Why we must not become jaded about male misbehavior

Another former FNC on-air personality files suit against the channel:

Fox News is being sued by its former personality, Andrea Tantaros. In a lawsuit filed against her former employer, Tantaros alleges the company — which was formerly led by Roger Ailes — is a "sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult."

The New York Times reports that Tantaros launched legal proceedings against Fox News on Monday, accusing the news network of punishing her for complaining about sexual harassment by former chief executive Roger Ailes.

Fox News told The New York Times that it would not comment pending legal proceedings.

Business Insider has contacted Fox News by email for comment on the allegations.

Earlier this month, the network's lawyers disputed Tantaros' allegations. They told New York Magazine that she had been suspended with pay because she didn’t allow the network to vet her book, which the lawyers said violated her contract.

Her lawsuit, filed in the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, did not pull any punches, according to the Times.

"Fox News masquerades as a defender of traditional family values, but behind the scenes, it operates like a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult, steeped in intimidation, indecency and misogyny," the lawsuit reads.

It argues that Ailes, who stepped down last month after being overrun by accusations of sexual abuse, "did not act alone" and his actions were "condoned by his most senior lieutenants," according to the Times.

Tantaros, who co-hosted "The Five" and vanished from the screen in April, claims that she was repeatedly told not to wear trousers, so Ailes could see her legs, according to the suit. She was also asked by Ailes to turn around so "so I can get a good look at you," the suit claims, per the Times.

The lawsuit also accuses Fox News of setting up fake Twitter accounts, known as "sock puppets," to harass her online, according to the report.

Tantaros' action follows former anchor Gretchen Carlson's lawsuit against Ailes last month. Carlson's lawyers also claim that more than 10 other women have come forward with claims against the former Fox News boss, who has so far denied all allegations against him.

Gabriel Sherman, New York Magazine writer and Ailes' biographer, suggested on Twitter on Tuesday that Tantaros' lawsuit will be followed by others. 

This, of course, follows Gretchen Carlson's lawsuit of the same nature, as well as remarks by Megan Kelly that Ailes had acted inappropriately toward her. And this sordid account of a behind-the-scenes Fox staffer's dealings with Ailes:

The morning after Fox News chief Roger Ailes resigned, the cable network’s former director of booking placed a call to the New York law firm hired by 21st Century Fox to investigate sexual-harassment allegations against Ailes. Laurie Luhn told the lawyers at Paul, Weiss that she had been harassed by Ailes for more than 20 years, that executives at Fox News had known about it and helped cover it up, and that it had ruined her life. “It was psychological torture,” she later told me.

So far, most of the women who have spoken publicly about harassment by Ailes in the wake of Gretchen Carlson’s lawsuit had said no to Ailes’s sexual advances. They ran out of hotel rooms, they pulled away from embraces, they complained or avoided or generally resisted, even when it hurt their careers. This is the account of a woman who chose to go along with what Roger Ailes wanted — because he was powerful, because she thought he could help her advance her career, because she was professionally adrift and emotionally unmoored.

Doing so helped Luhn’s career for a time — at her peak, she earned $250,000 a year as an event planner at Fox while, according to both her own account and four confirming sources, enjoying Ailes’s protection within the company. But the arrangement required her to do many things she is now horrified by, including luring young female Fox employees into one-on-one situations with Ailes that Luhn knew could result in harassment. “He’s a predator,” she told me. In recent years, Luhn had a series of mental breakdowns that she attributes to the stress of her situation, and was even hospitalized for a time.

Now, the author of that New York magazine piece, Gabriel Sherman,  has for some time made a mission out of peering into the life and mind of Roger Ailes, and he has his supporters and detractors.

But there is enough of a body of accusation, from multiple sources and bolstered by detail that seems unlikely to be the product of fabrication, for us to conclude that Mr. Ailes was a man of inconsistent virtue, to put it kindly.

