Men caught by march of time
What makes spoilsports tick, like the person who caused Otago University’s graduation ceremonies and parades to be cancelled this week? Who’d get a kick out of it? Otago Polytechnic followed, leaving young people and proud families disappointed. It’s not the biggest deal, but the academic world likes to celebrate its triumphs like everyone else. I liked seeing my own kids in caps and gowns, especially as I never completed a degree.
When they slug it out in the academic world, I gather, it’s another story. You can expect bloody noses in intellectual battles, and worse, like being cancelled.
Such was the unsurprising fate of 83-year-old American opinion writer Joseph Epstein this week. His was one of two object lessons on the march of time and its effect on ageing men who think they’re being cute and are much mistaken.
The Wall Street Journal ran an article from Epstein mocking Jill Biden for calling herself ‘‘Dr’’. She has two masters degrees and a PhD.
‘‘Forget the small thrill of being Dr Jill Biden and settle for the larger thrill of living for the next four years in the best public housing in the world as First Lady Jill Biden,’’ he advised her, on one hand patronising her academic achievement, and on the other encouraging her to bask in her husband’s glory. In the 21st century.
Epstein thought it was a lightly humorous piece. At other times he has infuriated gays, possibly in similar ‘‘light’’ fashion. ‘‘I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth,’’ he once wrote. Feminists haven’t fared much better. He doesn’t try to endear himself.
The Wall Street Journal stood stuffily by the article but Chicago’s Northwestern University swiftly deleted Epstein, a former English lecturer, from its website. He has an honorary PhD and no postgraduate degree. Maybe there’s a chip on his shoulder, what with a mere woman having a real one.
In 2018 Epstein published a book, Charm: The Elusive Enchantment. Which brings me to an example of that very quality, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a famous so-called charmer who might have become president of France had a hotel worker not alleged he sexually assaulted her for nine minutes in a New York hotel in 2011, when he was 62.
A Netflix series released this month details that event and its sequels in a walk of shame through the US justice system and the attitudes of French intellectuals and fellow socialists who trivialised the event as romantic and somehow weirdly gallant. They almost seemed to think she should be grateful.
In a disturbing sequence, a young French author described a meeting with DSK in which he made unwanted physical advances to her that she found distressing, but which a group of men on the TV programme were amused by and laughed over. She didn’t.
The hotel worker, Nafissatou Diallo, and her union found his alleged assault on her unfunny too, and she emerges as a hero who at the time couldn’t read or write, and was an migrant supporting a child.
Both Strauss-Kahn and the newspaper settled with Diallo for undisclosed sums a year later, after she pursued civil actions. In the aftermath his libertine lifestyle was revealed. Until then he’d been described as a ‘‘romantic’’, a ‘‘seducer’’ and amazingly clever. Diallo, a poor immigrant from Guinea, saw he was none of these things.
Watching, I was reminded that French women didn’t get the vote until 1944, which can’t have helped in a culture where the myth of the great seducer looms triumphant. In real life such driven behaviour is pretty much like a caged mouse on a wheel, compulsive and joyless. Charming it’s not.