You may have heard of “The Shitty Media Men List”. When the revelations about overwhelmingly GoodThink Liberal Men Who Were Slimy Sexual Predators began to gather steam, the list was put together anonymously by Moira Donegan. She claims this was the first attempt “at solving what has seemed like an intractable problem: how women can protect ourselves from sexual harassment and assault.” For someone with such an awesome command of Google Docs, I’m surprised she hasn’t heard of “Lawyers” or “The Second Amendment.”  As to that last, perhaps her ignorance can be forgiven, as she seems to live in a deep-blue enclave of civility and concern for the rights of the oppressed where exercising one’s right to self-defense is severely restricted. I could be mistaken.

Ms. Donegan defends her list (and by extension herself), observing,

“When a reporting channel has enforcement power, like an HR department or the police, it also has an obligation to presume innocence. [The oteoive! – Griff]  In contrast, the value of the spreadsheet was that it had no enforcement mechanisms: It was intended specifically not to inflict consequences, not to be a weapon — and yet, once it became public, many people immediately saw it as exactly that.”

(Emphasis mine because I find it hard to credit she actually believed that it would not be used as a weapon or that it would not, as it later did, go viral.) As she notes,

“Among the most potent of (our special womanly) powers is the knowledge of our own experiences. The women who used the spreadsheet, and who spread it to others, used this power in a special way, and I’m thankful to all of them.”

Ah, yes, an anonymous list of Evul Menz, with their crimes recounted and shared, absent any actual proof other than a good accusation. I couldn’t help but imagine Arthur Miller trying to write today, much less get produced, his Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Crucible,” which was about the hysteria around the Salem Witch Trials.

Woke Producer:  “I dunno, Artie.  Seems like your play is saying there weren’t any witches.”

Miller: (thinks Did you even read the play?) “Well, there weren’t. This play is about hysteria and how a mob can be worked up by people with less-than-pure motivations.”

Woke Producer:  “Come on, man. There’s always one.”

Miller: (thinks I hear Howard Stern is hiring writers. Maybe they have an opening…)   “Always one?”

Woke Producer:  “You to have to believe the victim’s truth every time, dude. I need you to put in a real witch.”

Miller: (thinks Why am I sitting here?  I wrote “Death of a Salesman,” for Christs’ sake!) “Okay…it kind of ruins the point about destroying the lives of the innocent, though.”

Woke Producer: “They were all straight white people. They got what they deserve…and that reminds me, we need to color-blind the casting. I’m thinking Morgan Freeman…”

Miller: “For the Puritan Pastor of a church in 1645?”  (thinks I gotta get a drink or I’m going to murder this Man-Bun Moron…)

Then, a couple of weeks ago, Vanity Fair magazine brought us the shocking exposé about how people who are rich and powerful behave in private (hint: it ain’t always pretty). Or as the headline reveals, “while the guys get laid, the women get screwed.” The dependably even-handed (snort) Vanity Fair breaks it down as their fearless writer “exposes the tired and toxic dynamic at play.”

One anonymous, alleged Tech Titan,

“described his teenage life as years of playing computer games and not going on a date until he was 20 years old.

Now, to his amazement, he finds himself in a circle of trusted and adventurous tech friends with the money and resources to explore their every desire. After years of restriction and longing, he is living a fantasy.”

Among the many stories recounted is that of Ava, a young female entrepreneur. She’s dated several of the techy founders, and she recounts that it’s men, not women, who are the most obsessed with displays of wealth and privilege. (Clearly, she’s never heard of Imelda Marcos, she of the 10,000 shoes).

After the obligatory sop of passive-aggressive judgmentalism (“They don’t necessarily see themselves as predatory”), to no one’s surprise the author Emily Chang, suggests that,

“…weekend views of women as sex pawns and (gold-diggers) can’t help but affect weekday views of women as colleagues, entrepreneurs, and peers.”

Instead of acknowledging that bad behavior toward other humans is a human problem (see how rates of domestic violence are higher in same-sex couples or the very high incidence of female DV against men––oh, you haven’t heard about those? Wonder why?), once more we are fed the approved, if toxic and tired, conclusion: Men are the Problem.

Perhaps Vanity Fair and Emily Chang overlooked the empowering decision of the woman entrepreneur in the article who got so fed up with the perceived lay-to-play dynamic that she moved herself and her start-up to New York and left Silicon Valley for good. She essentially said, “I’m better than this.”

This gutsy woman was, unknowing, applying the wisdom of Tucker Max (aka, “Man with the Id of Bill Clinton, minus the pathetic need to be loved by everyone”). Max, who made a damned decent living recounting his Rabelaisian exploits in completely honest pursuit of poon, had this to say in his first book, well before he got a grip and realized hump-and-dump is no way to live:

“This is all you need to know: Men will treat you the way you let them. There is no such thing as “deserving” respect; you get what you demand from people.”

This is a point that seems to be just beyond Emily Chang and Vanity Fair’s grasp.

Then there’s the lawsuit filed by James Damore, the hateful ex-Google Engineer who was fired for (in very typically clueless tech geek-fashion) writing a memo that raised impolitic points about male/female performance in certain work places. Mr. Damore is claiming that he was fired for being the most heinous of creatures, a conservative white male.

In addition to the Notes From The Woke claiming they’d never hire a conservative and would blackball them in the tech industry if possible, there were some bright spots such as,

“…an employee who sexually identifies as ‘a yellow-scaled wingless dragonkin’ and ‘an expansive ornate building’ presented a talk entitled ‘Living as a Plural Being’ at an internal company event…the presentation (covered) ‘living as a plural being.’”

The Dragonkin Formerly Known as “Sane” lectured the prisoners attendees on the proper way to address coworkers with multiple identities. It would appear that among the flightless Wurm-set, it is a major social faux pas to direct one’s inquires to “any one headmate in particular; we’re all listening!”

Nor can we overlook the thoughtfully unhinged behavior captured in an email to the aforementioned hateful engineer: “You’re a misogynist and a terrible person,” read a late-night email from Alex Hidalgo, a Google engineer. “I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired. Fuck you.” Nothing says “I embrace the ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto” like promising to drive someone out of a job.  Perhaps Mr./Ms./Esteemed-Ambassador-to-Our–Future-Dragon-Overlords Hidalgo thought that by offering James Damore a good time the reptilian-one was being conciliatory.

The late Sam Kinison, professional lunatic and quite funny comedian, once described Hollywood’s Sunset Grill as the place “where the possessed go to mingle.” (Warning: NSFW language, of course – ed.)

Judging from the lawsuit, Google is the place where the possessed go to get paid.

Next week:  “Monuments Men is a Fine Film that George Clooney Directed and Starred in with Matt Damon and you should see it anyway!”