#MeToo: Is Donald Trump The Next Powerful Man to Fall?
“Women, you have to treat ’em like shit.” —Donald Trump, New York magazine, November 9, 1992
After centuries of indifference to or even tacit (and sometimes open) sanctioning of sexual harassment, abuse or assault, we are suddenly in the midst of a cock conflagration. Powerful men in Hollywood, politics, journalism and many other fields are being pilloried, sacked or jailed for piggish or even criminal behavior toward women.
To understand how this bonfire started, we must speak frankly about the Garden of Dicks, a mythical place in the caveman lobe of the male brain. Like that other primeval paradise, the Garden of Eden, men have tried for millennia to create it here on Earth.
The Garden of Dicks is a Hooters. It’s an NFL locker room. It’s the Vatican. It’s the Rolling Stones’ private jet. It’s Harvey Weinstein’s suite at the Tribeca Grand Hotel.
It’s a top modeling agency in New York City run by a man who, after years of preying on his models, was disgraced for having sex with underage girls. He excused himself by saying, “I’m a man, and I have urges.”
It’s a corner office at Fox News decorated with the memorabilia of great power—including a brick from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan—inhabited by a muttony executive who relentlessly propositioned female colleagues, grabbed kisses, demanded sexual favors for jobs and said things like, “You know, if you want to play with the big boys, you have to lay with the big boys.” And, “Well, you might have to give a blow job every once in a while.” Down the hall, that executive’s pasty star was allegedly sending gay porn, jerking off on late-night calls to female underlings and making numerous other unwelcome sexual advances.
It’s an online “review board” where an estimated 18,000 men, many of them reportedly white-collar tech workers, ranked the sexual skills of trafficked Korean women.
It’s a beauty pageant afterparty, where a 1997 Miss USA contestant met the pageant’s owner. "He kissed me directly on the lips,” Temple Taggart told The New York Times about her encounter with the man who is now president of the United States. “I thought: Oh my God. Gross. He was married to Marla Maples at the time. I think there were a few other girls that he kissed on the mouth. I was like, Wow, that's inappropriate.”
In the Garden of Dicks, the sense
