It's been pointed out before that this is Pence being sexist, of course. It's a way of keeping women in their place, it smells of an excuse to be rude to women who might talk to him, it's the same as those Islamic clerics who turn their backs to female teachers because they refuse to believe a woman can teach them anything, including English. (I used to be friends with a woman who taught English to middle eastern immigrants and she told me how some of these men would sit with their backs on her in class. Not all, but some did. I have no problem with Islam, it's the fundamentalists of all religions that are the real problem, whether it is Islamic, Judaism or Hare Krishna-ism...or Christian in the case of Pence.)
It is interesting to note that most of the men (that I am aware of) that came out against the #MeToo movement have issued apologies to the movement. It's curious how the initial denouncement made headlines but all the apologies were ignored.
Now Bloomberg has published an article stressing women have to be ignored and avoided when working on Wall St, which i saw last night and again today - which has been heralded as the greatest insight since sliced bread (did i just mix my metaphors? - oh well). I'm not the first to respond to this article, Sallie Krawcheck already has.
It's simple, just treat us like one of the guys but don't talk about sex in front of us. Would you grab a guys butt? brush your hand against his fly? Stop touching us.
How do the guys who were victims of other men's sexual advances feel about men denouncing the #MeToo movement?
Women are typically not vindictive - no more so than men are - or perhaps men are judging women by their standards, perhaps men are more vindictive than I ever realized - I don't know, I haven't done scientific studies into it - but i would love to.
Or perhaps it's time we do like Krawcheck does, just go off and do our own thing. I would trust Krawcheck with my money more than I would other investment firms on Wall St, and perhaps that's what these guys at Bloomberg and elsewhere are really worried about, we'll prove to be better at what we do than they are and we might even start treating them as badly as they've treated us over the years.
But one thing is certain, things won't change if we stop. We have to keep on going. We are no longer needed in the kitchen or cleaning house - we don't need to be devoted to reproducing - there are plenty of children in the world already, we have to do something, so we might as well fix the world, because men have made a mess of it.