By David Futrelle
If anyone thinks the Mike Pence rule of never being alone with a woman lest something naughty happen isn’t discriminatory against women, consider the case of Mississippi Today reporter Larrison Campbell, who learned earlier this week that she wouldn’t be allowed to “ride along” with GOP gubernatorial wannabe Robert Foster on a 15-hour campaign trip because people might think that the two were “riding” each other, wink wink nudge nudge, knowwhatImean?
Because obviously every time a woman is alone in the presence of a man, sex breaks out.
“In two phone calls this week,” Campbell wrote in a story yesterday,
Colton Robinson, Foster’s campaign director, said a male colleague would need to accompany this reporter on an upcoming 15-hour campaign trip because they believed the optics of the candidate with a woman, even a working reporter, could be used in a smear campaign to insinuate an extramarital affair.
“The only reason you think that people will think I’m having a (improper) relationship with your candidate is because I am a woman,” this reporter said.
Robinson said the campaign simply “can’t risk it.”
I don’t even know what gender Colton Robinson is, but frankly they sound HOT. Are we sure Foster isn’t having sex with them right now?
Anyway, in a Tweet today, Foster said he was just following in the footsteps of Billy Graham, which really aren’t great footsteps for anyone to be following in but never mind. He also sort of suggested he might find it impossible to resist sex with Campbell and/or any other female person who wandered close to him unaccompanied by a man or men.
Clearly they aren’t thinking this through. If Campbell rode along with a male colleague in tow, wouldn’t people assume they were having an MMF threesome? I know I would.
Wait a minute, are there other men and women on this campaign bus or whatever it is that Foster is using to get around? DUDE IS TOTALLY HAVING ORGIES!!!1! ALLEGEDLY!1!
Still, in the odd moments when he is not having sex with ladies in his immediate presence (allegedly), Foster has found time to be mad online about the coverage of his not-sex-having policy with regard to Ms. Campbell.
I’ll give him credit for one thing: he can spell Mississippi correctly, despite all the sex thoughts about lady reporters and other nearby women he apparently has bouncing around in his head all day long.
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@footprints in wet clay
This hits upon the rub of it. What these dipshits have taken from #metoo is not that it’s a wake-up call for how universal sexual assault and harassment is and that we should all treat women, enbies and yes, men better, but that women who accuse high-profile men of harassment or assault are in it
@Skye
While I’m sure that in some of the more religious evangelical adherents that they believe “everyone’s a sinner” until they join the official “saved” club, there’s also a lot of post-hoc rationalizations for getting caught that rely on the just-world fallacy. “If I’m bad, it’s because everybody’s bad, because nobody can be a better person than me! Anybody who claims to be a goodie-two-shoes is just hiding something. Cuz that’s what I did! And nobody gets to this point by being a goodie-two-shoes.” This is how they defend themselves in their heads from the obvious disparity in the decency of those in favour of egalitarianism vs those who doggedly defend exclusionary hierarchy.
Yeah, some people actually are that good and decent and achieve great things. The problem is that a lot of ambition is needed and that has a poisoning effect, and since they’ve decided that everything is fair game, they think everyone else has concluded that too.
I wonder if Congressbigot Foster knows that his objection to the reporter riding with him is a fundamental tenet of Sharia Law….
Waitaminute.
If he and the woman are the only ones on the bus (I am assuming, of course, that there is no bus driver, who could act as a chaperone), why in the world is he driving around an entire bus?! Why not just take his own car, and drive where he needs to go? Or a U-Haul, if there is that must stuff for him to carry that he needs a large vehicle with plenty of storage space? Why a bus?
Could it be that the bus will be full of… other people?!
Or do the other people not count, because they are men, but because they are HIS men, and not HER chaperones, they cannot be used as security against having sex with a stranger?
Just how stupid does this guy think his wife is?
Oops, didn’t wrap up this point:
@footprints in wet clay
This hits upon the rub of it. What these dipshits have taken from #metoo is not that it’s a wake-up call for how universal sexual assault and harassment is and that we should all treat women, enbies and yes, men better, but that women who accuse high-profile men of harassment or assault are in it for their own self-interest rather than any genuine desire for justice. We’re already seeing Alex Acosta deploy those exact rape myths to paper over his failure to hold Jeffrey Epstein to account. Hence, they think the solution is to have another guy in the room to either blame for any sexual impropriety that does occur, or more likely to keep the jezebel from “crying rape”.
I’m pretty sure what the “liberal left” is confused by is his confusion of “being unchaperoned with a woman” with “automatic extramarital sexing”. There are millions of men conducting business with women all over the world AT THIS VERY MOMENT and managing not to fall dick-first into their ladyparts. It’s very easily done! So I’m pretty sure the problem is with Foster and not WaPo’s readership.
I just re-read the post, and realized that “bus” was David’s word, not this jerk’s word.
