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“It is forbidden to kill; therefore, all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” Voltaire

27 Minutes to Midnight…

Disclosure, penned by the late Michael Crichton, was one of his best efforts, and I consider Barry Levinson’s movie adaptation, starring Michael Douglas and Demi Moore, to be an accurate and even stylish version of the popular novel. Briefly, the book deals with the issue of sexual harassment in the work place—specifically, a fictional computer company called DigiCom. But there’s a twist. Much to the disdain of feminists everywhere, it’s the woman who is harassing the man, not the other way around. Tom Sanders (Douglas) shows up for work one morning expecting to get the VP promotion. Instead, it goes to sexy Meredith Johnson (Moore). Now installed as Sanders’ superior, Johnson starts in on the harassment. After all, she holds all the cards. She has the power.

As I’m describing the plot to my students, most of the boys in the class of juniors are sporting curious looks on their faces, looks that almost suggest, She’s harassing him? Okay. That’s cool. Wait a minute. You don’t understand what it’s like to be harassed, I tell them. It’s anything but pleasant. Do you really think the woman who ends up harassing you is going to resemble anything close to Demi Moore? And even if she did look like Moore, do you really think her looks and curves would mollify harassment’s sting? The boys are clearly unsure of what to say.

I tell them my story from many years ago. I was getting my belongings, one morning, from the faculty room when I felt this hand patting my behind. “Morning, Tommy,” the voice behind me said. At this point, my students’ ears have perked up and they seem mildly amused by the whole episode, especially the boys. That all ends when I tell them what I saw when I swung around. The woman touching me was about five feet tall and must have weighed close to two-hundred pounds. A good twenty-five years my senior, she looked every bit the female version of Winston Churchill—with a little more hair, of course. Their faces, their expressions torque and twist into frowns of disgust. Exactly, I tell them. Perhaps now we understand why women often describe their tormentors as disgusting pigs. I chide the guys for living in La-La land. Many of them actually think being harassed by a woman is a walk in the park. Somehow they’re convinced their harasser will be some hot babe, who merely wishes to caress them and whisper sweet nothings in their ears. It might get a little annoying after a while, but she’s just a chick. How bad can things get?

How about real bad.

After Sanders finds out he’s been passed over, he has a meeting with his staff. A female engineer at the conference table comments that Sanders can now sleep his way up the corporate ladder. One of the men across from her takes mild exception to that and snickers. Why the cynical reaction, she asks him? Tom’s attractive. What’s the difference? He responds immediately: Because men aren’t the ones who are supposed to be sleeping their way to the top.

The double standard.

Apparently only women would roll around in the sack for a better job. Men earn their positions the right way—with skill and hard work. So, by the end of the movie Sanders’ attorney asks Meredith Johnson how many times she heard Tom Sanders say ‘no’ during their hot and steamy encounter (at which time Sanders abruptly broke away from their embrace, suddenly remembering his wife and kids). The attorney asks, “Don’t we tell women that they can stop at any time?” Isn’t it true that a man must immediately honor a woman’s wishes, even if she suddenly changes her mind about a romantic tryst or encounter, the attorney wonders out loud? What if a man decides he wants to suddenly put the skids on a romantic romp? Doesn’t he also have that right? Do men deserve less consideration on that score? Of course, the prevailing male-think may be that no reasonable man would want to stop such an encounter in the heat of the moment. Women might, but not men. No real man would, at any rate. This would explain the nasty email messages that hit Tom Sanders’ inbox after word gets out that a hot babe wanted him and he said ‘no thanks.’ Guys like you give men a bad name you [expletive]. Sanders pauses, then moves on to the next message. Why don’t you just admit you are gay?¹

ABC’s Diane Sawyer interviewed Crichton, back in 1994, when Disclosure was in its first printing. I’ve shown this tape many times to my juniors. I tell them that, yes, Crichton was a little quirky. Most brilliant men are. He had a rather curious laugh, coming at odd times during the interview. He calls lots of people, mostly those who run Hollywood, stupid. But if you listen to him carefully, he makes a great deal of sense. When asked, by Sawyer, what he would like to know about women, Crichton’s eyes light up. Why do women assume that men are ready to jump on anything that comes along? “That’s a tremendous burden,” he says, suggesting that many men, including him, are gentlemen and would never think to disrespect a woman. Why, he asks, is it statutory rape for an older man to have sex with a girl, while a younger boy who has sex with an older woman is just getting “lucky”? And Crichton is adamant that this attitude is not correct, it’s not right and it’s got to change.

Lakewood, California is a middle-class suburb of Los Angeles where, in the mid-Nineties, a group of white youths invented a strange game. You see, in this game, a guy scores a point each time he achieves an orgasm with a girl.² No girl may be used (I think used is apropos here) or scored upon more than once. One member bragged that he had 63 points, while the group’s leader boasted of 66. Think about it. That’s 63 and 66 different girls respectively. The one with 66 points said, “My parents were a little surprised. They thought it was more like 50.”

Oh boy.

