For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to phrase “this”, because it’s delicate, and the more that happens in our world these days regarding this situation the more delicate it is made to be. It’s a perspective I have, and it’s only one to ponder… part one of several that have been brewing in my mind about a variety of things.
I’m trying to put the best of my sensibilities in line with others but I’m also – rather frankly – seeing a world en masse going crazy. I’m seeing a blanketing of confusion and it’s not the media’s fault, for they’re trying to both understand “things” that they see and provide information as a daily part of their jobs. Sure, there are some journalists – a word that is certainly used much more loosely than it should be – that really should go back to school and learn what it means to be a craftsman at their trade, but I think an open and free communication and press is mandatory for our society. What we NEED is believability and an ability to see through BS. But we’ve also become covered in “BS” from all sources: entertainment, reality, daily life, social media, and even advertising that is allowed to present itself in the same exact form as a news story in order to catch one’s attention. Those types of “ads” take very unfortunate advantage of the less intelligent in our collective society who just simply cannot tell the difference between what is an advertisement – or satire – or comedy – and the truth, and they take it as such. And, like the old shampoo commercial says, “And they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on….” and pretty soon, “the truth” is something completely different, or at least a twisted version of reality that it just doesn’t matter. Welcome to the 201x’s. We now live in BS.
Let’s talk about the sexualization of society and the increasing number of “it happened to me’s” and “he touched me” and stories that have been reported of sexual harassment to (mostly) women over the past few years, with the high profile cases of Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Al Franken, and let’s even throw Kevin Spacey’s story in there because it definitely fits the scenario that I’m going to present to you here. And obviously, the current situation with Mr. Brett Kavanaugh.
I want to preface everything you’re about to read with I absolutely do not condone any act of unwanted sexual advancement on another and I have been a victim in the past as well, well documented on other pages of my own blog in recent years. It takes a lot of strength for one to present their story publicly and the reasons behind doing it are as individual as the rays of sunlight hitting any one individual’s eye, and they simply cannot be judged by another for doing it. It’s that personal. If it’s false, then they will meet their own karmic fate for that decision from their higher power at their destiny point, and it’s not our place nor decision to pass that judgment, and that should be a human accepted fact.
What I DO want to focus on in this writing is a few verifiable and never discussed items that deal with our American culture, and it is definitely, specifically American.
First, look at the average age of the men in question – typically – and, using the examples I gave above, these high profile cases, where each of the men were accused of inappropriately and aggressively taking sexual gratification – although in a variety of ways – from other people. People they either perceived as weaker than they from an age or physical stance and more than likely as a professional or celebratory mindset. With Cosby being the oldest of the bunch, and Kavanaugh the youngest, let’s give an average age to them of 65….”now”…. and the 2nd number (below) is how many years ago their alleged assault happened.
Cosby age 81 (1965, 53 years ago, event @ 28 years old)
Franken age 67 (2006, 12 years ago, event @ 55 years old)
Spacey age 59 (1986, 32 years ago; event @ 27 years old)
Kavanaugh age 53 (1981, 36 years ago, event @ 17 years old)
Their average “event” age, meaning the average age of guys when they commit something is 32 years old. But this average takes a wide range of guys really….an older African American actor, an aging Caucasian Senatomiddle-aged aged gay actor, and ok, well another middle aged senator… maybe they do have more in common than we think. We’d also have to acknowledge that all 4 above have led rather priviliged lives and there are some unique factors. However…
Why am I saying this?
Bear with me.
It’s now 2018.
Let’s go back – using that FIRST average of 65 years and see what was going on in the US. Just what changes were happening to the American Psyche and the good ol’ USA society?
Well, that would take us back to 1953. The typical “American” white bread household and all USA appearances were for the middle class “Leave It To Beaver” type facade….interestingly enough the first color television sets started appearing, and radio was just starting to come along… the whole face of American entertainment had started to change and “free voices” were starting to be heard, and that would truly change everything.
Within 10 years, 1963 – we’d have already sent a man into space, have heard of the Beatles and their music (and that hair – CRAZY!, even though they’d not stepped foot on US soil yet) and oh yeah… seen the US President have his head blown off in Dallas, TX, in front of millions of people. That would also truly change everything, and bring about suspicions, doubts, and shadows upon the government that would never go away by many. Little boys born in the early 1950’s were just now starting to get into pre-puberty and adolescence.
It didn’t even take another 5 years before the US saw “free love”, rampant rises in drug usage among youth, creative hard rock and acid rock, tremendously liberal attitudes toward sexuality being displayed in film and literature, all at an astounding pace, and beingdisplayed freely for the first times in American culture. Youth were experiencing it openly and dreely, many of whom still lived at home. Oh, and those same boys? Now in their late teens.
