Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Through male eyes.

The problem I think isn’t a craving for sex. Nor is it necessarily misogyny, or at least not exactly what we think of as misogyny.

A lot of it is more about what we think about being male, than what we think about the role of women. We think of being male as being the fighter, being forceful, being willing to take charge.

So with the Catholics, they can try and eliminate any hint of sexual characteristics from women, and they end up… with a massive child rape scandal that spans the entire globe. Islam tries to do the same thing, as I’m sure you’re well aware, and the net result is… more of the same stuff.

The problem isn’t the sexual desire, it isn’t about women’s bodies, it is about what we as men have going on in our heads. It is that stuff we consider being a “real man”.

Sometimes you need those traits of being a fighter, being forceful, being willing to take charge, they aren’t inherently bad things, except what we’re taught to think of as winning is somebody else losing, and that means those traits are prized in a way where consent is not only devalued, it is seen as a negative.

If everyone wins, is it victory or is it a participation award?

President Jacob Zuma, a while back, argued in Parliament that because the ANC won the most votes, the ANC has more rights than everyone else. His view of democracy was as a means of winning those rights.

Is it any surprise that Jacob Zuma, the ANC and the country as a whole, have less than great histories regarding respecting consent? When your concept of political victory is you have more rights than everyone else, that, not anything really to do with women per se, is a problem.

What is our language around sex? Conquest. Conquest is a form of taking power that is not achieved through mutual consent. Leadership becomes dominance, and dominance is desirable because you don’t have to think about what other people want. “When you’re a star, they let you get away with it.”

When you’re a successful movie producer, when you’re a TV icon, when you’re a president, when you’re in charge and you’re a winner, you get more rights. It isn’t simply about how men view women, it is what happens when the way we’re taught to see everything gets applied to women.

But of course all of this is IMO, and maybe I’m crazy. I hope so, because actually solving the problem I’ve set forward is much harder than identifying it.

This this this. It’s not just the Harvey Weinsteins, it’s not just the actual men and their actual groping and raping. It’s also the sea they swim in: it’s the content. Kate Hardie knows.

The focus is quite rightly on the horrendous sexual abuse that Weinstein is alleged to have committed. But to focus on that alone is to miss the point that the portrayal of women – of their lives, their feelings, their sexuality and their bodies – is nearly always decided upon and filtered through male eyes. Nearly every actress will tell you about scripts that included scenes of female nudity that seem to have no apparent reason for being there and that are often degrading.

And quite a few women in the audience for such scripts will tell you the same thing.

You only have to turn on most police dramas to find the obligatory image of a battered, naked – but beautiful – young female corpse. (Apart from the ones written by Sally Wainwright: will someone please put Sally Wainwright in charge of everything for a while?) You don’t have to be talking about consent and abuse to be mortified by many female roles.

Second that. I love Sally Wainwright. In case you’re thinking “who?” – Scott and Bailey. Women have all the big parts, and they’re real women.

I am 49, so I do not get asked to be naked any more. (That is another thing the male-dominated industry is not keen on – women over 40 having any kind of satisfactory sex life or, indeed, bodies.) But when I was 17, I had become so used to being required to appear naked that I asked for a no-nudity clause to be written into a contract. I was fired by the male director because, despite there being no nudity in his script, he felt the clause curbed his creativity should he, on a whim, decide he needed me to remove my clothes. (This director, fittingly was given his break by Weinstein.)

Besides which, why is a woman even in the movie if she doesn’t take her clothes off? It’s not as if women ever do anything.

We proceeded to read the scripts; the room was full of women – a casting director and assistant director included. A male producer was reading out the stage directions, his voice hardly faltering in tone as he read out: “He rips open her shirt and we see her tits.”

When we finished, it was announced that anyone who wasn’t an executive producer, producer, writer, director or the director of photography had to leave so that those left behind could make important decisions. I watched as the room emptied of women.

While the men stayed in the room to decide when the women had to take their clothes off for the camera.

Woody Allen hopes people won’t get carried away with this Harvey Weinstein thing.

Weinstein has been credited with reviving Allen’s career after Allen was accused of abusing Dylan Farrow, his daughter with actress Mia Farrow.

The allegation emerged in the early 1990s following Allen’s separation from Farrow.

The actress left Allen after discovering he was having an affair with her adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn.

But despite working with Weinstein on a number of films – including the Oscar-winning Mighty Aphrodite – Allen said he had never heard any of allegations of rape and sexual assault.

“No one ever came to me or told me horror stories with any real seriousness,” Allen told the BBC. “And they wouldn’t, because you are not interested in it. You are interested in making your movie.”

