By Count Friedrich von Olsen
It seems like everybody is dancing on just-fired media personality Bill O’Reilly’s grave. To be completely honest, while I knew who he was and even saw him on television once in a while, I did not spend a lot of time watching him, thinking about him or considering very carefully what he said. I did glance over a book a while ago that he had written, or was ghost written for him or which he edited about the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers. It did not bore me. As to his television persona, I must say that for someone who was barely half my age, he came across as being too much of a curmudgeon…
All good things have to come to an end, I guess, but I am not certain, exactly, that Bill O’Reilly was a good thing. Still, I’m not convinced he was all that bad of a guy, either. This whole thing about getting on the wrong side of women has me a bit puzzled…
Let me see if I have this right: He made passes at a few women. Some might have taken him up on his offers. I guess some didn’t. I guess there is a veritable who’s who of those he made, ahem, offers to. Pequita Burgess. Greta Van Susteren, Megyn Kelley, Gretchen Carlson. I could go on and on, but I’m not sure I know who a lot of these women are…
Part of the problem is it seems a lot of these accusations are being made anonymously. If there is some substance to the accusations, do so anonymously is okay, maybe. I guess in his neck of the woods Bill O’Reilly is, or was, a pretty powerful guy who might hurt people or harm their careers, so maligning him from the shadows is acceptable because the accuser, assuming the accuser is telling the truth, might be harmed even more by stepping out of the shadows. It occurs to me, however, that if what is being said is true, then doing so anonymously is pointless and maybe even counterproductive. That is, if it is true, then Bill O’Reilly knows who his accuser is. If a woman says, ‘I’m not going to tell you who I am but on February 17 at the Sheraton Hotel in Atlanta, Bill O’Reilly invited himself into my room and tried to undress me,” Bill would have to remember that incident. So he could send a private eye or one of his henchmen out to visit some meanness on this lady, and be safe in doing so. He would be able to say, “How could I be responsible for her brakes failing when she was coming down that mountain? I never heard of her. I have anonymous accusers saying things about me all the time. Now you say one of them had an accident? How does that have anything to do with me?” It seems to me that if someone is going to make such an accusation, and the accusation is true, then the person should come out in front of man, God and everyone else and lay it all out there…
The other part of the problem is – and this is the part that is very hard to know – the accusations might not be true. In recent years, another man – another rich man – Bill Cosby – has been hit with similar accusations, perhaps even ones that were more serious than just making unwanted passes at women. I have no idea whether those accusations are true. At first there was just one. Then one or two more cropped up. Then more still. Pretty soon people were looking around for one of those rare delectable creatures that Bill Cosby had not seduced while she was drugged up. To read the reports, they are as rare as coelacanths. But obviously, Bill Cosby could not have gotten around as much as these legions of women were claiming. The logistics of it were impossible. What we had here was a frenzy of women who thought they could get rich quick by making an accusation, either threaten or actually file a lawsuit, and then get a settlement out of court where no proof needed to be offered. The terms of such a settlement which would protect Mr. Cosby from further embarrassment. Such is our legal system…
But there is a larger issue here. Have we really become so fastidious that someone becomes offended when someone else remarks upon her beauty? Is this not absurd? Some clothing designer was quoted in the Sentinel in the California Style column not too long ago. I am going to botch the quote, I am sure, but you will get the sense of it nonetheless. It went something like this : “I know what women want. They want to be beautiful.” I don’t even remember who the designer was, but I think he is right. The amount of money and time that women spend on make-up, and false eyelashes, and hair dye, trips to the hairdresser, form fitting clothes or clothes that aren’t form fitting but are designed to seem as if the person wearing them has a good form, all of that and more attests that what women want is to be beautiful. So, do they long to be beautiful in a vacuum? Where no one will notice their beauty? Or do they want their beauty to be witnessed? Do they want their beauty to be remarked upon? I think so….
I understand, of course, that there are refined and gentlemanly ways of remarking about feminine beauty and there are crass ways of doing so. I recognize too that an unwanted advance can be uncomfortable for someone who is an object of that advance. But I cannot help thinking that it is not so much the advance that women resent but rather the particular person who is making the advance. Somehow, I get the feeling that someone like Cary Grant couldn’t make an unwanted advance to a woman. And that says as much about women as it does about men…