One For The Boys.
How the recent Cracked.com/Modern Rogue shitstorm shows it’s past time men actually did “man up.”
I have never been a victim of sexual harassment. I’m also a man, and the absolute-god-damned-last thing the internet needs is another man sounding off about women’s reports of sexual misconduct.
We’re in a period of time right now — long overdue — when women are finally starting to speak out en masse and make some changes about pervasive and ignored sexual assault and harrassment. This is a fight that should be led by them, and not me. So I’m not going to talk about John Cheese, the former Cracked.com editor and columnist who has been outed for sending sexually inappropriate messages to a long list of women (many of them 18 or 19) who worked on that site. John Cheese has never harassed me. The worst he ever did to me was turn down a good article idea without giving it any thought, and I’d like to think that was because he’s an asshole and not because he was busy with his main job, creeping on young girls who weren’t his wife.
Like I say, I’m not here to talk about John Cheese. The women he wronged are doing a fine job of that by themselves, and I hope they continue to kick the battered corpse of his hacky career into socially unmentionable smithereens.
What I am going to talk about is The Modern Rogue.
When Cracked.com underwent some pretty brutal, financially motivated and creatively short-sighted staff revisions at the end of 2017, John Cheese and a few others jumped ship to The Modern Rogue, a YouTube channel and website fronted by magician Brian Brushwood.
Over the past weekend, Brushwood was repeatedly confronted with the emerging allegations about Cheese, who functioned as his website’s editor in chief. Brushwood initially tried to sweep these allegations to one side, shrugging his shoulders on Twitter with responses like “what am I supposed to do?”, or appeals to people’s sympathy for John Cheese’s family.
As the story reached critical mass, Brushwood fired Cheese and posted an apology on The Modern Rogue’s homepage, which I’m not linking to because they can all go fuck themselves.
The apology in question contained links to Modern Rogue’s YouTube channel (twice) because obviously the best thing to do when apologising for defending a sexual predator is to plug your comedy videos. It also stressed that Brushwood himself was irresponsible and dumb.
But here’s the thing: We’re supposed to feel empathy for Brushwood’s irresponsibility. We’re supposed to support him for being dumb. We’re supposed to believe that he’s just impetuous and rash and stupid and that those things make him loveable.
Except that Brian Brushwood is forty-three. He’s forty-three and has two kids. He’s forty-three, has two kids and he runs multiple businesses. It’s not just that he should have known better, it’s that he probably does and is cynically using the facade of innocent stupidity to avoid responsibility.
In case you don’t believe me that Brushwood, a magician by training who lectures on how to charm people more efficiently, might be trying to fool the public, here’s a tweet from today:
That’s a fan before being sorry that Brushwood “had to adult,” and Brian Brushwood endorsing the message by accepting sympathy.
It’s 2018. Are we not finally done with the tedious, Vince Vaughn, man-child persona? If, as the Modern Rogue apology claims, their site is about being the best people we can be by learning cool tricks and interesting facts, should there not also be mention of being the best people we can be by taking personal responsibility and knowing when an issue is serious?
I’m the perfect target demographic for The Modern Rogue — indeed, I was a fan, even if I disliked Cheese before I knew he was a sex pest — but I’m done with the site. I’m done with the whole notion that men are never supposed to be serious or responsible.
Because some men are sexual predators, and you’d better fucking believe THOSE guys are serious. How are other men meant to treat them? With flippancy? With boob jokes? With forgiveness and a beer bong?
The exact same men who share that tedious meme of the Rat Pack contrasted with kids in fake tan and ask “what happened to real men?” are the ones simultaneously demanding the right to be let off all responsibilities and to act like children. They want to hide from reality in a treehouse, real or virtual, where problems like gender inequality and racism and climate change don’t exist. Those things are boring. Those things are for grown-ups to deal with. Meanwhile, those of us who do try to care about these things are often accused of being joyless and ruining the fun of the endless, vacant waves of Lost Boys who refuse to grow up.
This is especially true if the people trying to bring up important issues are women. Women, according to Judd Apatow movies, are shrew-like creatures whose only real functions are to be uptight and bear children, who they will then be uptight about. We shouldn’t listen to them because they’re not even good at video games and they don’t laugh when we fart.
So I’m saying this as a man: We need to do better. We need to stop being such fucking children and actually try to make the world better, rather than screwing off with our friends and hoping someone else will fix it. Because we’re the grown-ups, now. Dealing with grown up problems is our job. Women have been trying to sort shit out on our behalf for a while, because this current generation of permanently immature men can’t seem to pull its collective head out of its ass and actually do some hard work. We commiserate with successful people when they “have to adult.”
We, the men, need to grow a pair before it’s too late.
Pretending otherwise is exactly how we’ve ended up with problems a lot worse than John Cheese’s pathetic, sweaty text messages.
EDIT: I initially said Brian Brushwood was forty-four. This has been changed.