Hey, male pols! Can you just keep it in your pants?
Here’s my sincere and heartfelt question for male politicians in general and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in particular: Can you just keep it in your pants? And a follow-up: No. Seriously. Is that really too much to ask?
I hear you. Why wouldn’t your 25-year-old executive assistant gravitate toward your 63-year-old (grand) dad bod? Makes total sense. Come for the sagging jowls, stay for the job security if you keep your trap shut.
Did Cuomo really tell her he was fine with dating someone “22 and older”? Hide your kids, hide your wife, y’all.
Evidence of the governor’s creepsome habits with female employees is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. Much like his ear hair. Funnily enough, at the very same time, male co-workers and politicians have summoned the courage to loudly grouse about how Cuomo is a “bully, mean, not a nice guy.”
Oh, shut up. It’s not the same thing. We’re not going to grant equal time for Cuomo calling you a bad word. You think the governor of NEW YORK got his job by following high school yearbook advice to “Be Sweet!”
Cuomo is trying to appear freshly woke about how to talk to young women. It’s as if it never occurred to him that hitting on an assistant who played middle school soccer with his daughter is throuple-with-the-Falwells levels of inappropriate.
What? It’s not OK to ask female employees about their sex lives while leering at them and saying you “sure could use a hug?” Who knew? I mean besides everybody. And now a third woman says he groped her at a party. Is he just a harmless, loud Italian uncle being persecuted for his boisterous personality?
After all, he’s a single gentleman with a good job, not some tattooed jobless Boogaloo boy over on TinderSpace or whatever the hell the kids use these days. He’s just rattlin’ around this big ol’ mansion in Albany in the middle of a pandemic coming off a breakup with a Food Network star.
One minute Sandra Lee is lovingly shoving a forkful of her quinoa-encrusted duck at you and the next, she splits (amicably, best of friends, blah blah blah) and you’re COVID-cooped up with your 20-something daughters and their stupid boyfriends and nobody ever bothers to turn the lights off around here because apparently electricity grows on trees.
But here’s the thing. The irksome, unavoidable truth shines like a diamond in a goat’s butt: Successful politicians get addicted to power just like a meth addict except without the convenience store hookups and bad teeth. And saying that you didn’t know, that you never meant, that you would never use that power to ... sounds an awful lot like a lie.
The obvious solution is to only elect women. We may not be perfect (we talk way too much about our hair, for example) but we are statistically 1,000 percent less likely to sexually harass our male staffers. Why? Because we have work to do. And when we finish, we don’t want some 25-year-old’s abs in our face; we just want our fleece dorm pants, 1.5 glasses of Kirkland wine and exactly one episode of “The Crown.” No more men in positions of power. Y’all blew it.