joy and amusement to so many of our lives, all the vulgar humor
that says, “We’re among friends, we may speak frankly.” It becomes harassment only by
virtue of three words: “I felt demeaned.”

Do not mistake me for a rape apologist. Harvey Weinstein stands credibly accused of
rape. He must face a real trial and grave punishment if convicted, not “therapy and
counselling.” Tariq Ramadan, likewise. No civilized society tolerates rape. Many of the
men whose professional reputations have recently been destroyed sure sound like they
had it coming. The law will decide whether the accused are guilty beyond a reasonable
doubt, but I don’t require such arduous proof: I’m already convinced that Roy Moore is
a sexual predator and so is Bill Clinton. Neither my certainty nor anyone else’s should
be allowed to displace the law. I may be convinced, but I might also be mistaken.

These reservations aside, I am grati ed that at last we all agree that a rapist—or a
serial groper of random women’s genitals—should be behind bars, not the Resolute
Desk. It was outrageous and unjust that we ever thought otherwise.

Revolutions against real injustice have a tendency, however, to descend into paroxysms
of vengeance that descend upon guilty and innocent alike. We’re getting too close.
Hysteria is in the air. The over-broad de nition of “sexual harassment” is a well-known
warning sign. The over-broad language of the Law of Suspects portended the descent
of the French Revolution into the Terror. This revolution risks going the way
revolutions so often do, and the consequences will not just be awful for men. They will
be awful for women.

Harvey Weinstein must burn, we all agree. But there is a universe of difference between
the charges against Weinstein and those that cost Michael Oreskes his career at NPR. It
is hard to tell from the press accounts, but initial reports suggested he was red
because his accusers—both anonymous—say he kissed them. Twenty years ago. In
another place of business. Since then, other reports have surfaced of what NPR calls
“subtler transgressions.”

They are subtle to the point of near-invisibility. It seems Michael Oreskes liked to kiss
women. Now, it is an embarrassing faux-pas to kiss a woman who does not wish to be
kissed, but it happens all the time. Kissing a woman is an early stage of courtship. It is
one way that men ask the question, “Would you like more?” Courtship is not a
phenomenon so minor to our behavioral repertoire that we can readily expunge it from
the workplace. It is central to human life. Men and women are attracted to each other;
the human race could not perpetuate itself otherwise; and anyone who imagines they
will cease to be attracted to each other—or act as if they were not—in the workplace, or
any other place, is delusional. Anyone who imagines it is easy for a man to gure out
whether a woman might like to be kissed is insane. The dif culty of ascertaining
whether one’s passions are reciprocated is the theme of 90 percent of human literature
and every romantic comedy or pop song ever written.

Romance involves the most complex of human emotions, desire the most powerful of
human drives. It is so easy to read the signals wrong. Every honest man will tell you
that at times he has misread these signals, and so will every honest woman. The
insistence that an unwanted kiss is always about power, not courtship, simply isn’t a
serious theory of the case—not when the punishment for this crime is so grave. Men,
too, are entitled to the bene t of the doubt, and even to a presumption of innocence.

We now have, in effect, a crime that comes with a swift and draconian penalty, but no
proper de nition. It seems to be “sexual behavior” or “behavior that might be sexual,”
committed through word, deed, or even facial expression; followed by a negative
description of the woman’s emotions. Obviously this is inadequate. Human beings,
male and female, are subject to human failings, including the tendency to lie, to be
vengeful, to abuse power, or simply to misunderstand one another. It is hard to de ne
sexual harassment precisely, because all of these human frailties are often involved.
But we must nonetheless reason out together a de nition that makes sense. Mass
hysteria and making demons of men will get us nowhere we should want to go.

Finding a consensus is tricky because our social standards are rapidly changing. We
appear now to be converging upon new rules for interaction between men and women
—for example, “Never kiss a woman without explicitly asking her consent beforehand.”
Such a rule is now the law on college campuses in some states. Whether we think the
rule good or ridiculous, we can certainly agree that it is new. Those in doubt can may
consult pre-2017 television and cinema, where men routinely kiss women without
asking permission. Grandfathering or statutes of limitations can’t possibly be
irrelevant to this, and only this, category of wrongdoing. This is not how we view any
other crime. It has only recently become mandatory for Americans to purchase health
insurance. Would we condemn a man for failing to purchase health insurance in 1985?

