Groping Girls at Capitol Junior High : Harassment: Now that Packwood ‘gets it,’ maybe it’s time to survey his colleagues.

Why would feminists put up with it?

That’s just one burning question among so many asked about the Bob Packwood story. But it misses the entire point that women put up with it all the time. Every day!

Despite what you heard through most of the 1980s, feminists are quite ordinary women. They go to work in the morning and they pick up the kids on the way home. They bake cupcakes and pair up the socks that come out of the dryer.

And they face sexual harassment.

Rather than indulging in blaming the victim, why not blame the perpetrator? After all, the larger question is why we’ve allowed a system to develop where men feel they have a God-given right to remain adolescent 13-year-olds who grope girls and talk dirty. I predict in the months ahead, we’ll discover that no adult institution so closely resembles a testosterone-filled junior high school as the U.S. Senate.

I was watching a talking-head show the other day, and one commentator seemed exasperated by the Packwood story, asking if we were going to survey every senator’s staff for any hint of sexual harassment.

I hope so. I want to see them squirm, on a spit over a large flame.

We don’t need to know what they do in private with their mates. But in the workplace, on our dime, a senator’s behavior is fair game.

By my way of thinking, the number of women a senator has attacked and harassed is at least as newsworthy as the number of bad checks a member of Congress has written.

I’m also curious about something that haunts me like a sad version of the joke about screwing in a light bulb: “How many women with tales of sexual harassment does it take to halt a prominent man’s career?”

In Clarence Thomas’ case, he survived the testimony of one. We now have a dozen women and counting in the case of Packwood, women with stories corroborated by others. And yet we are hearing predictions that Packwood won’t lose his seat and may not even lose committee assignments.

Don’t ever forget what Bob Packwood did. He subjected these women to physical and mental cruelty. He then used his power to intimidate them. And he lied again and again. But, hey, he wants you to know he has finally apologized. He plans to keep a job he might not have if he had spoken the truth to the press, but he does get it now. He said so.

We are expected to take comfort in that. It would make me a lot less queasy if he were just honest about how he feels and said, “Shut up, already!”

Of course, then the U.S. Senate might actually have to do something about the embarrassing case of Sen. Robert Packwood (R-Ore.)