Suddenly it's a meme!

First Scott Adams:

No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world.

And now Naomi Wolf:

It is hard to ignore how many highly visible men in recent years (indeed, months) have behaved in sexually self-destructive ways.

Two or three news stories do not constitute a trend. So why do these two so want to believe there is a  trend when there is nothing that looks even vaguely like evidence that there is a trend?

I think that the real problem is that at least one guy that both Adams and Wolf used to admire (Anthony Weiner) has let them down badly and they need an explanation for this.

Why do they desperately need an explanation? Because they are members of the same generation as I am. They are members of a generation that has spent its entire existence moralizing everything. When we were teens, my generation firmly believed that people who liked disco music were morally inferior to people who liked rock music. Not surprisingly, we grew up into adults who believe that people who don't share our political views are morally inferior to people who do.

These are deeply held beliefs. If you took a time machine back to our high schools and walked around suggesting that disco fans were child rapists and anything else you could think of you'd get surprisingly little disagreement.

So when an adult of my generation is forced to acknowledge that someone on their side has serious moral failures, major cognitive dissonance happens. And something, anything at all, has to be dragged in to explain away the problem. In Adams' case that is human nature in Wolf's it is porn.