Several cases recently in the headlines are simply baf ing. They do not involve the
workplace—or vast discrepancies in power—at all. Perhaps there is more to the story,
but from what I’ve read, the improprieties committed by the UK’s (now former)
Defense Secretary Michael Fallon amount to this: He kissed a journalist—not his
employee, and not someone over whom he had power, but another adult in another
profession— fteen years ago. What transmogri ed Fallon’s kiss to a crime that cost
him his career were these words, and only these words: “I felt humiliated, ashamed.”
Had the object of his affection said, “I felt attered,” there would be no offense.

Fallon apparently also touched another woman on the knee. Fifteen years ago. The
latter incident has been reported thus:

“I calmly and politely explained to him that, if he did it again, I would

punch him in the face. He withdrew his hand and that was the end of the
matter.” Julia said she did not feel like she was a victim of a sexual assault,
and found the incident nothing more than “mildly amusing.”

The facts as described are nothing like sexual assault. Any woman alive could tell
similar stories. Many of us nd such incidents, precisely as Julia said, “mildly
amusing.”

There is apparently a “list” of women prepared to make similar accusations against

Fallon. Secret lists are inherently sinister tools. The words “I have here in my hand a
list … ” are never a salubrious portent.

Mother Jones’ editor David Corn, it seems, offered unwanted backrubs. So what? From
the prose in Politico you’d think he ravished Tess of the d’Urbervilles. The accused, we
are to understand, “came up behind [his accuser] and put his hands and arms around
[her] body in a way that felt sexual and domineering.” He gave her a hug, in other
words; but it felt to her sexual and domineering. There is no reliable way to know if a
hug will feel sexual and domineering to a woman or whether she will nd this
disagreeable, let alone how she will feel about it twenty years from now. So the lesson
to men is clear: Never hug women at work, period. But this is insane. The project of
eradicating physical affection from the workplace is cruel to men and women alike, and
if it is successful, we will all go nuts.

Nor does it make sense to hold all men to the same standards. Some of the accused
have made entire careers out of their lewdness and exhibitionism. After revering them
for decades for precisely those qualities, we are overnight scandalized to learn they are
lewd and exhibitionistic. Take Louis CK. There’s an almost preternatural emotional
obtuseness at work here: Did no one notice that in his stand-up routines he speaks
incessantly of suicide, masturbation, self-loathing, masturbation, self-hatred,
masturbation—and this is all he ever speaks of? If we’re determined to worship a
comedian whose work clearly emerges from a profoundly exhibitionistic instinct and
self-loathing of the deepest sort, how can we be so astonished to discover it’s not just
an act? I grew up around performing artists, so perhaps my view is jaundiced. But
yeah, I could have told you: Stay out of his hotel room.

My point isn’t that it’s no big deal to whack off in front of your lady friends. It’s
disgusting. What Louis CK did is not as banal as offering a woman a backrub or
touching her knee. But it’s exactly what you’d expect from him if you’d ever watched
his routines. If the man has a delusional view of the appeal to women of watching a
self-loathing man whack off, shouldn’t it be relevant to our moral assessment that we,
the American public, are the ones who nourished this delusion with applause, laughter,
money, and massive crowds at Madison Square Garden screaming his name? How can
we suddenly be so censorious upon discovering that he took his onstage act to its
logical extension in his hotel room? What makes the reaction to this all the weirder is
that the women in question were comedians. Didn’t they see the potential? This is gold!
It’s going to bring the house down. Sure, tell the whole world and humiliate the hell out
of him—obviously he had that coming. But “outraged and shocked?” Grim faces and
utter solemnity? Seriously?

The comedians, by their own account, screamed and laughed—and only later revealed
they were “outraged.” They say that they shrieked with laughter because they were
traumatized. But if you can’t understand why someone like Louis CK might
have genuinely understood their laughter as “consent,” your emotional acumen is
de cient. He says he asked  rst, and that they said yes, and that’s why he thought it
was okay. Plausible? Of course. Really true? Who knows. But either way, I wouldn’t be
surprised if now he hangs himself, because obviously, it isn’t all just an act. I expect
everyone to be shocked, shocked, when he does.

