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Pence is an evangelical Christian and a teetotaler. Last week it was revealed, based on a profile written a full 14 years ago, that Pence “never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won’t attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either.”

He won’t attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side

Reaction was predictably partisan. Conservatives either approved his uxoriousness and the seriousness of his commitment to traditional family values, or pronounced that it was nobody’s business how he conducts himself socially. Liberals mocked him mercilessly for his old-world prudery. But Csanady went totally off the polemical grid when she wrote: “At its core, Pence’s self-imposed ban is rape culture.” Her “reasoning” is that if Pence is too scared to be alone with another woman, then he is perpetuating a superannuated sexist stereotype of women as “over-sexed” and “a wellspring of possible sin.”

This is an assumption Csanady has no right to make, especially with so little evidence. There are numerous other possible explanations she overlooked in her rush to cram the anecdote into a social-media friendly insta-thesis. His wife may have trust issues he accommodates out of love. Or, as I tweeted, maybe he is simply ensuring he is never the victim of a false allegation of impropriety, which can easily happen to a man in the public eye. Perhaps he’s simply shy.

One thing we have learned since the story broke last week is that Pence’s policy of not dining with women staffers is no reflection on his treatment of them. A former press secretary to the House Republican Conference who worked under its then-chairman Pence, Mary Vought, published a defence of him in the Washington Post. She writes that Pence’s dining policy “was never a hindrance to my ability to do my job well,” and in fact she “excelled at my job because of the work environment (he) created from the top down.” Voughgt worked side by side with Pence in meetings, where her “proposals and suggestions were always valued as equal with those of my male counterparts.” Vought is now the president of her own consulting firm. Also of note: she mentioned that Pence wasn’t in the habit of dining alone with male staff, either, preferring to race home at the end of a work day to eat with his family.