Please Forgive Me For Being Male: Tom Pessah Edition

This is pure-D cringe.

   Pessah's problem isn't that he wasn't a feminist early enough...it was that he was apparently a rather creepy kid. Now he's apparently a differently creepy adult. 

   Though, tbh, it seems a bit crazy to me to expect kids to behave perfectly in any way. People make mistakes, kids especially. I never did any stuff like that--but it doesn't exactly surprise me that some boys do. And I mean: some normal boys--not just the psychotic ones. Hormones at that age are basically blotting out your rational faculties. I pretty much thought about nothing but sex from age thirteen to...well...let's just say: for quite awhile. Is the idea supposed to be that we need to have a world in which no hormone-addled thirteen-year-old ever does something both stupid and sexual? Because that seems nutty to me--even as a guy who would honestly never have dreamed of "accidentally" groping girls. I mean...by all means, make sure boys are raised right...I mean....my parents never said "don't grope girls"...they didn't have to say that. It would have been like saying don't burn down buildings. Why would they think I needed to be told such a thing? (This is why the teach men not to rape stuff is irksome; like so much of feminism, it's meant to indicate that we're all evil, and that, if not for training, we'd just be groping and raping right and left...)

   I've occasionally--I'll have you know!--had women--you know...eh...in my earlier years--be obtuse about my (to my mind) clear indications of disinterest, and sometimes go on to...uh....make entirely unsubtle physical advances. I can't say any of those incidents break the top 1000-or-so bad things that have happened to me in my life. There are asymmetries...but the asymmetry is not total. Look: not every act of groping or staring is life-shattering. (JQ, who doesn't have a lot of tolerance for such things, has said in the past: Eh, I gotta say, I don't totally mind the wolf-whistles... I've heard other women say similar things.) I'm totally opposed to unwanted groping...until the last ten years or so, I'd have said that I have a zero-tolerance view about it. I don't think it should be taken lightly...but...as contemporary feminism and PC keep illustrating...it turns out that people can be way too damn anti- even the stuff you thought you had a zero-tolerance policy about. For example, I think it's time for Pessah to let that youthful incident of his go. Fretting about something like that two decades on is probably a bit much. 

   Look...seriously...does this guy sound entirely psychologically healthy to you?:

   These are just some examples of how I was infected by sexism. There were countless other ways in which I blatantly or more subtly devalued women, their thoughts and their feelings.
   I’ve considered myself a feminist for about 25 years, and it’s been a long process of unlearning. I try to take up less space: I wait until a woman in the room has spoken before I chime in. I walk in the street in a non-intimidating way – if it’s late at night and there’s a woman in front of me, I keep my distance or cross to the other side.
   I count how many women there are in the space I’m in, and I practice calling in other men in empathic, non-competitive ways (not “my feminism is bigger than yours”). And I’m still learning. I’m truly grateful to all the women who trusted me, educated me and called me out when I deserved it. Unlearning is hard but I believe we’re en route to a better, kinder society.

I mean...some of the sins he reports include "inappropriate staring" and politically-incorrect pornography viewing. Staring can be rude...and can be worse than rude...but there are cases and cases. Given the rest of this guy's resume, I really can't tell what kind of staring he might be talking about. (Staring as in I was staring in the sense that I grabbed her butt? Or staring as in Non-consensually glanced at a woman today...rushed home and did fifty hail Dworkins? Either one seems possible with this guy...)

   But...at some point this kind of self-flagellation becomes self-emasculation. I mean...I, too, make sure to give women some space if I'm walking by myself at night. So that one doesn't seem crazy to me. But FFS, he tries to take up less space??? And he waits to speak until a woman has spoken??? Jesus wept, dude...this is not something to be flashing around. This is pathological. It's gross. It's pathetic. It's typically left: skipping right over the sane center and exactly inverting the stupid shit you're against so that you have a mirror-image version of the stupidity.

   Also, incidentally: I can tell you right now, man: you're never getting laid.