‘Girl I Want Your Body’: David Brooks’ Column on Men and Harassment Has Twitter Baffled

Josh FeldmanNov 3rd, 2017, 3:52 pm
 

New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote about sex for a new column in the context of recent revelations about predators and how such behavior arises in men. For as he puts it, “I don’t think good men wake up one morning and suddenly start thrusting their tongue down the throats of women they barely know.”

“You’ve got to walk through a certain number of doors,” Brooks continues, “before you’re capable of that kind of behavior.”

The doors Brooks lists lead to: “the room of love,” “the room of the prospector,” and “the predator’s room.”

In the room of love, per Brooks, “sex is special,” but when boys become adolescents, “that room basically drops from common culture.”

And this is what Brooks has to say about the room of the prospector:

In this room sex is a gold nugget, a pleasure, like any other pleasure, except maybe it’s better and the desire for it is stronger. If you’re straight, women are the people who can give you this pleasure. When you go to a college party or a club, you’re on the prowl for women who want to share this pleasure with you. Most pop songs are about this kind of conquest. Girl I want your body.

In this room, sex is almost like a market transaction. You can measure yourself by how successful you are, which depends on how hot you are or how smooth you are. You can rack up victories.

The key difference between that room and the predator’s room, as he puts it, is that in the former, people “see each other in a degraded way,” but in the latter, “the harasser doesn’t see his victim at all.”

But Brooks’ column isn’t going over that well on Twitter:

[image via screengrab]

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Josh Feldman - Senior Editor

Josh Feldman is a Senior Editor at Mediaite. Email him here: josh@mediaite.com Follow him on Twitter: @feldmaniac