Still, are we supposed to believe that he’s driving around the campaign trail all by his lonesome, without an aide, at the very least? Seriously?
This guy isn’t going to be ALONE with the reporter, anyway! It’s just a sorry excuse to exclude her. I’m sure that if she were a conservative journalist, they’d be happy to have her along, and deem it perfectly safe, since he’d always have his aide with him, at the very least, and so there could be no thoughts of hanky-panky.
I notice the campaign director talks about a potential smear campaign by enemies of the candidate who believe he had an affair. The candidate talks about the potential that his wife will believe he had an affair. Doesn’t that imply that his wife is his principal enemy?
Regardless, I challenge this git to find any person besides his wife, on this planet or any other, who would care even a little bit whether he had an affair or not.
Wasn’t there a bit in Pratchett’s Lords and Ladies in which Magrat wryly reflects on how the local gossips regard her moving into a suite of rooms in the Palace during the preparations for her upcoming wedding to the King as “living in sin” with him, even though her apartments are at the opposite end from the Royal bedroom, the building is full of staff and court officials, and she and her fiancé never actually get to be alone together?
@kupo
I was commenting on the disgusting behavior men like this have frequently displayed towards women in a sarcastic manner. I wasn’t defending his nonsense in any way, or suggesting that the woman should report on somebody else instead. His blatant discrimination is ridiculous and the reporter has every right to follow his campaign. If he couldn’t behave, that’s his own problem and not grounds to deny her access to his campaign.
@Jackson Ayres
The kind of attitude you expressed affects me daily, being in a profession that is <20% women. I'm saying it's not funny and it's actively harmful. Are you defending your statement, then? On what basis? Do you feel like using sarcastic humor makes your words defy criticism?
Edit: why specifically tell women we don’t want to be around him? Do you think this joke would land if you said, “To be fair, you probably don’t want to be alone around these people, as a man?” Can you see how, just maybe, it’s women who can never win in this scenario and maybe your comment isn’t quite as venomous against the men who actively don’t want to include women and agree with the sentiment that we should be kept away?
If women never put themselves in the scenario of being around sexist, mysogynistic men… women would never have been able to work in the workplace at all.
Attitudes have changed (somewhat, the OP shows how much farther we have to go), but when i think of the sheer mountains of shit professional women had to endure… I just can’t even.
And it is even worse if they were along any other axis of oppression.
I know where you were coming from, @Jackson Ayres, but perhaps this joke does more than not land, perhaps it shows something that could use some self reflection.
Someone on Twitter suggested that he very well may have been sleeping around with women previously and now is on a leash. He said this is an agreement with his wife. It does make me wonder if she’s one of those jealous control freaks who thinks he is going to cheat any chance he gets….so he caved into her and has a “moralistic” cover story.
Note: you asked me to stop the rumors that he’s secretly gay so I DID. But there has to be more to this story than we’re getting. I don’t believe word he says(or tweets!).
No….there doesn’t? This is literally the Billy Graham rule. Its purpose is to subjugate women and force them out of professional spaces under the guise of holiness. And switching from homophobic rumors to misogynistic ones isn’t a stellar look.
Thanks to everyone who responded to me.
Did anyone see the updates on his Twitter? His comeback when the reporter rightfully accused him of seeing her as a sex object first and reporter second was “my truck, my rules.”
I’m assuming “my uterus, my rules” holds no weight for him though…
Also any politician (as others noted here and on Twitter) should be available to their constituents of whatever gender or sex.
That poor reporter is probably still retching and heaving at the thought of that dude getting within 10 feet of her, much less touching her. Ew.
@ Moon Custafer
Yes indeed, and I believe Terry Pratchett (who knew a lot of stuff) was thinking of Elizabeth I ‘s response to people who claimed, pretty much throughout her reign, that she was having affairs with pretty much any of her courtiers – though especially with Robert Dudley.
As she pointed out, she was never, ever alone, even at night when her chambermaids slept in the same room.
Carlo Levi, sent into internal exile in 1930s Italy, treated a very old woman in the village of Eboli. To cheer her up he promised he could fix what ailed her and that she’d be well enough to walk down the village street to thank him.
She recovered and felt obligated to walk down the street and thank him, but was visibly terrified, because it was always assumed in Eboli that when a woman and a man were in the same room together they’d be getting it on.
Even a woman in her late 80s.
@kupo @rhuu
I was mocking the people who making arguments like that, it was not my intent to make it seem like I was expressing that view. I do NOT think that women should stay away from people like this, be kept away from them “for their own good”, or in anyway be excluded. Those arguments are blatantly discriminatory and punish women for the assumed behavior of men, and they are commonly trotted out to keep women out of a variety male-dominated sectors.