No, they wouldn’t because you’re the wrong guy to tell, because you’re such a skeeve. You cheated on your partner with her daughter.

Allen said he hoped the revelations, which emerged after an investigation by the New York Times, would lead to “some amelioration”, but said: “You also don’t want it to lead to a witch hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere, where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself. That’s not right either.”

Yeah. Gotta make sure guys in offices are still totally free to skeeve on women. That’s what women are there for, after all.

The truck bomb in Mogadishu yesterday killed at least 230 people.

Hundreds more were wounded when a lorry packed with explosives detonated near the entrance of a hotel.

It is the deadliest terror attack in Somalia since the Islamist al-Shabab group launched its insurgency in 2007.

It is not clear who staged the bombing, but Mogadishu is a target for al-Shabab militants battling the government.

…

A BBC Somali reporter at the scene of the main blast said the Safari Hotel had collapsed, with people trapped under the rubble.

An eyewitness, local resident Muhidin Ali, told news agency AFP it was “the biggest blast I have ever witnessed, it destroyed the whole area”.

Meanwhile, the director of the Madina Hospital, Mohamed Yusuf Hassan, said he was shocked by the scale of the attack.

“Seventy-two wounded people were admitted to the hospital and 25 of them are in very serious condition. Others lost their hands and legs at the scene.”

Ad maiorem dei gloriam.

Even Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist who has been defending Trump in the Washington Post for months, is disgusted. Susan Glasser talked to him for a New Yorker piece.

And yet when I met Rogers, at his usual table in the back of the room at Tosca, the expensive but understated Italian restaurant across the street from his lobbying firm, where he goes to lunch almost every day, he was in no mood to defend Trump. The constant tweeting, the personal attacks on his own team, were taking a toll. “Every week!” Rogers said. “It’s surreal.” Then he paused, almost groaning when he asked, “Why does it have to be this way?”

Because Trump is what he is and not something else. He is what he is and what he has always obviously been – there wasn’t a better wiser more adult human being under the stuffed bladder of Public Trump. Under bloviating pinch-pointing fishmouth Donald Trump is just more of the same. He’s all exterior.

The weekend war of words between Corker and Trump had left Rogers, like many lobbyists in town, thinking not so much of the actual world war that Corker warned about (though he’s worried about that, too) but about the fate of Trump’s proposed tax-reform plan.

Good ol’ Republicans. “Yeah nuclear war would be a hassle but the real agony is losing the tax cuts for millionaires.”

Until now, Rogers and many other Washington Republicans have placed their hopes in the idea that sober-minded types like the new chief of staff, John Kelly, will somehow find a way to check Trump’s worst impulses, as was clear from a story he recounted. Rogers said that he remembered attending a session once with Steve Bannon, who was the President’s top White House strategist at the time, and who has returned to his previous roles as chairman of the conservative news site Breitbart and scourge of the Party establishment. Bannon had said, as Rogers remembered it, “ ‘There’s a bunch of people who think they have to protect the country from Trump.’ He said it in a belittling way.” At this, Rogers shook his head again and told me, “Well, it’s not heretical to say such a thing and think such a thing.”

Says the lobbyist who had been supporting him until just recently. If you know Trump has worst impulses that need to be checked, and those worst impulses are much worse than the normal routine worst impulses of presidents, then why did you ever support him in the first place? Weasel.

They all hate him, but they won’t all say it in public. That’s cool: it’s only the welfare of the 300-something million people in the US and also pretty much everyone else on the planet, apart from Putin and the odd oligarch.

As a Republican veteran of Capitol Hill explained to me, “The taxonomy of Washington Republicans is not a bright line of Never Trump versus pro-Trump.” There is, instead, “a continuum of people who are to varying degrees either outright supportive of the President or comfortable with the fact that getting things done requires working with the Administration to outright disgust and opposition.” As I have found, and with the exception of a small handful of officials who came to town with Trump, the private comments of even the most publicly pro-Trump Republicans often differ little from their more outspoken colleagues.

They know he’s shit but they won’t do anything about it. Impressive.

In Puerto Rico:

Jose Luis Rodriguez waited in line Friday to fill plastic jugs in the back of his pickup truck with water for drinking, doing the dishes and bathing.

But there is something about this water Rodriguez didn’t know: It was being pumped to him by water authorities from a federally designated hazardous-waste site, CNN learned after reviewing Superfund documents and interviewing federal and local officials.

But he has no other water source. More than 35% of Puerto Ricans still don’t have access to safe water. Without water, you die.

