Excellent! She just needs to also serve the same amount of time in prison as he would have.

It started off an ordinary day for eighth grader Keith Bailey until he was summoned by administrators into the vice principal’s office at a Colorado Springs, Colo. middle school. He was confused and shaken. Keith had never been in trouble at school before, save for one minor incident months ago when he made an inappropriate remark that a fellow student “looked like a school shooter.” This time, it was much more serious.

For over two hours on Wednesday afternoon, alone in her office, the vice principal grilled Keith. “He said they kept asking him the same things over and over. They were just intimidating him, asking him the same thing in different ways, asking what he did to these girls and why he did it to them. ‘Why did you do it, what did you do, when did you do it,'” Kieth’s father, Dennis Bailey, says. “They were vague the whole time. They never asked anything specific.”

Only after the two hour inquisition did the school phone Keith’s parents to let them know he was being suspended. But before they did that, they called the police. By the time Keith’s father showed up at the school, his son was being cuffed and put into the back of a police car as a crowd of students stood by ogling the scene.

According to Keith and his family, it all started a week ago when Keith and his friends were sitting around his house talking about online anonymity. Keith decided to change his Snapchat avatar into a black Bitmoji character. One of his friends, a girl, immediately noticed and within minutes told him he needed to change it back. She said it was insensitive and racist for a white person to use a black character as an avatar. Keith, stubborn as any eighth grader, laughed it off and said he wasn’t going to change it. The next day at school the girl, according to Keith, then started telling everyone he was a racist. The harassment and accusations persisted for days. Other students began threatening to beat up Keith, saying they were going to jump him after school for being ‘racist.’ Then the girl and three other female classmates took it to the next level, appearing to take a page from the Feinstein handbook on how to destroy your political enemies, they appeared before the vice principal to accuse Keith of sexual harassment and assault stemming back to the summer.

Keith had been friends with two of the girls. They attended youth group together at their church. “They hang out all the time. If he had been maliciously touching them since back in the summer, then they wouldn’t be going out of their way to walk by our house to go to school together. They go to youth group together, they carpool together. To any reasonable person, I’d think that these allegations would be obviously ridiculous, but apparently there aren’t any reasonable people anymore,” Dennis says.

Keith is an A and B student, plays football, takes advanced math classes, is well-liked by his teachers, and loves attending church. One of the girls, according to Keith, identities as a “feminist.” “He’s pretty scared. I was scared. He was crying when they arrested him. We’ve never been close to anything like this. We don’t know anybody criminal. It’s not something we ever thought we’d have to do deal with,” Dennis, 32, who works as a plumber, says. “I think the whole political climate is what is motivating this. Anytime you disagree with somebody, now you accuse them of sexual assault and automatically they’re a victim and you’re a monster. It’s so highly publicized now, that’s just the answer.”

After the arrest, Dennis stayed back at the school while his son was taken to the police station to be finger-printed and have his mug shot taken. But neither school administrators nor the police would tell Keith or his parents the exact nature of the allegations. He was charged with unlawful sexual conduct and harassment, which comes with a maximum sentence of two years in a juvenile detention center, and the family must wait until a court date on Oct. 27 to learn what, exactly, the girls claim Keith did to them. But a clue emerged the night before when one of the girls’ parents phoned the Baileys.

“Her mother gave us a call and said she just found out that Keith had been inappropriately touching her daughter and she just wanted to let us know. She said, ‘I know Keith is a good kid, maybe he just went down the wrong path.’ She obviously believed her daughter. But she said it happened at the football game last week. The problem with that is, my wife was at the football game the whole time. My son was there with his girlfriend and my wife didn’t want him unattended, so she had eyes on him the whole time. My wife tells this girl’s mother, ‘that’s funny, I was there watching the whole time, he didn’t leave my sight and he was no where near your daughter,'” Dennis recalls. “He was hanging out with his girlfriend, he wasn’t running around molesting other girls.” The mother then changed the story, saying it must have been a different football game.

The Baileys have met with a lawyer and started a legal defense fund for their son. After Keith’s five day school suspension is up, the school has the option to extend it another five days, or to expel Keith entirely. But after the humiliation Keith suffered, his parents are already looking to enroll him in a new school. The other students, they say, already assume he is guilty after watching him put in the back of a police car.

“It blew my mind. my son is not even mature enough to have done anything like that maliciously. I don’t think it’s in his realm of mental capacity at this point in his life. That they are demonizing him as some sort of malicious predator blows my mind. I don’t even think his mind is capable of being predatory,” Dennis says.

The Crucible-like scenario has the Bailey’s reeling. “We are all on edge. I’m furious personally. I’m furious at these kids, and at their parents for allowing them to do something like this. I’m furious at the school for not even seeming like they are giving him a chance to defend himself, and the way they tried to intimidate him. It seems really shady how they wouldn’t call us until two hours after they started interrogating him,” Dennis says.

He sees the whole terrifying situation as trickling down from the way all the adults on television appear to be treating each other these days. “What 13 year old girl doesn’t love drama? I imagine that’s all they see it as. Let’s stir up some drama. What they don’t realize is now he is facing criminal charges. I hope these girls did this without truly understanding the repercussions of their actions. I think the #metoo thing has gotten played out so much, that they see it as a way to get what they want. It’s a quick way to demonize somebody. I hope they didn’t foresee what the actual ramifications would be.”

To donate to Keith Bailey’s legal defense fund, click here.

*****

#FEMINISMISCANCER

Tonight, on “How Much More Delusional Can Hillary Clinton Get?”

It’s open sex war — a grisly death match that neither men nor women will win.

Ever since The New York Times opened the floodgates last October with its report about producer Harvey Weinstein’s atrocious history of sexual harassment, there has been a torrent of accusations, ranging from the trivial to the criminal, against powerful men in all walks of life.

