The Bar for Progressive Men Is Somewhere Under the Earth's Crust

Writing like this takes time: the reading, the receipts, the staring at a wall composing zingers about men who think they’ve done the work. Paid subscriptions are what make that time possible. Free ones help too, and sharing this with your group chat is its own form of love. Thanks for being here.The bar for progressive men is underground, and this week it got a shovel.Graham Platner suspended his Senate campaign this week after a former partner accused him of rape. And look, by the time we got here, nobody could claim they hadn’t been given a heads-up. There was already reporting about women describing troubling experiences with him. There was the tattoo situation. (The Nazi-adjacent tattoo situation, which is a phrase I’d love to stop typing about men running for office.) And through it all, a reliable chorus explaining why each new revelation was actually fine, actually context-dependent, actually not the dealbreaker it would obviously be if the guy had an R next to his…