For young men, it would not be uncommon – even through the late 90’s – and this is not to say that ALL relationships would be like this – but it would not be uncommon for a father from the older generation to continue to encourage his son to pursue women aggressively through perhaps crude or (now) socially unacceptable phrases or actions. The thought process of either “Go get you some!” or “Be a chip off the old block” – or even “That’s what makes you a man”, meaning, that “drive” of masculinity was the only defining characteristic of manhood in a father’s eyes and that anything less was an indicator of feminism, and therefore failure as a son….this led to very much malaligned and malformed development of healthy relationship skills for many young men in the 60’s and all the way through the 90’s… it’s one of the reasons there are so many poor fathers from that time period, and one of the reasons we now have so many unskilled younger men who have no good father figures to look out for them, and teach them, and guide THEM. It is a multi-generational cataclysmic failure of manhood. All for the sake of “getting some”.
These men are definitely not “excused” – there is no excuse for violating another person.
And this writing definitely does not mean that we should not be holding these men accountable for their actions – yes, they should have absolutely have KNOWN better WHEN/BEFORE they acted on their impulses, without a doubt. Yet, still they could not.
But my point is, at the time they were doing these things, it’s very much quite possibly they simply did. not. know. better. And, if alcohol or drugs were involved, then there is just no telling ‘where” they were mentally and/or emotionally. They very much could have been raised in an environment that this was ‘the norm” and what they were mentally reinforced with from the very voice they’d been hearing for years, their father and/or quite possibly even their mother. They had literally been instructed in many ways by their parents that this was either normal behavior, that this was somehow expected; and even the movies and television have portrayed some behavior as a rite of passage if nothing else.
In addition to making sure that they never do it again, we need to focus on WHAT caused them to do it in the first place. These men, with lucrative, successful careers that are now forever changed along with the lives of those around them, and that is to say nothing about the lives of those they physically touched, of course. It’s also nothing being said about the countless others that go unreported, and those that go reported that are NOT celebratory evening news stories. We have got to get to the root of the issue of sexual abuse in this country.and the world.
There’s nothing wrong with human sexuality – not in the least; but the ability to learn about it was probably a pretty difficult lesson for most teens for the period of time we’re discussing here – even into the 80’s, there were many areas of the country that the subject was not approached in many public schools and families did not discuss this topic. Attitudes have changed tremendously about this over the last 50 years and especially the last 20.
We are experiencing our own failure at “villaging”. We are experiencing the reflections of societal bad decisions over our own bad decisions and it has affected our very core BEING. The saddest thing about it ALL is that we have accepted it like electricity and let it take its most easy path out – and let IT become “the blame game” where we just slough it off to the easiest thing – or sadly, person – to blame it on, and let it become race, religion or the next subject, or we blast it into the labels we can place on politics; just another name for each other, because it’s easier when we have named buckets to place each other in… We have neglected to see that by NOT being responsible, and by being ‘TOO FREE’ in the past, we’ve allowed ourselves to just lay DOWN and not RISE up to being the best “us” we can be… and we are now suffering the consequences of wanting our cake and eating it too. That simply must come to a screeching halt if our humanity is going to survive. We will create our own sexually charged zombie apocalypse. Non-effective psycho-sexualization of our youth during the time they just needed to be taught well has had a terrible shock wave upon the American culture for far too long.
If you notice, it is rare to see someone who is 30 years of age or less being pounced on by another person saying that they were accosted or abused by another person, sexually, several years ago… and that fits right into these average figures. Now, I’m not saying that it DOESN’T happen – what I’m saying is that hopefully the bulk of our last few generations have gotten some of the idea that just taking what doesn’t agree with you is wrong – at least sexually – but what frightens me more is that we hear it still happens, so it makes me think that the voices that continue to cry out by females and males alike make it sound like complacency is the norm instead….
I would hope that any of these individuals who come forward are telling the truth and getting it out of their systems for their own health reasons and that it does serve the bigger purpose of stopping someone from doing it again, and if being truthfully told I also agree that someone who has done this in the past, no matter how ‘good’ they are NOW doesn’t need to be on our highest court in a lifetime position making decisions for you and me. I’ve personally made some humdingers in my life so nope, I would never run for that job. You gotta be smart in those things. I guess that’s just one of those things. Again, just my opinion. But past this case, we also have to come to a point where these cases are not politically connected, they can’t seemingly be timed at election points, and they can’t continue to keep being the focus of news stories, and we can’t keep living our daily lives like reality shows. We need quality in our lives and not paper dolls to represent who we are.
These thoughts here are all ideas to be planted into your mind and hopefully points to stick there in the ongoing conversations that will happen. Who knows? The more we talk about this – and talk about it with different viewpoints, the better and faster we can move forward past it, and make this part of our lives something that did not remain when we look back. But it’s a definite area that the American culture lacks grace or class in and any wit that is displayed often comes across childish and immature – which might be the best argument for the truly adolescent phase we are experiencing right now, sometimes on display in the Senate Examining Hall.
k.peters – october.1.2018
