On women, regarding Weinergate, written by Andrew Klavan and linked with a Read the Whole Thing by the Instapundit:

I blame women. No, really. Women — by which I mean each and every single member of the female gender — you know who you are — need look no further than themselves to explain why Weiner-types behave toward them in this fashion. We men are always hearing complaints from women about how badly we treat them, what pigs we are, how pushy and abrasive… on and on. But what these same women conveniently fail to mention is that this stuff really works on them!

I’m angry about Klavan’s offhanded blaming of “each and every single member of the female gender,” which he then qualifies with “you know you are”–why would we need to know who we are if he is blaming every member of the sex regardless? But that’s beside the point. The point is that it is only THOSE WOMEN, the ones who fell into bed with the Governator or eagerly solicited dirty pics from a congressman or even didn’t eagerly solicit then but played along in accepting them, that he should be talking about blaming for the reprehensible behavior of these men. Does he even think women who don’t like this stuff exist? We do exist. And if he even grants that we exist, does he think we’ve never had men approach us like this? He’s wrong. We have. And we have shot them down in disgust.

I’ve spent way too much time online ever since college and I’ve seen this more times than I can count, first in the I-don’t-know-you-but-let’s-just-talk-dirty-awhile way and then in cases where I actually have known the men offline. At least one man I was attracted to for his smarts, humor, and articulate, pointed reasoning spent a lot of time trying to get down in the dirt of online sex-baiting with me. That fizzled, at least partly because I tried to simultaneously like him as a person, be attracted to him, and yet not play that dirty-talk game too much. There have been a few other men who I could tell were staying away from me because I would not play their type of game. There was a man in college who tried to ask me out after previously being shot down by my roommate. Why did we both reject him? Because we knew this was the kind of “dating” he was into–sleazy and fast, in every sense of the word.

These men are into sex and its pre-actual-sex trappings and flirtings; they do not, as Klavan plaintively says, just want women to love them, much less just one woman to love them or even one at a time. There are different varieties of men with different styles of approaching women, and there are different varieties of women with different styles of reception to men’s different approaches. I am not a feminist and usually don’t get mad about most high-level characterizations of group-wide behaviors, but this one is dead wrong. This is not a group-wide behavior; it is men who act this way seeking out and gleefully latching onto multiple individual women who are receptive to it.

Klavan should be ashamed of himself for stating straightforwardly that all women like this kind of garbage and that’s why men do it. All women don’t, and that’s not why some men do it. Those men do it to gratify their own urges, and they just have to look around for women who are open to it. And when you’re a celebrity, even the weird kind of political celebrity that is a congressperson, you have a much wider field to look around in. And as a side note, when you are a politician, what are the odds that a woman might be “open” to this kind of thing precisely for the purpose of getting you in trouble later? It’s a trump card. But Andrew Klavan seriously states without a glimmer of LOL that All Women like this, that this is why these piggy men do it, period. And the refutation is right there in Klavan’s own piece: “…why Weiner-types behave toward them in this fashion.” Weiner-types? Oh, so it’s not each and every single member of the male gender who behaves this way? And yet, it IS each and every member of the female gender who encourages and causes it? No, Andrew Klavan, the answer to that is no. The answer you gave is wrong. You fail on both bottom line and reasoning.