We’re Not There Yet
Sex
With coffee in hand, I flipped through Facebook yesterday morning. “Me too” read one post from a female friend I used to work with. Incredibly intelligent, hands-down one of the smartest women — no, people — I’d ever worked with just posted two words. I thought it was a mispost that was supposed to be a reply, a butt-post if you will. Then I saw another, and this time with an explanation. And throughout the day, my feed depressingly filled up with “Me too” posts, illustrating how common sexual harassment and assault of women are.
Of course this movement was spurred on by the bombshell investigative journalism by the New York Times and the New Yorker. Last week they broke open a story that’s eluded the media for so long: Harvey Weinstein and his serial sexual harassment and assault of women in Hollywood.
Why would a man who was successful, married, and the father of five children decide to regularly try to convince young starlets to sleep with him, give him a massage, or just flash their breasts? As I read and listened to women recounting what had happened to them, and how Weinstein actually acted, I realized just how small and backwards of a man he is. He negotiated with them. He sounded desperate. And he sounded guilty and scared immediately after committing any of those acts. Weinstein knew he wasn’t supposed to use his position of power and act like a predator. But he did anyway.
And he is not alone. Fox News Channel’s cofounder Roger Ailes, that channel’s biggest star Bill O’Reilly, Amazon Studios’ Roy Price, and disc jockey David Mueller, were all recently exposed or convicted. And it’s not limited to just the entertainment industry either; see SoFi’s CEO Mike Cagney, Binary Capital’s Justin Caldbeck, Uber’s Travis Kalanick, and many others. And of course, let’s not forget our president Donald Trump!
Men have sexually harassed or assaulted women close to me. Stories I’ve been told and my Facebook feed yesterday affirm that. There is a significant portion of men out there who, because they succumbed to their urges, have made women feel ashamed, dirty, and slimy. It’s pervasive, even in our first world country. Even in our liberal state. And even in a progressive city like San Francisco. Penis trumps brain.
Violence
I sat in my car in my driveway, listening to the remaining nine minutes of the podcast. The reporter, Jeffrey Gettleman, was recalling the horrific tale of a 20 year-old Rohingya woman named Rajuma who survived an attack on her village by the Myanmar military. She was one of the few survivors. The soldiers had shot, decapitated, and slit the throats of all the men in her village. They took her 18 month-old baby boy she was clutching to and unemotionally threw him into a fire. Then the men pushed Rajuma into a hut and proceeded to gang-rape her. Rajuma woke up to smoke and fire. Her mother dead. Her sisters and brother, all dead. Almost everyone in her village murdered. But she escaped. And eventually joined thousands of other refugees in Bangladesh.
I was heartbroken hearing that story. How could a human being do that to another human being? What could make them so savage that they could do those things to children? To babies? This vicious act was not the isolated act of a psychopathic serial killer. This was systemic, coordinated ethnic cleansing, carried out by groups of soldiers. Since August, the above scene has played out 288 times, with many thousands of Rohingya people killed.
Evolution
Schoolchildren are taught that male animals put on a show when they’re looking for a mate. Peacocks fan out their feathers. Pigeons dance around in a circle. But male mammals go further. Primates like chimpanzees will coerce females to mate with them by charging at them, ripping out their hair, or beating them.
Chimpanzees have also been observed killing other chimps who do not belong in their territory, or in an effort to expand. In fact, Jane Goodall watched one tribe of chimps, called the Kasakela, kill all six of the other tribe’s — the Kahama — adult males over four years.
As modern humans, we are many species away from our genetic ancestors. Proto-humans separated from chimpanzees seven to 10 million years ago. We developed a consciousness and a conscience. And yet our animalistic tendencies still persist. I’m not talking about core biological functions like hunger, or our fight or flight response, but acts that require thought and effort like arranging a “meeting” at the Peninsula Hotel or torching over 200 villages and killing all their inhabitants.
Values
“Hey! Stick to your side!” my daughter yelled from the back of the car. Her little brother is sticking his arm or leg past the mid-point of the row of seats. As he needles her, he’s smiling devilishly.
I’ve lost count the number of times that vignette has played out in my car over the years. Being possessive and territorial is instinctual. Children say “Mine!” all the time. But we teach them to share. We teach them that it’s good and nice to share with their friends. We also teach our children to be empathetic and help those who are less fortunate than us.
These are core human values: sharing and caring.
At least I’d like to think so.
Kayla Chadwick wrote a great piece last week, “I Don’t Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People” that connected a few dots for me.
Chimpanzees may resort to sexual coercion and murdering rival tribes. But us, modern homo sapiens, should not do that. Yet we do sometimes. Our human society should be about cooperation and shared prosperity. But we don’t always adhere to that either. Instead, just like chimps, it’s each sub-group for itself.
Politics
My core human values are indeed sharing and caring. I am squarely middle-class and believe in sharing my tax dollars to help those who are less fortunate. I care for the plight of the homeless, the immigrants and refugees, Black lives, and the disenfranchised. This is the liberal platform. That all boats rise together.
But on the conservative side, the values are fundamentally different. It’s about the opportunity to prosper or fail by one’s own hand. In other words, it’s every man for himself. The fight over the Affordable Care Act illustrates this. Insurance is, by definition, pooling financial resources to share in the cost. Which, again by definition, means that healthier people’s premiums pay for sicker people’s costs. The Right’s constant drumbeat of repealing and replacing Obamacare is a demand for healthy people to pay less, and sick people to pay more. In other words, not sharing and not caring.
Healthcare costs for the sick can be extraordinary. A year’s course of treatment for a typical breast cancer patient is over $140,000. So if she were in a high-risk only insurance pool, her premiums would be incredibly high — upwards of $18,000 — compared to a healthier person her same age. Would a person making minimum wage or on disability ever be able to afford such insurance?
Republicans conveniently forget that Americans already share in a lot of costs that may not apply to us individually: mass transit on the other side of the country, the Library of Congress, the military, disaster relief from hurricanes. Adding healthcare — something that affects each of us — seems obvious to me.
We’re just not there yet
Perhaps we’ve been fooled by liberal idealism. We’ve been overly optimistic in our assessment of our own evolution as a species. Despite millions of years of continued brain growth and refining our societies, humans are still pulled by our primal instincts of sexual aggression, territorialism, and tribalism.
I want to believe that we can do better. I want to believe that someday, there will be peace and prosperity on Earth for 100% of us. That someday, men will no longer be pigs, and we won’t squabble and kill over a plot of land. The only way we can achieve that is by pulling the other way and moving forward. By believing and acting better, together.
P.S. This essay was not written from a point of moral superiority. The opposite is in fact true. I acknowledge that we are all imperfect, including myself. But that we can—and should—improve in our own lifetimes, and in the generations to come.
