July 14, 2017
Source: Bigstock
The most notorious Wolf of Wall Street this year has, of course, been Travis Kalanick, founder of Uber, who resigned after a flurry of allegations that he had an active aggressive libido and somewhat of a temper. Among the shocking revelations: He and some of his buddies had frequented “escort bars” in Asia. I”ve never been to an escort bar, but I”ve soaked up all the prurient literature about the Patpong district in Bangkok, and from what I understand, all that goes on there is legal. It seems a little unfair, even by the shifting standards of slut-shaming, to be attacking the guy for availing himself of legal services that are, after all, available in certain rural counties of Nevada as well.
But we”re now living in an environment where businessmen aren”t really allowed to say things like “That’s a beautiful dress” or “Can I buy you a drink?” because everything is contextual.
“No, “That’s a beautiful dress” is not necessarily sexual, but it was the way he said it. You should have seen where his eyes were when he was talking.”
“When he asked me to go for a drink I assumed he was trying to pressure me into sex”because, well, you had to be there.”
“He called me a “babe.” It was clear he was trying to blackmail me into sex in return for funding my start-up.”
Well, sweetie, no, it’s not clear. And if he was blackmailing you, then he was probably also blackmailing fourteen other people, male and female, for various other things that he wanted. It’s called business. It’s nasty.
“He called me “sweetie” in a Takimag article, he must be a perv.”
I only have two things to say about this and then I”ll shut up.
Numero Uno: Why are the fearless investigative journalists at the Times limiting themselves to women being hit on by men? I could give them at least two examples of entertainment-industry luminaries who are notorious for hitting on young men who need work. It’s males hitting on other males, so all the archetypal Wolf behaviors still apply. But even if every gossipy story about these two guys were to be proven true, it’s none of our business.
Numero Two-o: The Times and other newspapers run these articles about “systemic sexual harassment” in Silicon Valley, and yet they don”t show that any of these men even know each other, much less participate in a woman-hating cabal. In the Times article, for example, the reporter claims that “sexual harassment in the tech start-up ecosystem” is “pervasive and ingrained.” Yet these are the same publications that, when reporting on the wolfish behavior of celebrities, use the terminology of “sexual addiction.” Tiger Woods…goes to a treatment center. Michael Douglas…goes to a treatment center. David Duchovny…gives interviews about overcoming his clinical compulsion. Colin Farrell…seeks help for his addiction to prostitutes. Billy Bob Thornton, Rob Lowe”the list goes on, and I”m not even naming the ones like Charlie Sheen and Anthony Weiner who do not seek treatment but are the subjects of numerous articles saying they should seek treatment.
So my point is that, if most of these Silicon Valley guys are sex addicts, then the Times is publicly shaming addiction. It would be like a reporter deciding to print the names of Alcoholics Anonymous members because, after all, many of these people are running companies and so the shareholders and public have a right to know. Maybe they should start digging into cocaine use on Wall Street and outing the young brokers who are reading Bright Lights, Big City and trying to re-create the hedonism of the early “80s. Maybe they should print the name of every opioid overdose in rural West Virginia so we can be sure none of those people get hired by UPS.
It’s not like the career carouser is a popular guy. Wilt Chamberlain, the reclusive 7-foot-1 center for the Philadelphia 76ers, slept with 20,000 women, but it’s not an admired statistic: All the sportswriting love goes to Chamberlain’s archrival Bill Russell, who was social and funny. The occasional attempt to glamorize the life of the horndog”I”m thinking of My Life and Loves by Frank Harris, the 1920s memoir recounting a lifetime spent seducing women”ends up being repetitive and mind-numbingly boring, the equivalent of reading the autobiography of someone who played videogames his whole life. (Every English major has read the Harris book because it includes anecdotes about Swinburne, Carlyle, the Brownings, and Oscar Wilde. Nobody really cares who Harris was.) Kinski Uncut, the autobiography of German actor Klaus Kinski in which he reveals how he basically attempted to sleep with every woman he ever met, comes across as a train wreck of an existence. Henry Miller’s attempts to preserve his sexual exploits in peerless literary prose founder on the shoals of invented words for “vagina” that might have sounded sexy to his lover but strike us as puerile and silly.
Even the urtext of womanizing, the original Don Juan story, always ends badly. In the Spanish play he ends up in hell, and God refuses to forgive him. In the Mozart opera he refuses to repent at all. In the most famous version, Byron’s mock epic poem, we don”t really know what happens because Byron never finished it, but his Don Juan is more often the seduced than the seducer. At any rate he lives on the edge of disaster. Giacomo Casanova, the most famous real-life Don Juan, started out his sexual career having threesomes with underage sisters (in fact, many of his escapades would qualify as pedophilia) and went through careers as a soldier, gambler, violinist, Freemason, playwright, cabalist, and spy, but mostly one long career as a freeloader and captive of his own impulses.
From psychiatry we know that the womanizer lives a life of isolation and fear. Freud and Jung agree that the compulsive sexaholic is probably looking for his mother in every woman he meets. In Carnal Knowledge Jack Nicholson is supposedly spending his life in a search for the ideal woman, but we know after his slide show, “Ball Busters on Parade,” that he actually hates all women.
Doctors used to call this satyriasis, but it’s now known as hypersexuality, and it’s usually a symptom of something more severe, like bipolar disorder or borderline personality disorder. The “amorous narcissist” is a subcategory of narcissistic personality disorder.
But we know all this, don”t we? We knew it in 1943, when Tex Avery’s cartoon came out, and we knew it long before that. It’s universal. Just as a certain percentage of the population is transgender, so a certain percentage of the population is wolfy. (For the distaff version of wolfiness, usually called nymphomania, read The Sexual Life of Catherine M., the memoirs of a woman who never encountered a sexual organ she didn”t like.) There was a time when every woman not only recognized the Wolf but knew how to deal with the species. There’s something wrong with a media so arrogant that it goes beyond investigating actual malfeasance and lawbreaking and starts clobbering people with Grandma’s sledgehammer for universal human conditions. We didn”t really need The New York Times to sponsor a wolf hunt.
