#MeToo Is Not a Debate Between Trump's #MeNeither Denialism and Hillary Clinton's Acquiesence.

Or at least I'd fucking hope so.

Dicks in their day, and different only by degree. Do they get
to arbitrate the moment? We should hope not.

I don't pretend to know or understand Donald Trump's sex life, as lurid and as grotesque as it's reputed. Bill Clinton's was over-evaluated and should be ancient history by now. The fact that it isn't is because conservatives can't let Hillary off the hook. She's been their go-to scandal for too long, whether she ever deserved to be a scandal at all.

So it's not surprising that Ross Douthat  goes there while trying to get his Catholic little fingers around the #MeToo movement:

Compared to those idealists, the people teaching “porn literacy” have accepted a sweeping pedagogical defeat. They take for granted that the most important sex education may take place on Pornhub, that the purpose of their work is essentially remedial, and that there is no escape from the world that porn has made.

Which at the moment there is not. But we are supposed to be in the midst of a great sexual reassessment, a clearing-out of assumptions that serve misogyny and impose bad sex on semi-willing women. And such a reassessment will be incomplete if it never reconsiders our surrender to the idea that many teenagers, most young men especially, will get their sex education from online smut.

This surrender was not inevitable. It was only a generation ago that the unlikely (or was it?) alliance of feminists and religious conservatives made the regulation of pornography a live political debate. But between the individualistic drift of society, the invention of the internet, and the failure of the Dworkin-Falwell alliance’s predictions that porn would lead to rising rates of rape, the anti-porn case was marginalized — with religious conservatism’s surrender to Donald Trump’s playboy candidacy a seeming coup de grace.

Except it doesn’t have to be. Trump’s grotesqueries have stirred up a feminist reaction that’s more moralistic and less gamely sex-positive than the Clinton-justifying variety, and there’s no necessary reason why its moralistic gaze can’t extend to our porn addiction. And indeed, I think the part of the #MeToo movement that’s interested in discussing sexual unhappiness and not just sexual harassment clearly wants to talk about pornography, even if it doesn’t quite realize that yet.

This bit of malarkey is in the middle of his "ban porn" article reflective of his Catholic canonistic obsessions (read moral backwardness). I'm not suggesting there isn't something degrading about the treatment of women in pornography or that the world may be better off without it or without our twelve-year-olds (or nine-year-olds?) getting their curious little eyes on it. But regardless of what Douthat might think, that horse is out of the barn and, First Amendment rights notwithstanding, banning it is somewhere between impossible and not-gonna-happen.

I'm just wondering two things: From whence cometh Douthat's measure of our "porn addiction," and why do Bill Clinton's ancient sexual peccadilloes -- and Hillary's humiliation -- have anything to do with Donald Trump's 2018 #MeNeither "he says he's innocent, lives are being ruined" focus that extends to only men. The women? They don't get included in Trump's equation.

That's the scandal, and no amount of sloughing it off on yesterday's news will make it -- or should make it -- disappear from today's headlines. It's Donald Trump's degradation we should stay focused on. Sure, Bill Clinton's past is in the mix with the rest of the asshole dicks when it comes to women, but his bill has long since been paid. Trump's has not yet been totaled.

As for porn, turning over that rock is a side story to the #MeToo movement. This is a woman's moment. Men need to buck up and stand aside. We've could use a good dose of shaming. It that Catholic enough for you, Ross?