The myth of the male bumbler

[mcar]

Long, but well worth the read.

http://theweek.com/articles/737056/myth-male-bumbler

...These men are, should you not recognize the type, wide-eyed and perennially confused. What's the difference, the male bumbler wonders, between a friendly conversation with a coworker and rubbing one's penis in front of one? Between grooming a 14-year-old at her custody hearing and asking her out?

The bumbler is the first to confess that he's bad at his job. Take Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who testified Tuesday of the Trump campaign's foreign policy team, which he ran and which is now understood to have been in contact with Russian agents: "We were not a very effective group." Or consider Dave Becky, the manager of disgraced comedian Louis C.K., who confessed last week to sexual misconduct. Becky avers that "never once, in all of these years, did anyone mention any of the other incidents that were reported recently." One might argue that no one should have needed to mention them; surely, as Louis C.K.'s manager, it was Becky's job to keep tabs on open secrets about his client? Becky's defense? He's a bumbler! ¯_(ツ _/¯

The bumbler doesn't know things, even things about which he was directly informed. Jon Stewart was "stunned" by the Louis C.K. revelations, even though we watched someone ask him about them last year. Vice President Mike Pence maintains he had no idea former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was lobbying for a foreign power — despite the fact that Flynn himself informed the transition team back in January, and even though Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) had written Pence — who was head of the transition team — to that effect as far back as Nov. 18, 2016. Wait, what? said Pence in March. Surely not! Really?

There's a reason for this plague of know-nothings: The bumbler's perpetual amazement exonerates him. Incompetence is less damaging than malice. And men — particularly powerful men — use that loophole like corporations use off-shore accounts. The bumbler takes one of our culture's most muscular myths — that men are clueless — and weaponizes it into an alibi.

[liberalmuse]

1. Great article!

Thank you for sharing.

[mcar]

7. My pleasure

It is a great article.

[Baitball Blogger]

2. Bumbler is their defense.

But they are drovers. People who use their ordinary guy characters to win confidence and drive the herd in whatever direction is necessary for their purposes.

[mcar]

4. They are expert manipulators

who have gotten away with their sham for decades.

[Baitball Blogger]

5. Yup.

Been around so long that they deserve their own category in the game of the con. Bumbler-Drovers.

Seriously, Mark Twain's opinion writings should be required reading. Everything old is new again.

[mcar]

6. It really should be

[Pacifist Patriot]

3. Fantastic article!

[mcar]

8. I think so too

A real eye opener.

[Pacifist Patriot]

13. I really appreciate authors like this who make me realize...

something that's been right in front of me but I never really thought of it that way. So obvious when she spells it out like that!

I had my husband read it and he completely agreed with everything she said.

[Nay]

9. Great essay! Well worth a read. The whole "clueless" meme, which many men

claim to resent as anti-male, is most perpetrated by men themselves, to get themselves out of major trouble AND to get themselves out of minor stuff too, like chores. I never thought that men who did the 'clueless' thing were ever that clueless -- I thought they were actively malicious or passive-aggressive in using cluelessness to get out of something they should know or do.

[CrispyQ]

10. An excellent commentary.

snip...

As the accusations of sexual misconduct roiling politics, publishing, and Hollywood continue to stack up, a few things are going to happen. The first stage of a phenomenon like this will always be to characterize the accused men as exceptions, as bad apples. #NotAllMen, the saying goes. But the second is that everyone is going to try to naturalize sexual harassment. If there are this many men doing these things, then surely this is just how men are! that argument will go. There's a corollary lurking underneath there: They can't help themselves. They're bumblers.

That won't wash. But the only way to guard against it is to shed our weird cultural blindness to manipulative male behavior. We must be smarter than our cultural defaults. We need to shed the exculpatory scripts that have mysteriously enabled all these incompetent bumblers to become rich, successful, and admired even as they maintain that they're moral infants.

snip...

How many deliberate, premeditated lies, how many carefully set traps, how many instances of deceit do we need before we can admit that men are every bit as duplicitous and two-faced as women are suspected of being? That harassment is not an accident? That predation requires planning? That this gigantic apparatus through which women's careers are destroyed and men's are preserved isn't just happenstance?

snip...

Most of us know that when a politician sits on the stand and insists that he "does not recall," that it's a political performance, a manipulative pretense intended to obfuscate. Let's apply that intelligent skepticism toward this rash of professions of male incompetence. To put it in pragmatic terms: You can be a bumbler, or you can keep your job. You can't have both.

Kick.

[Orrex]

11. This is a terrific article.

k/r

[brer cat]

12. Great read, mcar.

Thank you for posting. K&R