In any case, none of us gets to watch Louis CK again—or Kevin Spacey, for that matter.
They’re literally going to airbrush Spacey out of All The Money, like water commissar
Nikolai Yezhov in that photo of the Moscow Canal. Comrade Spacey has been
vaporized. He’s an unperson. Long live Comrade Ogilvy. Isn’t anyone a bit spooked by
this?
Nor for the life of me can I make sense of the allegations against Leon Wieseltier. “The
only problem with that dress is that it’s not tight enough,” he is reported to have said
to a woman who worked for him. A lewd comment, to be sure. The daily banter of men
and women the world around is full of lewd comments. At times, we have learned from
The Atlantic, Wieseltier drank too much and made passes at his co-workers. That’s not
a wildly rare occurrence.

Above all, this is Leon Wieseltier—a man legendary for babbling on publicly about his
sexual appetites. He has always been known as a megalomaniacal asshole. Didn’t this
occur to anyone at the Emerson Collective before they hired him? If they were
surprised to learn that Leon was an asshole, they must have missed this Vanity Fair
pro le, written in 1995. He seems to have become a better man since then. At least he
no longer spends the day snorting coke off of his interns’ rear ends.

Even if every allegation against him is true, do they warrant his total professional
destruction? Wieseltier’s a windbag, but I would still have read any journal he edited
with interest. I’m sorry I won’t have the chance.

We just can’t hold people like Louis CK and Leon Wieseltier to the same standards of
probity and decorum we would—in a highly imaginary alternate universe—hold the
President or a Senator from Alabama. Americans love these people precisely because
they’re outrageous, lewd, and willing publicly to violate sexual and social norms. Why
wouldn’t you expect Louis CK, in a hotel room, to be Louis CK, only more so? What do
people imagine John Belushi was like in his hotel room? He was like John Belushi, only
more so. That’s why he was found dead in his hotel room, having taken “being John
Belushi” to its logical conclusion.

For that matter, isn’t anyone else a bit spooked by the ritual tenor of the confessions
that always follow? The most profound mystery of the Moscow Trials was the
eagerness of the victims to confess. What prompted them to say things like this?

I once more repeat that I admit that I am guilty of treason to the socialist
fatherland, the most heinous of possible crimes, of the organization of
kulak uprisings … as will be clear to everybody, that there were many
speci c things which I could not have known, and which I actually did not
know, but that this does not relieve me of responsibility. …  I am kneeling
before the country, before the Party, before the whole people. The
monstrousness of my crimes is immeasurable especially in the new stage of
the struggle of the U.S.S.R. May this trial be the last severe lesson, and may
the great might of the U.S.S.R. become clear to all.

Torture, of course, forced many of these confessions. But something more profound
was at work. As Lavrentiy Beria said, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”
Every man, in his soul, feels guilty. The confessions we are seeing now have been
dredged from the same place in men’s souls.
They are all confessing in the same dazed, rote, mechanical way. It’s always the same
statement: “I have come to realize that it does not matter that, at the time, I may have
perceived my words as playful. It does not matter that, at the time, I may have felt that
we were irting. It does not matter that, at the time, I may have felt what I said was
okay. The only thing that matters is how I made these three women feel,” said
Representative Steve Lebsock. Now that is a remarkable thing to say. Why doesn’t it
matter what he thought what was happening? Why would we accept as remotely
rational the idea that the only thing that matters is how the women felt? The
confession continues in the same vein: “It is hard for me to express how shocked I am
to realize the depth of the pain I have caused and my journey now is to come to terms
with my demons and I’ve brought on a team of therapists and I will be entering
counselling and re ecting carefully on issues of gender inequality, power, and privilege
in our society and—”

For God’s sake, why are these men all humiliating themselves? It’s not like confessing
will bring forgiveness. They must all know, like Bukharin, that no matter what they say,
the ritual of confession will be followed by the ritual of liquidation. If they said,
“You’ve all lost your fucking minds, stop snif ng my underwear and leave me the fuck
alone,” they’d meet exactly the same fate. Why didn’t Bukharin say, “To hell with you.
You may kill me, but you will not make me grovel?” I used to wonder, but now I see. Am I
the only one who nds these canned, rote, mechanical, brainwashed apologies deeply
creepy? Isn’t anyone else put in mind of the Cultural Revolution’s Struggle Sessions,
where the accused were dragged before crowds to condemn themselves and plead for
forgiveness? This very form of ritual public humiliation, aimed at eliminating all traces
of reactionary thinking, now awaits anyone accused of providing an unwanted backrub.

