The Ultimate Man’s Guide to #MeToo

“I am devastated that 80 years of my life is at risk of being undermined in the blink of an eye.” –Morgan Freeman

Don’t blame former PBS’ talk show host Charlie Rose, former Fox News’ host Bill O’Reilly, or former senator and Saturday Night Live comedian, aka self-help guru “Stuart Smalley,” Al Franken. They aren’t responsible for the #MeToo tsunami.

Matt Lauer, the former NBC Today show host, didn’t give us the sexual-harassment tidal wave either. It wasn’t actors Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Piven, Steven Seagal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Ben Affleck, or Dustin Hoffman. It wasn’t former nightly news anchor Tom Brokaw or former CBS chief Leslie Moonves. It wasn’t President Donald J. Trump’s infamous “locker-room talk” on that 2005 “Access Hollywood” recording. Former president Bill Clinton’s alleged rape of Juanita Broaddrick nor his alleged sexual assaults of three other women didn’t start this back in the 1990s—though they should have. It wasn’t John Bailey, the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, or Jeff Franklin, creator of Netflix’s “Fuller House,” or even convicted rapist Bill Cosby.

Former congressman Patrick Meehan of Pennsylvania, once known for his work in Congress fighting against sexual harassment, might have been working with a guilty conscience when he used taxpayer money to settle his own sexual-misconduct complaint, but he didn’t start all this either. It also wasn’t former Rep. John Conyers of Michigan or Rep. Patrick Meehan of Pennsylvania.

Ryan Lizza, the New Yorker’s former-Washington correspondent, did get caught up in complaints, but he is hardly the cause. Radio personality Ryan Seacrest isn’t to blame. Fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier isn’t the poster boy for this. The Humane Society of the United States’ former CEO Wayne Pacelle didn’t start the flood either, though he did leap right into it.

The now former celebrity chef Mario Batali isn’t to blame. Nor is Peter Martins, longstanding head of the New York City Ballet. Sexual-harassment complaints did knock Garrison Keillor, former host of A Prairie Home Companion, off his moral perch, but he isn’t to blame. John Lasseter, now-former chief creative officer of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios went down after a whisper campaign but his alleged actions didn’t start this deluge of sexual-harassment complaints either.

Even former film producer Harvey Weinstein isn’t to blame for the #MeToo flood, though all he allegedly did was the charge that shook the fault lines of our culture.

These men may or may not be guilty of all they’ve been accused of, but they aren’t responsible for the cultural crisis, just for whatever their individual actions were.

For the cause we have to unearth the real blind spots in our culture that allowed this behavior to go unpunished from New York to Washington, D.C., to Hollywood.

Many are saying the trouble is men, or manliness. With the problem thus identified, as far as they are concerned, they say the solution that follows is to weaken men to empower women. One problem with this sexist remedy is it gives men no incentive to be part of the solution, as it is a no-win scenario for them. They are just guilty, guilty, guilty.

Even if men go along with this anti-masculine logic by weakening themselves, aren’t they then less likely to boldly take on someone up the chain of command who might be guilty of sexually harassing one or more employees? Weak men, after all, don’t stand up to powerful men or women.

Meanwhile, treating manliness as the problem creates political polarization with an issue that shouldn’t be political—it is, after all, a problem that both indicted Matt Lauer and Bill O’Reilly, both Donald J. Trump and finally Bill Clinton.

If we let the important #MeToo movement become a political weapon for one side or the other then the movement will be split right down the partisan divide.

With all of this playing out in American culture anyone thinking for themselves must ask: Why are so many in the media and popular culture unwilling to make the obvious and critical distinction between the few men, whatever their politics, who sexually harass or even rape women and the many gentleman out there who respect women? Don’t men now, more than ever, need good ideals and role models to live up to?

Men, to be all they can be, still need to be heroes in their stories (just as women do); they need to be gentleman and stand-up guys, not weaklings paralyzed by the fear they’ll be accused of “mansplaining,” having “microaggressions,” or of actual sexual harassment. Men need to know how to gallantly navigate a world where men and women work together and compete with each other in the workplace.

For the sake of women who raise, marry, and work with men this is critical. It’s also important because it’s not just the Harvey Weinstein’s who are being pilloried in the public square and possibly punished in the legal system. There are innocent casualties. There are even men and women using sexual-harassment claims in this hypersensitive time to destroy adversaries in the internal wars for advancement in America’s workplaces.

Blaming men for being men also gives a big pass to the legal system, as right now the prevalence of forced arbitration agreements is smothering this debate.

