That, of course, is not to say that white men don’t have their own predatory nature—one that is expressed in ways unique to their privilege.As we know from countless court cases, it’s not that white men don’t hassle women (or rich white men, as Joyce Carol Oates implied this week in a tone-deaf tweet), it’s that they do it in a different way.

Would be very surprised if women walking alone were harassed in affluent midtown NYC (Fifth Ave., Park Ave.), Washington Square Park etc. — Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) October 30, 2014

From Slate:Those bastards …Here’s novelist Joyce Carol Oates, an old-fashioned 1960s-70s liberal’s offensive tweet:

Something needs to be done about novelists: they notice patterns.

Back to Slate:

For all men, harassment of women has more to do with establishing power than it does sexual interest; they do it to control space, both public (the very street you both walk on) and personal (a woman’s self-set boundaries). Men of color catcall vocally and visibly on the sidewalk because they have to—not that there’s ever excuse for harassment. They need the “Sexy!” and “Smile!” to create the illusion of dominance in shared public spaces that social constructs and institutional racism have never afforded them control over.

So, it’s the white man’s fault, after all.

Seriously, this ancient feminist dogma about how male behavior isn’t about sex, it’s about power over women … A lot of it goes back to a dogmatizing treatment of Susan Brownmiller’s 1975 book on rape, but it’s worth reading Brownmiller’s sensible interview with People magazine from that year. She’s fairly explicit that her work is particularly motivated by the large increase in black-on-white rape in New York City.

Brownmiller’s work was, in some ways, part of the law and order backlash of the 1970s against the liberal excesses in protecting the rights of the accused. But, I didn’t know that about Brownmiller until a couple of years ago because it doesn’t fit into the dominant paradigm of men and women as “enemy genders,” to reference a Dave Barry column about taking a ballroom dancing class when he was ten. But, we don’t stay ten forever, and after awhile we start doing a lot of fraternizing with the enemy.