It’s not just about Graham Platner or even Donald Trump. It’s about the millions and millions of men who are just like them. I have personally known far too many of them. They are men who for some reason I have never completely understood believe that they can do anything they want with a woman simply because she is a woman.
It started in high school. I heard guys brag about clocking the movements of a girl who almost always didn’t have siblings to get in the way and was not part of the “in” crowd the guy was in. The guy telling the story had never talked to the girl in the halls at school or asked her on a date. He would figure out when her parents weren’t home, and he would show up on her doorstep and “get some.” I went to three different high schools in three different towns in three states, and I heard guys tell this story in every single one of them. They even used the same phrase, “get some.”
Guys like that turned into Donald Trump and Graham Platner. I heard them talk about what they did in teen clubs, at wrestling and track practice, in barracks at West Point and in the Army, in fast food joints and bars and restaurants, in cars, and even once on an airplane. I could not figure out when I was a boy, and I could not figure out as a young man, and I still do not really understand what made guys like them do what they did and then brag about it.
Later in life, I had relationships with women that were serious enough that we would open up and share secrets with one another. Too many of them – in fact, all but one or two – had been raped or abused when they were very young girls or teenagers or young women. I’m just one guy, and for a long time I believed that it was just happenstance that I became involved with women who had been sexually abused or raped. I don’t believe that anymore. I believe most of the women on this planet have experienced the evil of men.
The Graham Platners and Donald Trumps of the world are everywhere. I am not doing anything more than stating the obvious to say that there are far too many of them, certainly far more than we talk about publicly. In the world as it exists in the United States, it takes a man running for office, or perhaps becoming famous as an actor or musician or sports figure, for the world to find out what is in his past. Trump was certainly known in some circles in New York City for his abusive behavior with women, but it wasn’t public knowledge because it had not been widely shared in the press. Platner was apparently known previously for his abusive behavior with women. One woman put up a Facebook post in 2024 warning other women “not to date this guy,” according to reports. In a story in today’s New York Times, Bret Stephens reported, “Lyndsey Fifield, a former girlfriend of Platner’s, told The Times earlier this year that he had ‘twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so that she couldn’t get out,’ while also describing him as ‘the most toxic literally abusive man on earth.’” That story alone should have ended Platner’s campaign.
The Times story was a colloquy between Stephens and long-time Times reporter and opinion writer Frank Bruni about the political implications of they called the “pathetic, ugly last chapter” of Platner’s “demise.” They talked about what primary voters knew and when they knew it. They compared Platner with Trump, talking about the “fan-boying and fan-girling” around Platner by progressives and around Trump by his fawning MAGA base. They even talked about how Karl Marx had posited that “History repeats itself: first as musical tragedy, second as moral farce.”
But let me be blunt and say that they didn’t spend enough time talking about Platner’s sexual behavior with women or the alleged rape that was revealed earlier this week. I want you to listen to this from Stephens as he compares MAGA Republicans and their willingness to “to overlook just about any flaw on its own side in order to win” in comparison to Democrats coming out of the Platner debacle with a better chance to win than they would have had with Platner. Here is the line that got to me: “The silver lining here is that the rape allegation really did destroy Platner’s candidacy.”
Silver lining? There is a victim in this story who is not mentioned even once, as the two New York Times political experts go on to analyze how “this rape allegation” finally tipped the balance in the Senate race in Maine. Then they discuss how support from AIPAC for one candidate might affect a Senate race in Michigan. It’s all politics.
A woman was raped. I guess I’ve got to say “allegedly,” but you know what I mean. In this New York Times story, and in another lengthy story published today that amounts to a kind of autopsy for the Platner campaign, the fact that Platner is accused of violently raping a woman is just another factor in figuring out what happened to a political race in Maine. In the second Times story, three reporters say that they interviewed 30 people in the course of figuring out how Platner so easily dispatched former Governor Janet Mills, who cancelled her campaign and pulled out of the primary despite running “tough” political ads against Platner “featuring his comments about women and rape.”