I now scan my class. “What incredibly whorish behavior,” I say. I get confused looks from the girls. The boys seem confounded by what they’ve just heard until the wheels really start to turn. Then some of those looks turn to indignation. Now I know I’ve really scored my point. “You think only girls can be called whores, don’t you?” I get some tepid nods. “Well,” I tell them, “you thought wrong. From now on, whore is a unisex term that will describe men as well as women, boys as well as girls. I hate the word. It should rarely ever have to be used. And I do mean rarely. But if it absolutely must be used, this is going to be how it’s used. There are no double standards in here. And for those of you guys who have that I can’t believe you are betraying us look on your faces, lose them right now. If this is what being one of theguys is all about, consider me off the team. Now I ask them how many times they’ve heard the following:

A girl who sleeps around: whore, troubled, disturbed, lonely, poor self-image, confused, easily led, desperate to be popular, seeking affection anywhere she can get it. A boy who sleeps around: normal, just being a guy, a hero, stud, stud muffin, pimp, making the old man proud, chip off the old block, the all-American boy.

Just listen to a couple of the fathers, from the Lakewood scene, attempting to defend their sons. “Nothing my boy did was anything any red-blooded American boy wouldn’t do at his age.” Said another dad, “I’m 40. We used to talk about scoring in my high school. What’s the difference?”³

What’s the difference? Where do I start? For starters, each of these points your son acquired represents a person, a human being. I wonder if that ever crossed this dad’s mind. Think about the anti-sexual harassment movement sweeping education, government and private industry. Or what about the increased awareness of the dignity of each person as evidenced by values training in the public and private schools. Why don’t we talk about rampant HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, HPV (viruses that have no cure once contracted), Chlamydia, and so on and so forth. What’s the difference, you ask? What’s changed? Try the world.

Let’s not leave out the Lakewood moms. “Those girls are trash,” one mother said in defense of her son’s whorish behavior. She added that it was “sad for the girls that they have such low self-esteem that they would do this.” What about her son? she was asked by the interviewer. He’s not trash? What about his self-esteem? The mom shrugged and said, “What can you do? It’s a testosterone thing.”⁴

This so-called “testosterone thing” has led to a dark place. A 16-year-old girl had sex with one of these boys, but he refused to return her clothes until she agreed to have sex with a group of his friends. This all-American boy, this stud was forced to return the girl’s clothing after she began to scream and make a commotion. She later told the sheriff’s department that the scene she caused most likely prevented a gang rape.⁵ She was probably right. Then the piper came to town and it was suddenly time to pay. Of the 2,989 Lakewood teens that visited the Planned Parenthood office that year, 547 tested positive for a sexually transmitted disease. Likewise, 949 girls took pregnancy tests and 385 of them discovered they were with child.⁶

As the father of two girls, I’m worried. I’m worried about the guy down the street who has a boy my daughter’s age. I’m worried sick that the following could, one day, take place in his den: Come here, son. Have a seat. This is a box of condoms. You know what they’re used for, right? That’s my boy. There are some cute girls in the neighborhood. I want you to make me proud, but I want you to use one of these when that time comes. Understand? God, what I wouldn’t give to be your age again. Okay, have fun.

Is this the kind of nonsense I’ve got in store for me? I can sense an inner debate coming on:

Well, Tom, if you raise your girls with the right values, you won’t have to worry about them jumping in the sack with one of these nit-wits. You’re absolutely right. I’m working on that one. Working real hard. My active mind continues to churn: But, Tom, fathers of boys have always been this way. This is nothing new. Polio was nothing new, either, but we finally put a stop to it. You need to have a son to understand the macho mindset. I need a son to understand that I’m supposed to sit him down, give him a pep-talk, and then sic him on the girls in the neighborhood? Sic him on someone else’s daughter? And by the way, I do have a son and he is not getting that kind of a pep talk from me.

What really galls me is that this mythical guy down the street could have a younger daughter. What kind of a pep talk is he planning for her when she reaches sixteen? Surely he’ll be consistent with all of his children, won’t he? He’ll certainly provide the daughter with the same sexual opportunities afforded the older son. Or will he be one of these hypocrites who has no qualms about sending his son after someone else’s daughter, while doing everything in his power to keep the wolves away from his own.

But let me change gears for a moment. As a society of supposed rational human beings, we’d better come to grips with two things. First, the vast majority of women enjoy sex. They’re not the poor, misguided, gullible souls this double standard would have us believe. As Demi Moore says to Sanders’ attorney in Disclosure, “I’m a sexually aggressive woman. I like it. Tom knew it and you can’t handle it.” Parents and schools had better wake up to this reality and start addressing it in the curricula and at home. Second, somebody had better redefine the notion of manhood. At this point I would really like all the proud fathers out there, all the men who are living vicariously through their sons, to sit up and listen. It doesn’t take a man to engage in sexual intercourse. The erection is automatic. It’s a biological certainty that requires almost no effort whatsoever. The same applies to orgasm. If you doubt that, just have a look around. There are more than seven billion people on the planet today. Sex is so easy, so simple that we practically conceive by just bumping into one another at the grocery store. On the contrary, it takes a man to respect the dignity of each person he meets. It takes a man to recognize when to and when not to engage in sexual activity and with whom. It takes a man to have sex in the right context. It takes a man to take full responsibility for his sexuality. And it takes a man to help raise a child and love that child and care for that child each and every day.

When are we ever going to learn this?