We are a culture historically disposed to moral panics and sexual hysterias. Not long
ago we rmly convinced ourselves that our children were being ritually raped by
Satanists. In recent years, especially, we have become prone to replacing complex
thought with shallow slogans. We live in times of extremism, and black-and-white
thinking. We should have the self-awareness to suspect that the events of recent weeks
may not be an aspect of our growing enlightenment, but rather our growing
enamorment with extremism.

We should certainly realize by now that a moral panic mixed with an internet mob is a
menace. When the mob descends on a target of prominence, it’s as good as a death
sentence, socially and professionally. None of us lead lives so faultless that we cannot
be targeted this way. “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”

Your computer can be hacked. Do you want to live in the kind of paranoid society
where everyone wonders—Who’s next? To whom is it safe to speak freely? What would
this joke sound like in a deposition? Do you think only the men who have done
something truly foul are at risk? Don’t kid yourself. Once this starts, it doesn’t stop.
The Perp Walk awaits us all.
Given the events of recent weeks, we can be certain of this: From now on, men with any
instinct for self-preservation will cease to speak of anything personal, anything sexual,
in our presence. They will make no bawdy jokes when we are listening. They will adopt
in our presence great deference to our exquisite sensitivity and frailty. Many women
seem positively joyful at this prospect. The Revolution has at last been achieved! But
how could this be the world we want? Isn’t this the world we escaped?

Who could blame a man who does not enjoy the company of women under these
circumstances, who would just rather not have women in the workplace at all? This is a
world in which the Mike Pence rule—“Never be alone with a woman”—seems eminently
sensible. Such a world is not good for women, however—as many women were quick to
point out when we learned of the Mike Pence rule. Our success and advancement relies
upon the personal and informal relationships we have with our colleagues and
supervisors. But who, in this climate, could blame a venerable Oxford don for refusing
to take the risk of teaching a young woman, one-on-one, with no witnesses? Mine was
the rst generation of women allowed the privilege of unchaperoned tutorials with
Balliol’s dons. Will mine also be the last? Like so many revolutions, the sexual
revolution risks coming full circle, returning us right where we started—fainting at
bawdy jokes, demanding the return of ancient standards of chivalry, so delicate and
virginal that a man’s hand on our knee causes us trauma. Women have long been
victims, but now we are in so many respects victims no longer. We have more status,
prestige, power, and personal freedom than ever before. Why would we want to speak
and act as though we were overwhelmingly victims, as we actually used to be?

Women, I’m begging you: Think this through. We are fostering a climate in which men
legitimately fear us, where their entire professional and personal lives can be casually
destroyed by “secret lists” compiled by accusers they cannot confront, by rumors on
the internet, by thrilled, breathless reporting denouncing one after another of them as
a pig, often based only on the allegation that they did something all-too-human and
none-too-criminal like making a lewd joke. Why would we even want men to be subject
to such strenuous, arduous taboos against the display of their sexuality? These taboos,
note carefully, resemble in non-trivial ways those that have long oppressed women. In
a world with such arduous taboos about male purity and chastity, surely, it is rational
for men to have as little to do with women as possible. What’s in this for us?

From the Salem Witch trials to the present, moral panics have followed the same
pattern. Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics remains the classic study. To read
it is to appreciate that we are seeing something familiar here. The media has identi ed
a folk devil, which it presents in a stereotyped way, exaggerating the scale of the
problem. The “moral entrepreneurs,” as Cohen terms them—editors, politicians, key
arbiters of respectability—have begun competing to out-do each other in decrying the
folk devil. The folk devil symbolizes a real problem. But so vili ed has the scapegoat
become, in popular imagination, that rational discussion of the real problem is no
longer possible.
Cohen argued that moral panics must be understood in their wider socio-historic
context. We may understand them, he proposed, as a boundary crisis: At a time of rapid
change, they express the public’s uncertainly about the boundary between acceptable
and unacceptable behavior. The widespread anxiety about unsettling change is
resolved by making of certain gures scapegoats—folk devils. They symbolize a larger
social unease.