Forced arbitration agreements have been deemed legal under contract law by many courts, as they are seen as employment contracts. To invalidate a forced arbitration agreement someone must prove in court that one such agreement fails an arbitrary “unconscionable conduct” test—no easy thing to do.

Forced arbitration agreements are very common.

“Among private sector nonunion employees, 56.2 percent are subject to mandatory employment arbitration procedures,” reports Workplace Fairness, a nonprofit organization. “Looking at the size of the American workforce, this means that more than 60 million employees no longer have access to the courts in the event they have a workplace related issue.”

These legal agreements between corporations and employees keep a lot of these complaints out of the newspapers and off cable television. Forced arbitration agreements have thereby suffocated a possible public debate, a debate that would help us understand and address this important issue.

“The institutional answer [to this problem] is to abolish human resources,” said S.E. Cupp, host of CNN’s “S.E. Cupp: Unfiltered” when interviewed for this book. “When the system for reporting workplace harassment involves informing the entity whose job it is to protect the company, victims lose. Independent and external boards are the only way to ensure victims’ safety and continued employment.”

Certainly, the first concern of a company’s human resources department is to protect the company. This is why so many use forced arbitration agreements to stop employees from going to the legal system for a remedy. This can put employees dealing with a bad CEO or other person in a senior leadership position at a disadvantage, which is a big reason why so many actors and CEOs, who might have been preying on the people they employed, were able to get away with all they allegedly did for so long.

Congress has also used administrative procedures to hush up staffers who’ve accused members of Congress of sexual harassment. Members of Congress even used a slush fund (taxpayer money) to pay victims for silence. As this was being written several bills had stalled in Congress, after public pressure had waned, that were designed to fix this.

Clearly, the bureaucracy and the legal tools used by corporations today are part of the reason why so many #MeToo complaints have been silenced in America.

This legalistic climate has made not acting by far the safer option in almost every case. Action today is often punished. Even courageous government whistleblowers often get destroyed by the bureaucracy they speak up to cleanse. Not acting, in contrast, is rarely punished. You almost have to be an eye-witness to a rape who walked away without saying anything to realize consequences later. Even then in today’s legal climate you could get off by simply saying you were too traumatized to act. In these ways our legalistic society has created disincentives to be manly, to be men of action who do what’s right despite the potential costs.

Not acting to help another—say a young woman being sexually harassed in the office—should, of course, have consequences of conscience. But even then, most people guilty of this sin will quietly justify their actions. They’ll rationalize it away to a deeper place within themselves. Now sure, a person who does this buries themselves with a shovel of bullshit at a time until they are nothing more than one more walking dead in the American workplace, but that’s a common enough sort of thing.

The trauma from not acting when you should, of course, might still haunt an otherwise good person. I once interviewed a US Army nurse who heard boys being raped by Afghan soldiers. She was in her barracks. The Afghan soldiers had rounded up a bunch of boys on what US soldiers have called “Man-Love Thursday” (known as “bacha bazi”in Afghanistan). In Afghanistan, as it is in a lot of Muslim countries, the weekend is Friday and Saturday, so this was their Friday night. This nurse was told to ignore the sounds of the boys screaming as they were raped, as many American soldiers have been ordered to do in Afghanistan. She was told it was their culture and there was nothing she or the US military could do about it. The helplessness of listening to these young boys scream while not being allowed to do anything about it gave her a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) she still deals with today.

That’s an extreme, but we’d all rather be the hero than the guy who looked the other way. So, given all that is misdirecting this important #MeToo movement, how does a good guy survive and thrive?

First, we have to understand and then step right through all of the politics and legalism warping this issue. Next, we must consider the rules a modern gentleman must live by. This is why this guidebook is broken into the seven rules that a stand-up and heroic gentleman, a man of action, lives by. Such a man respects women and himself and refuses to weaken himself; after all, a gentleman can’t be a sexist, as any man who has to put down women to prop up his own ego isn’t just a monster, he is also too insecure to be a real man.

This is doubly important because success in the workplace doesn’t often reward a quiet, docile, and benevolent man or woman. Agreeableness is beneficial in many fields, but social scientists have found being too timid can actually keep people from succeeding in many occupations. Weak people just don’t climb the corporate ladder. To be all they can be men can’t simply become passive, always amenable pushovers afraid to raise their voices and desires lest they be called sexists.

Interestingly, Hollywood still understands the pressing desire and need for men to be heroes in waiting. It is why action movies are made. Even Harvey Weinstein knows this, as he was the executive producer of “Inglorious Basterds,” (2009) “Cop Land,” (1997) and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy (2001-2003).

So to become all we need to be in this most perilous age for men, we need to understand the rules a how to be a modern, yet heroic, gentleman.