The water comes from a Superfund site but it’s not clear that the particular well in question is contaminated. The EPA is going to test it over the weekend.

Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados, the water authority, was unaware that this well site was part of the Superfund program until CNN provided maps showing that this was the case, according to Luis Melendez, sub-director for environmental compliance at the utility.

Melendez maintained the water is fit for public consumption. The well was opened on an emergency basis and is not part of the regular drinking water supply, he said.

In 2015, this well in Dorado, which is located near a shopping center, was found by the EPA to be safely within federal standards for PCE and chloroform, two industrial chemicals.

Let’s hope it still is, and let’s hope the EPA’s standards are good enough.

We have to hope Trump’s people haven’t been weakening the standards.

Rebecca Solnit looks at the pathological absence of empathy it takes for men to exploit or destroy women in the horrifying way we see from the chopping up of Kim Wall to the reported abuse by Harvey Weinstein.

Underlying all these attacks is a lack of empathy, a will to dominate, and an entitlement to control, harm and even take the lives of others. Though there is a good argument that mental illness is not a sufficient explanation – and most mentally ill people are nonviolent – mass shooters and rapists seem to have a lack of empathy so extreme it constitutes a psychological disorder. At this point in history, it seems to be not just a defect from birth, but a characteristic many men are instilled with by the culture around them. It seems to be the precondition for causing horrific suffering and taking pleasure in it as a sign of one’s own power and superiority, in regarding others as worthless, as yours to harm or eliminate.

Or perhaps it’s an extreme version of masculinity that has always been with us in a culture that gives men more power and privilege than women; perhaps these acts are the result of taking that to its logical conclusion. There must be terrible loneliness in that failure to perceive or value the humanity of others, the failure of empathy and imagination, to consider oneself the only person who matters. Caring about others, empathising, loving them, liberates each of us; these bereft figures seem to be prisoners of their selfishness before they are punishers of others.

Loneliness and beyond – emptiness, meaninglessness, nothingness. Can you imagine considering yourself the only person who matters (and who has ever mattered)? You don’t have to be gregarious or an extrovert to find that idea a horror. There would be no meaning in books, in stories, in dramas, in art, in history – there would be little meaning in anything.

(Do I suddenly for the first time feel sympathy for Donald Trump? No.)

Much has also been written to explain why the mass shootings are not terrorism (except when the shooter is, as he is rarely, Muslim), but perhaps terrorism can be imagined as a cultural as well as political phenomenon, a desire to instil fear, assert dominance, devalue the rights and freedoms of others, assert the power of the violent and of violence. There is an ideology behind it, even if not an overtly political ideology, of self-aggrandisement, cruelty, the embrace of violence, and hate.

I would call that not so much an ideology as…what, an urge, a preference, a permanent mood? A great many people like that kind of thing but it’s not by itself an ideology.

It’s the authoritarianism of violence that seems too often overlooked, the acts that are the opposite of the democratic ideal that all people are created equal, with certain inalienable rights. There is no greater authoritarianism than that of someone who violates the will, the body, the wellbeing, or takes the life of another.

Yes. That’s why I keep repeating the word “authoritarian” (and the word “dictator”) when I talk about Trump. It’s important – more so than whatever passes for the ideology that attempts to justify it. He doesn’t really believe most of the bullshit he talks; he just likes to boss and destroy.

That powerlessness of others seems to be desired and relished in these cases. It’s time to talk about the fact that many men seem erotically excited by their ability to punish, humiliate, inflict pain on women – the subject of a lot of porn. When you jerk off while cornering an unwilling woman, you’re presumably excited by her powerlessness and misery or repulsion. Another of Weinstein’s victims told the New Yorker, “The fear turns him on.” Fox News founder and CEO Roger Ailestook pleasure, according to his victims, in degrading the employees he sexually exploited and harassed.

But that stuff gets called “sex-positive” and feminists who criticize it get called the other thing.

We’ve also recently had a host of obituaries for Hugh Hefner. Some included the arguments that Hefner and his magazine were harmless or liberating. But they insisted that women were for men to use if they met a narrow definition of attractiveness, and to mock or ignore if they were not. While often portrayed as part of the sexual revolution, the magazine and Hefner were instead part of the counter-revolution, figuring out how to perpetuate women’s subordination and men’s power in a changing era.

The young women who lived in – and sometimes described feeling trapped in – the Playboy mansion were there to please the old goat at the centre of it and his friends, and not the other way around.

His male friends. Men are people, women are things for people to have sex with. Sex isn’t mutual, it’s For Him and By or In or On her. He is Man, she is thing.

Negative empathy is a bad thing.

