Misguided Indignation

This morning while idly surfing the net, I read one woman's rant about the latest sexual brouhaha du jour; that of David Letterman being blackmailed over the many sexual dalliances he's had over the years with women he'd worked with. In complete indignation, she ripped Letterman up one side and down the other.

She reviled him for his inability to be monogamous; that he'd been repeatedly unfaithful to his partner of 23 years. Calling him a "creepy, perverted old man", she jeered at him for his apparent inability to "keep in in his pants". And then she wrapped up with hand-wringing about the increasingly so-called "dying breed" of men who remain absolutely sexually faithful to their female partners who, unlike Letterman, in her opinion, were "upright, righteous, strong, moral men with integrity".

I won't take the time to address all her points here, because that isn't the main point of this post, save to say that infidelity wasn't something invented in the 1960s. People have been struggling to adhere to monogamy ever since it was imposed on us by religion countless generations ago.

What mainly struck me as absurd and short sighted about her post was the fact that the Letterman "sextortion" news has followed directly on the heels of the latest news about Roman Polanski's arrest.

If she wanted to vent her spleen on a "creepy, perverted old man", then she need not have looked any further than Polanski, who drugged and forcibly raped a 13 year old kid, then evaded justice for over thirty years. Polanski is the real deal when it comes to creepy, perverted old men and it's completely ludicrous to even attempt to put Letterman into the same category.

Unlike Polanski and his misguided defenders, (such as Whoopi Goldberg, who has said that Polanski did not commit "rape-rape", but "something else"), who have tried to minimize the seriousness of what he did, Letterman has stepped up to the plate like a man and openly admitted the dalliances without trying to explain them away. Unlike many other celebrity men who have been outed for adultery in recent years, was honest about his behavior.

Letterman was also involved with adult women in consensual encounters; hardly the crime of the century that will lead to the end of civilization as we know it. Polanski and his defenders, who somehow think he's special and not subject to the same laws as the rest of us, on the other hand, say something very sad about our society.

Thoughts?