Is it “Me, too”, or “He, too”?

One day, during the weeks leading up to my retirement from Manhattan Criminal Court, I was leaving the building when I noticed a clusterfuck of sorts in a hallway, off to one side. A ring of court officers was blocking someone in their midst from public view, and I craned my neck to see who it was, before the court officers shooed me away. Despite the rudeness of these glorified mall cops, the best thing about working at the fabled 100 Centre Street address is that you get to witness a veritable parade of disgraced celebrities file by, on their way to jail or exoneration. This particular celebrity straightened out, as though sniffing the air, locked eyes with me, then gave me the once -over. It was Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood mogul of multiple- sexual-harassment-accusations fame. I was amazed not only that someone in such deep shit, someone literally ringed by his captors, could still be spirited enough to feel like checking out strange women at the very site where his infamy was being trumpeted, but also that he'd be staring at someone like me, someone way past the age when men stop ogling women, and way below the beauty standards of the Hollywood babes he supposedly harassed. In the end, he was found guilty of a total of five felonies in California and New York,and sentenced to serve a total of 39 years in both places. After our little encounter in Manhattan Criminal Court, I have to suspect this guy's a dog and probably guilty as charged. I'm assuming not all men are like that, but the species still poses a mystery for me. I find men amusing, I love their company, but I've never been able to sustain a long-term relationship with one-- I think they demand too much and give back too little. I even have difficulty getting along with my own brother. Being a woman, I do know more about women, which makes me question the wholesale legitimacy of the "me, too" movement. Successful men too often fall prey to ambitious women who feel they are owed privileges in exchange for sex. And when these women are not rewarded for putting out, they accuse the guys of sexual harrassment. Also, women often cry sexual harassment to escape blame mostly in situations where they have screwed up and are about to suffer the consequences. This gives feminism a bad name, but it happens because the social pendulum has swung to the opposite extreme. As a society, we are now more than willing to see women --ALL women--as helpless victims and ALL men as ruthless predators. Sexual harassment has become the ultimate no-no. Former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo committed all kinds of misdeeds, yet it was his sexual harassment of female underlings that finally got him driven from office. These days, it's easier to get away with murder than with grabbing someone's ass, because when it comes down to he-said versus she-said, we automatically believe the woman's version of events. Fortunately, some awareness of this venomous trend is beginning to emerge; one female lawyer with offices in San Francisco and New York has made a career of defending men wrongly accused of sexual harrassment by women. I know about this because I tried to hire her (but she was too busy). My son had been falsely accused by some bitch who was nasty, incompetent, and about to get fired, and who tried to smear him as a way to save her own job. She claimed he had touched her inappropiately when nobody was looking. The truth is that she'd been trying to pressure my son onto picking up her slack at work, she was doing it in a disparaging, hateful manner, and he complained about it to the Human Resources Department. So she accused him of sexual harassment. Meanwhile, for whoever thinks I'm making this up, know that there are written reports of her nastiness on file somewhere. Before attacking my son, she'd accumulated an official track record as a problem employee, the kind who, in government agencies, gets transferred from place to place before finally being let go. This is standard government practice,it takes a lot to get fired from public employment of any kind, but now her agency was finally giving up after affording her countless opportunities to straighten out. Her latest supervisor had been readying the paperwork to fire her for incompetence, laziness,and general goofing off when she accused my son of sexual harassment. Her timing was deliberate. Firing her after she'd launched a sexual harassment complaint would have been seen as retaliatory, so the termination process was halted pending an internal investigation. We lived through tense moments between the start and end of this inquiry; we realized that a false accusation could stay on my son's record and ruin the rest of his life, and that all too often, reality has nothing to do with the truth. It's more the luck of the draw, like: are the work site investigators male or female? If female, are they predisposed against men? Are they more interested in being fair than in collecting male scalps for their own careers? Will they find it easier and safer to decide against one man than to buck the overall trend of the times, which heavily favors women? "Just be yourself during the interview", recommended my brother the lawyer."Once they get a measure of your character, they'll realize that the accusations ar made up". Truer words were never spoken; my son was victimized not only because he'd spoken up for himself against a woman, but because he was an easy target. He is kind and guileless; I have never seen him be snarky or disrespectful to ANYONE. I've never heard him say anything even mildly teasing or suggestive to a woman. Even if all that were false, I wouldn't care. To me, my son is not just a man; he is a person I carried for 9 months and took 12 hours to bring into the world. Forget "me, too", there can be no stronger allegiance, and most Latinas will agree. I notice that most "me tooers" are white women. Conversely, most Latinos are mama's boys. They place mom on a pedestal and she returns the favor by staying fiercely loyal. I'm happy to report that in the end, the truth did set my son free, and that most of his coworkers--of both sexes--rushed to testify as character witnesses in his defense. Best of all, his accuser was fired, and as long as that episode remains on her record, as long as she can't obtain job references in order to move on and wreak havoc someplace else, she'll have been neutralized. And she'll be unable to victimize another poor, unwitting man, at least for some time to come.