BuzzFeed published a story the other day on the secret life of Breitbart – specifically about its “legion of secret sympathizers in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, academia, suburbia, and everywhere in between.”

“I have said in the past that I find humor in breaking taboos and laughing at things that people tell me are forbidden to joke about,” Yiannopoulos wrote in a statement to BuzzFeed News. “But everyone who knows me also knows I’m not a racist. As someone of Jewish ancestry, I of course condemn racism in the strongest possible terms. I have stopped making jokes on these matters because I do not want any confusion on this subject. I disavow Richard Spencer and his entire sorry band of idiots. I have been and am a steadfast supporter of Jews and Israel. I disavow white nationalism and I disavow racism and I always have.”

Notice what he doesn’t disavow – notice and be wearily unsurprised. He hates women and loves to harass them and encourage others to harass them. That of course is mainstream and fine, so no need to say he’ll stop making jokes about it.

Breitbart puffed Milo up.

And for thousands of people, Yiannopoulos, Breitbart’s poster child for offensive speech, became a secret champion.

Aggrieved by the encroachment of so-called cultural Marxism into American public life, and egged on by an endless stream of stories on Fox News about safe spaces and racially charged campus confrontations, a diverse group of Americans took to Yiannopoulos’s inbox to thank him and to confess their fears about the future of the country.

He heard from ancient veterans who “binge-watched” his speeches on YouTube; from “a 58 year old asian woman” concerned about her high school daughter’s progressive teachers; from boys asking how to win classroom arguments against feminists; from a former NASA employee who said he had been “laid off by my fat female boss” and was sad that the Jet Propulsion Lab had become “completely cucked”; from a man who had bought his 11-year-old son an AR-15 and named it “Milo”; from an Indiana lesbian who said she “despised liberals” and begged Yiannopoulos to “keep triggering the special snowflakes”; from a doctoral student in philosophy who said he had been threatened with dismissal from his program for sharing his low opinion of Islam; from a Charlotte police officer thanking Yiannopoulos for his “common sense Facebook posts” about the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott (“BLUE LIVES MATTER,” Yiannopoulos responded); from a New Jersey school teacher who feared his students would become “pawns for the left social justice campaign”; from a man who said he had returned from a deployment in “an Islamic country” to discover that his wife was transitioning and wanted a divorce (subject line “Regressivism stole my wife”); from a father terrified his daughter might attend Smith College; from fans who wanted to give him jokes to use about fat people, about gay people, about Muslims, about Hillary Clinton.

He also heard, with frequency, from accomplished people in predominantly liberal industries — entertainment, tech, academia, fashion, and media — who resented what they felt was a censorious coastal cultural orthodoxy. Taken together, they represent something like a network of sleeper James Damores, vexed but silent for fear of losing their jobs or friends, kvetching to Yiannopoulos as a pressure valve. For Yiannopoulos, these emails weren’t just validation, though they were obviously that. They sometimes became more ammunition for the culture war.

Sleeper James Damores. It sounds oddly familiar.

“I’m a relatively recent ex-lefty who received deep liberal indoctrination via elite private schools (Yale and Andover),” wrote one film editor who introduced herself as an “Undercover ‘pede in Hollywood.” (“Centipede” is slang for an online Trump supporter.) “I’ve been deeply closeted thus far due to the severe personal and professional repercussions of not beating the progressive drum.”

In an email titled “Working for E! Is Hell,” a production manager at the cable network wrote Yiannopoulos that her employer was a “contributor to the fake news machine and my colleagues have become insufferable. … I … offer you my services … a partner in fighting globalism.”

And so on.

A Twitter software engineer who felt betrayed by the “moral company” he had worked for since 2012, when it “stood for free speech,” emailed to tell Yiannopoulos that the removal of his verification in early 2016 “was obviously politically motivated.”

And some of these disgruntled tech workers reached beyond the rank and file. Vivek Wadhwa, a prominent entrepreneur and academic, reached out repeatedly to Yiannopoulos with stories of what he considered out-of-control political correctness. First it was about a boycott campaign against a Kickstarter with connections to GamerGate. (“These people are truly crazy and destructive. … What horrible people,” wrote Wadwha of the campaigners.) Then it was about Y-Combinator cofounder Paul Graham; Wadwha felt Graham was being unfairly targeted for an essay he wrote about gender inequality in tech.

…

In addition to tech and entertainment, Yiannopoulos had hidden helpers in the liberal media against which he and Bannon fought so uncompromisingly. A long-running email group devoted to mocking stories about the social justice internet included, predictably, Yiannopoulos’s friend Ann Coulter, but also Mitchell Sunderland, a senior staff writer at Broadly, Vice’s women’s channel. According to its “About” page, Broadly “is devoted to representing the multiplicity of women’s experiences. … we provide a sustained focus on the issues that matter most to women.”

