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Originally Posted by William A. Baurle
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He's absolutely right that some men, such as the Nobel laureate being discussed in the clip, feel like superior beings when they make women cry.
The many, MANY men whom I admire don't need to bolster their self-esteem by bullying anyone at all. But not all men are admirable.
Neither are all women. I've known my share of both men and women who have felt threatened when working on a team with smarter, more talented people, and I've witnessed them trying to destroy their colleagues and underlings psychologically, to preserve their own dominance.
Whatever problem the team is supposed to be solving is always less important to these egomaniacs than the problem of someone else threatening their own status as the best and brightest.
Tell any of these jerks that they are inherently superior intellectually, physically, or morally because of their sex--whichever one it happens to be--and they will eagerly believe it. The fact that some feminists engage in this sort of nonsense too doesn't make it any less nonsense when male chauvinists do it.
Milo Yiannopoulos has bullied people in particularly nasty ways. He has repeatedly sown lack of empathy, and now he's reaping it over his statements excusing sexual contact with minors. He likes to kick over hornets' nests, and now he's complaining that he's being stung. The fact that he expects an empathetic hearing now, after having demonstrated zero empathy for the victims of his bullying, is more than a bit hypocritical.
Survivors of sexual abuse have a wide range of coping mechanisms, some of which can be destructive to themselves and others. Milo Yiannopoulos's statements about the positive aspects of his own underage sexual experience, and saying that others in that situation might find benefits, too, are consistent with the very common coping mechanism of denying that one was actually victimized or taken advantage of at all. I understand where he's coming from. But I also understand the harm that can come from generally excusing sexual contact with minors (outside of the context of one's own coming to terms with one's own experience). I think he honestly feels he wasn't harmed, probably because his abuser took care to groom him carefully and not traumatize him, but that doesn't mean others too young to give legal consent to such contact might not be harmed. And it doesn't necessarily mean that he wasn't harmed himself, in ways he can't recognize because he doesn't associate that harm with outright trauma.