The first item to address upon so concluding is the easy-to-make charge that those who have been enthusiasts of the channel are hypocrites, willing to wallow in schadenfreude when, for instance, Dave Letterman's Late Night staff was proven to be a bacchanalian playhouse, or that they are on shaky ground when they point to the sybaritic antics of the music and movie worlds. Or, most relevant to the present moment, when they point to Bill Clinton's forty-year track record.

Which makes this an opportune moment  to reiterate one of LITD's core assertions: Hypocrisy is about the least impressive charge that can be levied against someone's character.

Least impressive because it leads to excuse-making and nihilism, as in "Oh, knock it off with your tired old standards that nobody ever lives up to. Men are horndogs; get over it. It's just something to be factored in to human interaction."

Let's look at the two sides of the coin that explains the prevalence of patriarchy in societies across the globe and throughout history.

On the one hand there are the undeniable facts of the man's greater upper body strength and his dispositional readiness to get as ugly with any threat as is necessary, the combination of which leads to the roles as protector and provider into which he naturally falls.

And this capacity for ugliness is what, in a truly seasoned man - one who has cultivated himself beyond the brute level of capricious indulgence in it - provides the germ of the sense of justice. If he's worked on refining himself to any degree, he understands that restraint is called for unless a wrong is so grave or a threat so immediate, so as to be sure that one's reaction is proper in the circumstance.  When the commitment is made to enter into conflict, someone can get killed. Great destruction may ensue.

To be blunt, this is why men were political animals first, why voting and office-holding have generally come late to women in human societies.

C.S. Lewis employs this observation in his explanation of why men make natural heads of families:

The relations of the family to the outer world—what might be called its foreign policy—must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to the outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world. Naturally, almost, in a sense, rightly, their claims override, for her, all other claims. She is the special trustee of their interests.

The function of the husband is to see that this natural preference of hers is not given its head. He has the last word in order to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of the wife. If anyone doubts this, let me ask a simple question. If your dog has bitten the child next door, or if your child has hurt the dog next door, which would you sooner have to deal with, the master of that house or the mistress? Or, if you are a married woman, let me ask you this question. Much as you admire your husband, would you not say that his chief failing is his tendency not to stick up for his rights and yours against the neighbours as vigorously as you would like? A bit of an Appeaser?

On the other hand, there is an impulse in a man that throbs at the slightest stimulus, and this is true regardless of whether he's bothered to refine himself or not. As Dennis Prager points out, a man is capable of engaging in meaningless sex, and a woman is not.

The ancient Hebrew king Solomon is an example of someone who had refined himself on many levels but was not able to surmount this basic drive. God had been so impressed with his answer to the question of what Solomon would like as a reward for his reverence - Solomon requested wisdom - that God gave him power and wealth anyway. But once Solomon had realized that his divinely bestowed stature could garner him hundreds of wives and concubines, he went for it.

The feminist response to all this is to cry that it is an unfair arrangement deliberately designed by men rather than a feature of nature. The shortcoming in that view is that, after thousands of years of societal development all over this planet, there is no example of a different arrangement prevailing.

What, then, is to be done? Is a cynical attitude, one that says that Roger Ailes types, rock stars and politicians motivated by the opportunity to meet chicks will always be with us, the best we can hope for?

 Quite clearly, even the most gentlemanly among us, one who graciously buries his fantasies and conducts himself impeccably in dealings with any and all women, still has the fight going on within him. He still has to make the effort to bury that which arises in his mind and nervous system.

And that which arises is so powerful that occasionally it prevails. Ask Solomon.

To move from the Old Testament to the New, what seems clear is that accepting God's grace is the only way out. A man has to acknowledge that there is this force within him that is thinking in terms of breasts and legs and intoxicating sensory cues to the exclusion of granting a woman her full humanity. And then he has to lay that at the foot of the cross.

It seems the only sure way to succeed at surmounting that force.

It's just another aspect of life that demonstrates why we must become new. We must die to what we have been.

It's the only way to keep harassed news-network personalities from becoming hardened and bitter, the only way to truly include women in the workforce and political realm, the only way to once and for all bring clarity to any and all situations and dispense with the cacophony that has gotten us nowhere since the beginning of time.

He is the answer, whatever the question.