Why are many on the left, too, still treating the disrespect of women as the niche-est of niche issues?
By Melinda Henneberger
There will be more stories about Graham Platner and his behavior with women, Graham Platner and what he said when, Graham Platner and dramas as yet unimagined.
After Tuesday’s Democratic Senate primary in Maine, those will have only begun to bloom, like toxic algae on the Platner oyster operation that mostly seems to sell to his mom’s upscale restaurant. I know this is only the preview of coming attractions – and you do, too – because we all know that guy, though not this particular guy.
You know him even if you’re out there mouthing some wishful thing about what a beautiful redemption arc his is. I believe in those, but sexting between 6 and 12 women not that long ago, as a newlywed raring to run for high office, makes me doubt that this is a man who is no longer reckless.
You know this even if you’re blaming The New York Times for failing to cover for him, which is not their brief. You know this even if you discount every abusive detail from his ex who was a Republican operative, though hers is not the only voice sounding the alarm.
So the question is not whether we know but whether we care to admit it, and if we do, consider behavior over time that suggests a basic disrespect for women disqualifying.
We can’t ignore 600 red flags and then wonder why MAGA can’t see the thousands flapping in the breeze over in Trump world.
As friend-of-the-Stack Barb Shelly said, Platner sounds like someone Trump would nominate for secretary of defense.
Only the names changeI know I have gotten shirty with some very dear friends over this, and that is because I have been having this conversation since the 90s, and only the names change. For my entire adult life, I have been told to get over this thing I have about finding even the most clearly abusive behavior disqualifying for those seeking office, as if this were the niche-est of niche issues.
Somehow, the bigger picture always requires the sacrifice of this one issue, and look where that’s gotten us. Women are half of humanity; that’s not a big picture?
How depressing that this particular form of disregard is still characterized as ‘personal stuff that shouldn’t matter.’ Sexting anonymously on an app notoriously favored by predators is written off as nothing for us in the public to worry about, but only between a man and his wife.
If you think otherwise, then you are not a fighter for the people but an elitist, though I don’t know how that follows. Someone who does have more elite ties than he says, though, is the candidate, and the only thing wrong with that is his lack of forthrightness about it.
Platner served four combat tours, and paid a price that I do not underestimate. But as the grandson of a Cornell-educated Modernist designer who won the Rome Prize for Architecture and the son of a real estate attorney who went to Dartmouth, his working-class persona is a little on the schticky side.
“This is not a salt-of-the-earth guy coming up from a hardscrabble existence,” former Maine Democratic Party Chairman Tony Buxton told The New York Times. “If he’s an oysterman, I’m a florist, OK? Because I raise roses and give them to my wife.”
Where’s the police report?Whatever happens in this race, what is making me sick at heart is how little the conversation has changed in the last umpteen years, and how not just our culture but men I actually know – on the left as well as the right – still can’t see misogyny.
Where’s the police report attesting that Platner’s Republican former girlfriend was really afraid, one asked, as if that’s a thing that definitely happens. Where are the criminal charges? I would ask if we’d learned nothing about intimate partner violence in the last half-century, but the answer is clear.
What a distraction from the latest Trump corruption scandals, someone I like a lot said, as if seeing through this man in any way hobbles our ability to appreciate the rolling disaster of this presidency.
Messy, or messed-up?Platner is not appealing to academics and journalists, but to those of us with messy lives, said another man I think well of. Not only do we scribblers have no protective cloak from anything anybody else is going through, but with the academy under attack and the business I spent my working life in all but going going gone, Platner’s VA pension and family support is more of a cushion than many of my former colleagues have.
Ken Klippenstein, the same independent journalist who went after Susan Collins for her essential tremor, called the sexting “scandal” – and yes, he put quotes around that word – exactly what folks in the real world like about Platner. Great, because we definitely need more of “those.” Is Ken Paxton also refreshingly masculine, then? On that basis, Donald Trump must be the ultimate hero.
“People are done with the clean-cut types who’ve harbored ambitions for political office since they were on high school student council and have lived every waking moment accordingly,” Klippenstein wrote. “I call them smoothgroins: real-life barbie dolls with smooth plastic where a sexual organ should be.” In my many years of covering politics, this somehow escaped me as a problem, but Platner is in any case here to help end that suffocating “era of smoothgroin politicians.”
I also have to say that the men I know who have said they’re done with these guys have my gratitude, and lots of it.
Of course I fully understand those who say that without the Senate, well, hope we like it in Gehenna, because we’ll be here in hell indefinitely. But to those who think this man is their ticket to anything but more of the same, I say: Janet Mills is still on the ballot. And when Platner disappoints you, please spare me your surprise.