“Please mock this fat feminist,” Sunderland wrote to Yiannopoulos in May 2016, along with a link to an article by the New York Times columnist Lindy West, who frequently writes about fat acceptance. And while Sunderland was Broadly’s managing editor, he sent a Broadly video about the Satanic Temple and abortion rights to Tim Gionet with instructions to “do whatever with this on Breitbart. It’s insane.” The next day, Breitbart published an article titled “‘Satanic Temple’ Joins Planned Parenthood in Pro-Abortion Crusade.”

Sunderland was fired – but I’m seeing people saying Vice’s “surprise” is an infuriating joke.

And the former Slate technology writer David Auerbach, who once began a column “Gamergate must end as soon as possible,” passed along on background information about the love life of Anita Sarkeesian, the GamerGate target; “the goods” about an allegedly racist friend of Arthur Chu, the Jeopardy champion and frequent advocate of social justice causes; and a “hot tip” about harsh anti-harassment tactics implemented by Wikipedia. Bokhari followed up with an article: “Wikipedia Can Now Ban You For What You Do On Other Websites.”

There’s a lot more.

It’s Trump’s world and we’re living in it.

Krugman.

Start with a clear-eyed assessment of Trump's character: he basically has negative empathy — that is, enjoys seeing others hurt 2/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 13, 2017

Yes. That exactly describes him – not completely of course, but exactly. He loves seeing others hurt. He loves it all the more if he’s the one doing the hurting.

At this point, however, it's clear to everyone — probably even him — that he just can't do this president thing, and won't get better 4/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 13, 2017

So we're getting into the end game. He can't save his presidency. He can, however, still hurt a lot of people. And he surely wants to 6/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 13, 2017

So from now on, until he's gone, I'm going to fire up my computer every morning in a state of existential dread 7/

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) October 13, 2017

Yep.

Boys will be boys.

Polly Toynbee was on Radio 4’s Today with a pompous bloviating Tory commentator –

If you didn’t hear Today, you can imagine what transpired. He took a swing at “our new establishment”, the “new elite … schmoozing and networking”, the “mass of people forever wagging fingers” and “telling us how to live our lives”. And as he did so, he betrayed again that curious paranoia of those who hold power, wealth and influence, and their defenders in the Tory press, pretending that they are the victims. For most of my life, the Tories have been in power, with brief social democratic interludes showing that democracy still functions, if intermittently. They are the captains of just about every commanding height – except, maybe, the most senior figures in the arts. That’s why they are Letts’ great bete noire.

Same old same old; just like filthy rich Trump pretending to be on the side of the workers.

He was losing the argument. So what does the right do next, what does a Mail man do next? He turned personal and patronising: “Do you know, whenever I’m on with Polly I wish I could just pin her to the ground and tickle her under the armpits and make you smile my dear!” It was creepy, disgusting. In the panic of the live radio moment I cringed and simpered a bit. “I do smile!” I said, falling for the trope of the “miserable humourless Guardian old girl can’t even take a joke!” (Old girl is what he called the prime minister on the Mail’s front page last week). And then I kicked myself a thousand times for all the things I might have said. Pin me down? Tickle me? Can you imagine him saying that to Simon Jenkins or Jonathan Freedland?

There was no harm done: I’m not vulnerable. But on Twitter there was anger at another wearying reminder of the extent to which contempt for women informs the Mail culture. This isn’t pussy-grabbing or masturbating in front of actresses. Letts isn’t Trump or Weinstein – but his twee, over-physical little put-down comes from an adjacent place. Men are men and women forever silly girls – old or young.

It isn’t pussygrabbing but it’s all part of the same shit: the same seeing women as other, lesser, empty, an afterthought, there only for the fucking.

I guess that this week all women my age have been mentally re-running the bum-pinching, grabbing, intimidating humiliations from men in power of our youth. I remember as a gauche and inadequate 22-year-old reporter, that interview with the author Saul Bellow. Bored, bullying, he ordered me to walk ahead of him in the park so he could look at my legs as they were better than my questions. And shamingly, I did. Mordecai Richler, the Canadian novelist, assumed a fixer had set me up for the night with him on his publicity tour in exchange for an interview. He was outraged when I ran off. I never wrote those things into my interviews, as now we would.

Ick about Bellow. No wonder Martin Amis idolizes him – Mart is another who can’t see women as real people. They’re everywhere.