The campaign analysis story, titled “A slow rolling disaster: Inside the Implosion of the Platner Campaign,” spends hundreds of words as it explores “Questions about the professionalism of the campaign’s senior leadership.”
Here’s what I’ve got to say about that: It’s not about who “recruited” Platner as a candidate, which they cover in detail. It’s not about how he was not properly “vetted” because Democrats seemed to be swooning over his “working class” credentials that turned out to be not so working class at all. It’s not about his campaign staff or how much money they raised.
It’s about Platner. He is a man who during his lifetime has used women, has been abusive to women, violent with women (twisting a woman’s hand behind her back and essentially locking her in a bedroom), was ugly and dismissive of women (the sexting “scandal”), and ultimately stands accused of raping a woman.
It’s about the man, and it happens far, far too many times. Remember Eliot Spitzer, the New York governor who was ousted because of his involvement with a high-end criminal prostitution ring? Remember Congressman Anthony Weiner sending photographs of his private parts to young women who were, to put it mildly, not his wife?
I could go on. And on. And on. What do these sex scandals have in common? Misbehavior involving sex, some of it criminal in nature, by men. What defines Donald Trump? His lying? His thievery? His authoritarian behavior? Yes, but what should define him is his sexual assault of E. Jean Carroll and the rest of his sexual assaults and harassment of some 25 other women. His statement that because he was famous, he could “grab them by the pussy.”
That is it, right there, in a nutshell, as the cliché goes. One statement by Donald Trump explains the boys I knew in high school bragging about “getting some” from girls they barely knew. It explains the politicians, the rock stars, the sports figures – it explains all of them, because millions and millions of men have that same instinct or belief or whatever it is in their soulless hearts and minds.
I don’t know what is to be done about it. The “answer,” at least politically, is not better vetting and more professional senior campaign aides. I have read that somehow the culture is to blame, that pornography plays a major role, that boys and violent video games are involved. Many so-called “conservatives” believe that “removing God from the classroom” was to blame. I’ve read all kinds of stuff that seeks to explain the unexplainable. But the boys I heard in high school bragging about their conquests were students in schools when God was still in the classroom, and they did not play video games, and the worst pornography they were probably exposed to was naked from the waist up women in magazines like Playboy.
This is what I have come to believe. It has to do with how boys are raised and what they learn from their parents and other close family members such as brothers and uncles and cousins and even from their friends about how they should treat girls and women.
I will tell a story to illustrate this. It’s one I have told before, but it bears re-telling here. When I lived in the deep South, I was invited along on a duck hunt with a bunch of men, several of whom brought their teenage sons along. I had never hunted ducks. I had never gone to what they call a “duck camp.” I was curious, so I agreed to go along.
The duck camp turned out to be a barge containing cots and a kitchen floating in the swamps of southern Louisiana in Cajun country. Next to the barge, on land, was a wooden building on stilts that turned out to be a bar. The first night, when the bar opened, the whole group, including the boys, went to the bar. I watched three men take their sons and treat them to blow jobs from women at the bar who turned out to be prostitutes who were there just for the purpose of providing sex to the men and boys. The fathers would pay one of the prostitutes, and this is the phrase I heard fathers use speaking to their own sons: “Go get you a piece of ass, boy.” I saw at least one father go with the same woman he had paid to go with his son. Where did they go with the prostitutes? It’s even worse than you think: into the woods behind the bar.
Later, the fathers would chortle with each other about teaching their sons how to be a man. They did this openly, and spoke in front of me, because they thought, wrongfully, I had gone through the same rituals when I was a boy. One of the men offered to “treat” me to one of the women. When I declined, all the men avoided me afterwards. I was never invited on another hunting trip by any of these men again.
The way boys are raised ends up affecting their entire lives. Even though what I witnessed happened in the deep South, I am telling you that the same sort of thing in a different context happens all over the country in suburbs and cities. It may not be duck camps and prostitutes, but it is everywhere.
Some men pass along to boys an inherent disrespect of women as things rather than human beings. Something similar was probably experienced by Donald Trump and Graham Platner. You are not born believing the way they do. Trump is a pig. Platner is a pig. Too many men are pigs.
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