McKayla Maroney Thrown to the Molestation Wolves by USA Gymnastics

The problem with #MeToo hashtags are both the entirely reliant self-reporting and the lack of a scale system. It’d almost be embarrassing as a woman to never have a man act inappropriately around you since all men have acted inappropriately around a woman from once to a million times in their lives. There are scales for men on this chart.

Hence, “Frank in accounting looked down my top and he’s not at all handsome” hashtags up with episodes of brutal sexual assault. It’s like when upper middle class college kids complain about being poor. No you’re not. You’re short on weed cash. You have no idea what poor means. The notion that all primal male behavior will be wiped from the face of the earth is the stuff of social media dreams. Enabled by the men who now weakly feel obliged to publicly apologize for no crime other than being male.

You can however attack sex crime. Which in fact has been on the decline in this country for twenty straight years thanks to enhanced arrest and sentencing in the criminal justice system. Contrary to popular feminist myth, a large percentage of the actual crimes are committed by a small percentage of the male population. You lock them up and the rate drops.

McKayla Maroney joined the #MeToo hot ticket with a horrible tale of long term molestation by the USA Gymnastics team doctor. She was thirteen the first time the team’s official doctor, Larry Nasser, started scheduling private medical treatments for her in his office. The evil doctor molested upwards of 140 girls that came through the program, including traveling with the team domestic and abroad, to literally bring his nightmare “treatments” on the road following the girls. 

“It seemed whenever and wherever this man could find the chance, I was ‘treated. It happened in London before my team and I won the gold medal, and it happened before I won my Silver.”

You may have some wicked high school sports stories. But I bet you weren’t 4’10” with the team doctor fondling your privates before your competitions. It speaks to concentration. And the willpower not to murder.

Maroney’s case speaks to any number of difficulties in containing this perverse grown man behavior. First, victims rarely speak up. In some cases they are facing an outright destruction machine, like Harvey Weinstein, but in most cases it’s merely a creepy teacher or doctor like Nasser who touches inappropriately during exams. Maroney is naming names, which is rather different than Hollywood, but the name of a guy who’s long since been in jail awaiting trial after thirty years of sex abuse. Which leads to the second and completely unreported pathology in a large number of these cases. Shitty parents.

Stage parents or sports parents hellbent on producing winners at the expense of their children’s souls. They either ignore the sexual vulnerability of their kids, or even actual incidents, and urge them never to complain or raise a stink. That goes for being exhausted, broken bones, or a casting agent asking you to sit on his lap for no good reason. Bialik spoke of this in her New York Times op-ed in relation to teen girl casting. The predatory men are drawn to these jobs as are the parents of these children drawn to the gifting of their male and female kids to these men.

The vast majority of the victims in all of these cases are young and myopic and encouraged to please. Not mature and strong and taught to stand up for themselves. Guys like Nasser and Weinstein don’t randomly grab at targets. They’re hunting animals who attack the weak they separate from the pack. You couldn’t possibly prevent your kids from never being randomly groped or fondled. You should be able to keep them from being repeat victims of scheming creepy adults or consenting to obviously horrible situations in exchange for candy or acting jobs. That’s not preachy or a high bar.

The #MeToo hashtag is a wonderful way to paint all women as victims and all men as victimizers of women. Or to infer that how you came to be was likely your dad being pushy with your mom and you’re the child of rape. All of you. Pointless slackivism in an age when being a victim equates to the heroism of doing something about it.

_{Photo credit: Getty Images/Instagram}