Maybe we need a fresh perspective. Everybody regards harassers as creeps. We’re watching them fall on their swords of necessity and regret, as much for being caught for what they’ve actually done. Some of the rest of us, however, are acting a little too much like Madame Defarge in Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” knitting with contented delight as the heads of the guilty and innocent drop from the guillotine.
Nobody wants to do nuance. No one wants to take the side of a hideous harasser or boorish jerk, but we do need to face up to the difference between a man charged with rape and one simply forcing an unwanted kiss on the lips of a lady, between the man who presses his body close and the creep who locks the door of his office to prevent her escape, or between the dedicated masher and the flamboyant performer taking slapstick to the point of touching a bosom or bottom.
Santa knows who’s naughty, nice and nefarious, as on a “Saturday Night Live” satire of the shenanigans and aggressions on Page One, but the comics at NBC concede that children are naturally confused to learn that adults like toys, too, such as those Matt Lauer kept in his office for play dates. One of the youngsters in the “Saturday Night Live” skit asks Santa why, “If you admit you did something wrong, you get in trouble, but if you deny it, they let you keep your job.” (Out of the mouths of babes.) Of course, that’s not getting it exactly right, but in terms of morality and the law the lessons are ambiguous, written not in black and white but in the fifty shades of gray in an erotic novel.
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