In another comment here, I explicitly compared this politician’s policy to those of Saudi Arabia and other repressive societies where these sorts of paternalistic arguments are used to oppress women and keep them as second class (if that) citizens. The arguments made by the politician are not too dissimilar and which it was my intent to mock, are used to deny women their agency, rights, and keep them as little more than property in such countries. More specifically, women are not allowed to be in public in Saudi Arabia without a male chaperone, which is often justified as being for “their own protection” or (usually implicitly) by accusing women of bad behavior/being responsible for other’s bad behavior. For the same reasons, they’re denied education, work, and much more.
I’ve seen those arguments used to exclude women in my own field, and they thoroughly disgust me. They are nothing more than thinly disguised excuses to get rid of women in areas where paternalistic men don’t think they belong.
I also pointed out just how creepy their reasoning was, with the intended implication being that maybe those men should be the ones excluded, instead of women.
In short, it was intended to be a Poe mocking the despicable arguments people make to exclude women all the time. I had seen people trotting out those arguments in response to that article myself and was frustrated by their inanity. I didn’t intend for my comment to be taken seriously, and I apologize for it. If anything, I suppose I have bad taste, but I do NOT subscribe to those arguments.
My actual opinion is that rather than any genuine worry that people will assume improper behavior if the reporter shadows him, he’s using such a ridiculous and discriminatory argument to exclude her because he’s worried about her asking pointed questions about the GOP’s, and presumably his, continued war on women’s rights. His blathering about the “lugenpresse” further makes me think he’s scared of her.
In what way is telling women we shouldn’t want to be around this man mocking the view that women should not be allowed to be around this man?
It’s not that I don’t get the joke. I get the joke. In times past, before regressivism got this bad, I made similar jokes. It’s just that the joke isn’t at all funny to me, a woman who regularly has to decide whether I want to risk my career or my safety and mental health.
You know that Poe’s law is that such jokes are indistinguishable from actual belief, right? And if you’re being a jerk ironically you’re still being a jerk. The harm of this joke* is not erased because you didn’t mean it.
Sorry, chief, this ain’t it. You’re not apologizing for YOUR words or YOUR actions, but how WE interpreted them.
*Which, again, was echoed half a dozen times that I saw when only glancing at a handful of replies on Twitter, so this is not about you or your personal beliefs.
@Jackson Ayres – I would employ the /s tag in the future. (that ‘s’ is for ‘sarcasm’, just in case you haven’t run into it before.)
Re – being a Poe – congrats, you succeeded? As kupo pointed out, a ‘Poe’ is someone who you can’t tell if they either believe something or are making fun of it.
And if that was what you wanted to do… Why? All that does is give cover to the people who are not saying it ‘ironically’.
I mean, look where ‘ironic racism’ has got us, a la 4chan.
As a reminder, this is the comment we are responding to:
How is anyone supposed to read this and go “Yes, clearly, this person doesn’t believe this, and is in fact against it?”
Your reasoning for your post seems to be that you don’t like the sentiment, either. That’s good. But why did you post something to be a ‘Poe’ that is echoing the sentiment? Why did you make this joke, specifically?
Who did you imagine would laugh?
The Washington Post published two articles on Foster yesterday — one factual and one by satirist Alexandra Petri, and the responses to them are interesting, to say the least. There were quite a few men who defended Foster on the grounds that a false accusation by a woman leads automatically to disgrace and ruin for the man — and when I pointed out Brett Kavanaugh and Donald Trump, they simply ignored my point. There very clearly was an underlying belief that women are by nature liars who love to make false accusations — a fairly toxic combination of paranoia and misogyny. I pointed out that the usual result of even a accusation that most people find credible is an all-out argument that the woman is just a vicious lying gold-digging slut. Apparently there is a belief that women enjoy this sort of attack.
It is clear that for many if not all of the guys (who seem to share MGTOW beliefs) the underlying motivation is to keep women out of traditionally male spaces.
From these guys’ point of view, there isn’t anything bigly wrong with thousands of women being assaulted to one degree or another — not in comparison with the absolute horror of one man being wrongly accused. The scent of guilty consciences is very strong.
The scent of people who fear consequences, belike
These guys are terrified by #MeToo. There has to be a reason. It’s really hard to make a case that people like Weinstein and Cosby were falsely accused. And Brett Kavanaugh — their poster boy for false accusation — certainly acted like the sort of entitled preppie boy who would do exactly what Dr. Ford accused him of and think it was a big joke.
Exactly. They’re not feeling guilty about it, though.
The same dynamic is at play in the welfare debate; it basically boils down to one side being okay with some people gaming the system as long as no one slips through the cracks and the other side being okay with people slipping through the cracks as long as no one can game the system.
…of course, we humans are freaking masters at gaming systems to our advantage: fire, agriculture, domestication of animals, all the way up through quantum computing. Gaming systems is what we do. So there will never be a fool-proof welfare system, a fact that at least some of the ant-welfare folks are obviously aware of….