Held to answer

Of course Herman Cain has tested the waters – and not just in the Republican race for president.

By his age, how many men haven’t chanced what they thought might be an easy piece of tail?

Ask any woman who has reached middle age if she has ever had a man touch her in a way that was unwelcome. It could have been by a man she barely knows, or a man she has known for years, or a colleague or a relative or a passerby.

The human male has a rutting season that simply never ends (especially now with Viagra.)

When cell phone cameras first became popular, it wasn’t long before a Web site was devoted to photos of gropers on the New York subway.

That’s why Cain’s accusers are completely believable. (At the same time, he sounds like a gentleman compared to Dominique Strauss-Kahn.)

Being a groper isn’t why Cain doesn’t deserve to be president. He’s unqualified on so many counts they’re not worth mentioning here. If groping disqualified a man from running for president, we would not have Jacqueline Kennedy’s “Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy” released recently, marking the fiftieth anniversary of his presidency. Kennedy was a man who not only groped but scored.

Towards the end of her life, Marilyn Monroe complained that she had been used by  President Kennedy, that she had been reduced to what he referred to as “poon.”

Yet compared to the current crop of presidential candidates, Kennedy looks superior. His sexual appetite didn’t define him. He also had intelligence, wit and warmth.

“Everyone found a part of him(self) in Jack,” Jacqueline Kennedy says in her 1964 interviews with Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. “Before that, politics was just left to all the corny old people who shouted on the Fourth of July … .”

Now we have corny politicians of all ages – and both genders – who like to shout their patriotism. They command so little respect, it’s not surprising they are open to attacks from anyone in their past, including a long-ago job applicant.

Cain was reduced to whining that “men were victims of sexual harassment, too,” The New York Times reported.

He ignores a crucial difference: Only a female victim of sexual harassment runs the risk of getting pregnant. Cain, like the other Republican candidates for president, has followed the party line and insisted that he is anti-abortion.

“No abortions, no exceptions,” he has declared. He may not respect females, but he respects zygotes.

Cain’s lawyer, L. Lin Wood charged that his client is being tried on false accusations in the court of public opinion.

What needs to be on trial is the continued subjugation of females by males only because the female body possesses a uterus – the soil for man’s seed, as Dick Gregory once put it. (He’s the political activist-comedian who once referred to his childhood as “pregnant with poverty.” No, Mr. Gregory, you have never been – and never will be – pregnant with poverty.)

While Cain was announcing he had no intention of leaving the presidential race, voters in Mississippi were rejecting a “personhood” amendment. It would have defined life as beginning at the moment of fertilization and outlawed not only abortion, but also many forms of birth control.

It was hardly a victory for abortion supporters, since the amendment should have never been on the ballot. Nothing will change the sexual privilege wielded by men as long as female bodies are subjected to a special enslavement.

There are worse things than having a man stick his hand under your skirt, and that’s having your entire life groped by another person’s religious or political beliefs.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons