Some words are political poison,

You know your political career is over when a CTV story comes out with a major unflattering adjacency: your name next to the words “his erection.”

In politics, you should be so far away from this normally cheerful possessive + noun that you can’t get cellphone reception. Any distant hilly country will do.

Voters can cope with erections of bus shelters and soccer nets — by all means, put them up — but not in the context of ex-PC leader Patrick Brown, sober, in his bedroom allegedly forcing himself on top of an 18-year-old who said she was drunk. She said she could feel it on her thigh. As for asking a high school girl for oral sex, yes, the word appears again.

His campaign advisers and party staffers were wise to push him out. Columnists who think he was hard done by should quarrel with them, not blame the victims. Those men and women should have de-planed him when courageous PC MPP Lisa MacLeod told other officials in December of other stories about Brown’s sexual conduct. She was told the rumours were “unfounded,” but she had done her bit. And as we know now, Brown was notorious among young women in the Barrie, Ont., bar that he frequented “like a peacock.”

It was nearly 10 p.m. Wednesday when Brown first spoke to reporters, then ran away. Even his new haircut appeared to be fleeing from the head that was emitting the scabrous things he said.

Everyone will have their own opinion on the worst part of Brown’s initial tearful speech promising to get his lawyers involved after allegations from the two women, one of them a teen who said he took his, well, his erection, and asked for oral sex.

My breaking point was Brown’s simulated incredulity that he could ever be guilty of such a thing. “I have two younger sisters who are my best friends!” We’ve all heard sexually harassing men say they have wives and daughters — well, maybe they don’t say that so much since Trump — but if the best you can come up with is that your sisters like you, you’re the kind of pol who thinks putting pink frills on his highway billboards will win the female vote. #GalStrong in #SimcoeNorth.

Brown is hiding behind women’s skirts, and at this point, voters will suspect he’s just there to take upskirting photos. Everything Brown has said or done in the leaving of his job has been “textbook generic” for a creep, to use Stormy Daniels’s phrase for what Donald Trump did to her in bed. I’m being told that more people have just left my column shrieking at the mental image.

Brown says he’ll remain as MPP for Simcoe North, presumably for the office space if he decides to conduct lawsuits against the two brave women. I can’t imagine the courage it took for them to come forward against Brown. The same goes for the woman who faced down against ex-Nova Scotia PC leader Jamie Baillie, who just lost his leadership for the same reason.

Now according to Missouri Senate candidate Courtland Sykes, women like us are “career-obsessed banshees” and “nail-biting manophobic hell-bent feminist she-devils” making up things “in their own nasty snake-filled heads.”

Americans do take it up a notch, don’t they?

But the effect is the same. With men like this in power, traumatized women lose their jobs, fall silent. Who knows? Brown may think these things and his followers on Twitter definitely do — of course thought is free — but no one in Canadian politics thinks them out loud.

Then again, there’s Kent Hehr, federal minister of sport and persons with disabilities, just removed from cabinet by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Alberta public servant Kristin Raworth said publicly that when Hehr was an MLA, she was warned on her first day of work at the Legislature not to get on an elevator with him. “You’re yummy,” he told her. She said he made “verbally suggestive comments” to other women.

In 2017, Hehr ridiculed a group of “thalidomiders,” women with bodies damaged by thalidomide.

Order of Canada member Fiona Sampson was in Hehr’s office speaking for the thalidomiders. As she said later in a news conference, they told Hehr they would die early. He said that would be a bargain for the government. When they asked him for help, he sneered and said, “Well you don’t have it so bad. Everyone in Canada has a sob story.” He even grabbed one thalidomider’s arm at breast-level. She is a fragile woman, missing one leg and some internal organs, but she stood up to Hehr.

He allegedly insulted another woman, Jennifer McCrea, who approached the minister on a question of maternity benefits, by joking about wife-beating. He seems to enjoy tormenting and humiliating women.

Hehr has resigned from cabinet pending an investigation. He had no business being there in the first place. The fact that he’s in a wheelchair was one reason to appoint him — he surely would understand others’ pain — but instead he enjoyed inflicting it. Science Minister Kirsty Duncan will take over his job to which, I assume, he’ll never return. Like Brown, he’ll keep his day job, not much comfort to the women in the building.

And in other news, Larry Nassar, the pedophile doctor who sexually assaulted more than 150 women and little girls in the USA Gymnastics program will go to jail for life, while some felt the judge’s comments were demeaning to the defendant. One of Harvey Weinstein’s assistants is suing him. She was made to clean his semen off the couch three times a week and provide the drugs he injected into his penis to obtain erections.

Erections. We end as we began. hmallick@thestar.ca