Why this moral panic, and why now? I’m not sure, to be honest. I can hazard a few
speculations. We’ve in the past thirty years experienced a massive restructuring of
gender roles. When Hanna Rosin wrote her 2010 Atlantic essay, “The End of Men,” she
was not exaggerating. “What if,” she asked, “the modern, postindustrial economy is
simply more congenial to women than to men?” What if? Because it seems very much
that it is. “The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength,” she
wrote. “The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open
communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not
predominantly male.” America’s future, Rosin argued, belongs to women. “Once you
open your eyes to this possibility, the evidence is all around you.” And it is.

Let us put this in the crudest of Freudian terms. Women have castrated men en masse.
Perhaps this panic is happening now because our emotions about this achievement are
ambivalent. Perhaps our ambivalence is so taboo that we cannot admit it to ourselves,
no less discuss it rationally. Is it possible that we are acting out a desire that has
surfaced from the hadopelagic zone of our collective unconscious—a longing to have
the old brutes back? That is what Freud would suggest: We are imagining brutes all
around us as a form of wish-ful llment, a tidy achievement that simultaneously allows
us to express our ambivalence by shrieking at them in horror.

The problem with Freudian interpretations, as Popper observed, is that they’re

unfalsi able. They’re not science. But they’re tempting. Certainly, something weird is
going on here. It is taking place in the aftermath of the most extraordinary period of
liberation and achievement women have ever enjoyed. No, of course we don’t want the
old brutes back. But perhaps we miss something about that world. Wouldn’t it be
comforting, for example, at a time like this, to believe what women used to believe—
that responsible men were in charge of the ship of state, and especially our nuclear
weapons?

Moral panics have a context. They emerge at times of general anxiety. Scholars of the
Salem witch trials point to Indian attacks, the political reverberations from the English
Civil War, crop failures, and smallpox outbreaks. Residents of colonial Massachusetts
ltered these apprehensions through the prism of their Calvinist theology. If their
moral panic was prompted by the anxieties of their era and adapted to the theology of
their times, why should we be any different?

I’m not sure what, precisely, is now driving us over the edge. But I’d suggest looking at
the obvious. The President of the United States is Donald J. Trump. Our country is not
what we thought it was. We’re a fading superpower in a world of enemies. The people
now running the United States cannot remotely persuade us, even for ve minutes,
that they know what they’re doing and are capable of keeping us safe. Who among us
doesn’t feel profound anxiety about this? Daddy-the-President turns out to be a
hapless dotard. Women who had hopefully imagined rough men standing ready to do
violence on our behalf so we could sleep peacefully in our beds at night have
discovered instead—psychologically speaking—that Daddy is dead.

That’s enough to make anyone go berserk. Perhaps this realization is powering some of
the hysteria we’re now seeing about sexual harassment. Rapid social and technological
change, a lunatic at the helm, no one knows what tomorrow will bring—we’re primed
for a moral panic par excellence. That it has something to do with men and male
beastliness is an adaptation to the theology of our era: American culture has been
obsessed with gender—the rarer and odder the better—for at least the past decade.
What’s more, we really do have an unreconstructed slob in the Oval Of ce, one who is
genuinely offensive to women. Some of the anger directed at these poor groveling
schmucks is surely—really—meant for him.

No woman in her right mind would say, “I want the old world back.” We know what
that meant for women. Nor would we even consciously think it. But perhaps, instead,
we are fantasizing that the old world has come back, rather than confronting
something a great deal more frightening: It’s never coming back. We are the grown-ups
now. We are in charge.

Maybe it doesn’t matter where the sources of the present moral panic lie. But could we
at least get enough of a grip to realize that it is a moral panic—and knock it off?
Women, I’m begging you: Please.
Published on: December 6, 2017

is a freelance journalist who lives in Paris. She is crowd-funding a book about European politics, Brave Old Word:
Europe in the Age of Trump. She would be grateful for your support.