Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

I get most of my news from Twitter (or I guess now it's called "X") so I have an admittedly eccentric understanding of the hot topics of the day. One that I have seen a lot of posts about lately is the sexualization of children. I try not to read the details, but even a cursory glance tells me that the instances which make it all the way to Twitter are pretty horrific. And the discussion of the perpetrators seems to be mostly about whether to tar-and-feather them before or after drawing-and-quartering them. In any event, nobody doubts that they are evil people with evil intentions.

I'm not about to make excuses for these people, and it seems clear that sometimes the impact they have on the children who come under their influence is really bad. But I find myself wondering, in an intellectual sort of way, whether they are actually motivated by malice (or cruelty or lust or any of those things), or whether in some cases the problem might not be no more than mind-boggling stupidity?

This idea occurred to me just a few days ago, when I began to wonder (for literally the first time in my life) whether that might not have been part of what was going on (in a milder and more attenuated way) with my own Father as I was growing up.

To be completely clear, I have no memory of my Father ever molesting me or treating me in an overtly sexual way. None at all. That's not what I am talking about.

But he was only 25 years old when I was born, and he was still in the middle of a prolonged adolescent rebellion against his parents. His parents were very religious as well as (so he felt at the time) square and stodgy. So it was very important to his own self-image that he be unlike them in every way he could think of. 

• He wanted to be the Cool Dad™.
• He didn't want to be an Authority, but just … well, an Older Friend, who had more experience and could give Good Advice.
• And for sure he didn't want to Disapprove of Anything.

One of the ways that he tried to be Cool was to talk about sex matter-of-factly. In at least one case this was a good thing, because he made sure that I never internalized the common double standard that says it's OK for boys to fuck around but not girls. My dad explained that some people think that, but those people are stupid; because simple math means that there have to be just as many girls out there fucking as there are boys. So if it's OK for boys, it has to be OK for girls. Case closed. (Yes of course this oversimplifies the sexual marketplace, but I was maybe 8 or 9 at the time he explained this. Oversimplification was just fine.)

But he also told me stories or jokes that I realize now were designed to prove how Cool and Non-Disapproving he was. At the time I didn't get the point, or really understand what he was driving at; but of course he was my dad, so I listened attentively anyway. I've been trying to think of an example, and I can only come up with one, though I am certain that there were more. (Maybe I will think of some more later.) But I remember him taking a dollar bill and showing me that if you folded it just right you could make the "legal tender" notice say "GAL TENDER AND PRIVATE." 

Now I'm sure that was hilarious when he first showed it to the other guys in the sophomore class—back when he was a sophomore, I mean—but what the hell was I supposed to do with it? I had no understanding of it whatsoever. My dad told me about it, so of course I remembered it because it must be important. But that's all.

Oh wait, I remember one other story about a friend of his who was arrested for indecent exposure and my father thought it was a travesty of justice. Apparently this guy was stumbling home from a bar at 2:00 in the morning, and peed in an alleyway en route. A passing police officer saw him and arrested him for indecent exposure, and my dad thought that was wrong. Now that I look back on it after more than 50 years, I think in his mind he was trying to prove that he was Cool and Didn't Think the Human Body is Dirty. I never got that at the time, however. The lesson I took from it was that peeing in alleyways is OK but watch out for the police. (Fortunately I never had an occasion to put this lesson to the test.)

I am certain that there was more like this. I just can't think of specific stories right now.

Anyway, my point is that while none of these things counted as outright sexualization—and none of them came close to the stuff I see on Twitter!—they all somehow leaned in that direction. But he wasn't trying to groom me. He wasn't trying to exploit me. All he was trying to do was to feed his own narcissistic self-image, and he was gobsmackingly blind and clueless to the actual effect that his words were having.

Intellectually he was a very smart man, but smart men have done crashingly stupid things before now and they surely will again. In any event, I'm sure that he was acting out of stupidity and not malice.

        

I also started to think, as I began writing this post, that there is some kind of a connection between the present one you are reading now and this post from nine years ago. For the moment, I'll just leave the link in case you want to follow it up. Later I might think of something concrete to say. 

Postscript: Here's another story that I thought of later. Several times when I was little I remember him quoting a joke that has to have dated from the 1948 Presidential election, more than a decade before I was born. The joke was that you could tell candidate your girlfriend favored by reaching under her skirt to feel her legs, in order to check whether she was hairy [for Harry Truman] or dewy [for Thomas E. Dewey]. Was I supposed to understand that?  [Added 2023-08-17.]    

I remember more than once that my dad explained to me why to order your girlfriend a Brandy Alexander when you take her out to a bar. He said that a Brandy Alexander tastes just like a chocolate milkshake but has a huge amount of alcohol in it, so that she will get plastered before she knows what hit her. (This was years before I ever heard the word "date rape.") And once she was drunk, you could more or less do whatever you wanted with her. I was under the age of ten when he told me this. Was I supposed to understand it? (To this day I have never tasted a Brandy Alexander nor ordered one for anybody else.) [Added 2023-08-20.]  

Then there was the time he explained that in the Army you had to call your firearm a "rifle" or a "pistol" but never a "gun." He said that if a new recruit slipped up he had to appear before the sergeant, drop his pants, and grab his cock with one hand while holding his rifle with the other. Then he had to repeat:

"This is my rifle, and this is my gun.
This is for fighting and this is for fun."

I distinctly recall that the story baffled me, because I couldn't imagine how a penis could be used for "fun." So far as I knew, it was just for peeing, and what's the big deal about that? [Added 2023-08-20.]