But no profession has been more shockingly exposed and damaged than the entertainment industry, which has posed for so long as a bastion of enlightened liberalism. Despite years of pious lip service to feminism at award shows, the fabled “casting couch” of studio-era Hollywood clearly remains stubbornly in place.

The big question is whether the present wave of revelations, often consisting of unsubstantiated allegations from decades ago, will aid women’s ambitions in the long run or whether it is already creating further problems by reviving ancient stereotypes of women as hysterical, volatile and vindictive.

My philosophy of equity feminism demands removal of all barriers to women’s advancement in the political and professional realms. However, I oppose special protections for women in the workplace. Treating women as more vulnerable, virtuous or credible than men is reactionary, regressive and ultimately counterproductive.

Complaints to the Human Resources department after the fact are no substitute for women themselves drawing the line against offensive behavior — on the spot and in the moment. Working-class women are often so dependent on their jobs that they cannot fight back, but there is no excuse for well-educated, middle-class women to elevate career advantage or fear of social embarrassment over their own dignity and self-respect as human beings. Speak up now, or shut up later! Modern democracy is predicated on principles of due process and the presumption of innocence.

The performing arts may be inherently susceptible to sexual tensions and trespasses. During the months of preparation for stage or movie productions, day and night blur, as individuals must melt into an ensemble, a foster family that will disperse as quickly as it cohered. Like athletes, performers are body-focused, keyed to fine-tuning of muscle reflexes and sensory awareness. But unlike athletes, performers must explore and channel emotions of explosive intensity. To impose rigid sex codes devised for the genteel bourgeois office on the dynamic performing arts will inevitably limit rapport, spontaneity, improvisation and perhaps creativity itself.

Similarly, ethical values and guidelines that should structure the social realm of business and politics do not automatically transfer to art, which occupies the contemplative realm shared by philosophy and religion. Great art has often been made by bad people. So what? Expecting the artist to be a good person was a sentimental canard of Victorian moralism, rejected by the “art for art’s sake” movement led by Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde. Indeed, as I demonstrated in my first book, Sexual Personae, the impulse or compulsion toward art making is often grounded in ruthless aggression and combat — which is partly why there have been so few great women artists.

Take director Roman Polanski, for example, whose private life has evidently been squalid and contemptible. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, founded as a guardian of industry reputation in 1927, would be perfectly justified in expelling him. But no sin or crime by Polanski the man will ever reduce the towering achievement of Polanski the artist, from his starkly low-budget Knife in the Water (the first foreign film I saw in college) through masterworks like Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown.

The case of Woody Allen, who began his career as a comedy writer and stand-up comedian, is quite different. Polanski’s chilly worldview descends from European avant-garde movements like surrealism and existentialism. In a sinister cameo in Chinatown, Polanski sliced open Jack Nicholson’s nose with a switchblade knife. Allen, however, in his onscreen persona of lovable nebbish, seductively ingratiated himself with audiences. Hence the current wave of disillusion with Allen and his many fine films emanates from a sense of deception and betrayal, including among some actors who once felt honored to work with him.

It was overwhelmingly men who created the machines and ultra-efficient systems of the industrial revolution, which in turn emancipated women. For the first time in history, women have gained economic independence and no longer must depend on fathers or husbands for survival. But many women seem surprised and unnerved by the competitive, pitiless forces that drive the modern professions, which were shaped by entrepreneurial male bonding. It remains to be seen whether those deep patterns of mutually bruising male teamwork, which may date from the Stone Age, can be altered to accommodate female sensitivities without reducing productivity and progress.

Women’s discontent and confusion are being worsened by the postmodernist rhetoric of academe, which asserts that gender is a social construct and that biological sex differences don’t exist or don’t matter. Speaking from my lifelong transgender perspective, I find such claims absurd. That most men and women on the planet experience and process sexuality differently, in both mind and body, is blatantly obvious to any sensible person.

The modern sexual revolution began in the Jazz Age of the 1920s, when African-American dance liberated the body and when scandalous Hollywood movies glorified illicit romance. For all its idealistic good intentions, today’s #MeToo movement, with its indiscriminate catalog of victims, is taking us back to the Victorian archetypes of early silent film, where mustache-twirling villains tied damsels in distress to railroad tracks.

A Catholic backlash to Norma Shearer’s free love frolics and Mae West’s wicked double entendres finally forced strict compliance with the infamous studio production code in 1934. But ironically, those censorious rules launched Hollywood’s supreme era, when sex had to be conveyed by suggestion and innuendo, swept by thrilling surges of romantic music.

The witty, stylish, emancipated women of 1930s and ’40s movies liked and admired men and did not denigrate them. Carole Lombard, Myrna Loy, Lena Horne, Rosalind Russell and Ingrid Bergman had it all together onscreen in ways that make today’s sermonizing women stars seem taut and strident. In the 1950s and ’60s, austere European art films attained a stunning sexual sophistication via magnetic stars like Jeanne Moreau, Delphine Seyrig and Catherine Deneuve.

The movies have always shown how elemental passions boil beneath the thin veneer of civilization. By their power of intimate close-up, movies reveal the subtleties of facial expression and the ambiguities of mood and motivation that inform the alluring rituals of sexual attraction.

But movies are receding. Many young people, locked to their miniaturized cellphones, no longer value patient scrutiny of a colossal projected image. Furthermore, as texting has become the default discourse for an entire generation, the ability to read real-life facial expressions and body language is alarmingly atrophying.

Endless sexual miscommunication and bitter rancor lie ahead. But thanks to the miracle of technology, most of the great movies of Hollywood history are now easily accessible — a collective epic of complex emotion that once magnificently captured the magic and mystique of sex.