Deepak Chopra (Not Jeffrey Epstein) Is Why Women Don’t Trust Men

Today, in a parking lot, I overheard an argument.

More precisely, I heard a woman yelling and in distress. I stopped to locate her and saw she was in her car with a man, very explicitly asking him to get out.  I waited.

He did not get out.

She repeated her request forcefully as I moved into a position where they both could see that I was watching.  I did not care that it might be rude. I wanted to make sure she was safe and okay, and I was not going to go until I felt sure she was.

The man glanced at me a few times before finally (slowly) exiting the car. I followed him (at a safe distance) to his car to make sure he actually drove away.  Only then did I leave.

On the way home, I was rattled and emotional. Will it ever not be like this?

One of the big problems we are having as a society right now is the way the Epstein files are being handled (or ignored).  It isn’t just that we are not actively investigating and prosecuting the men who were involved in this criminal and abhorrent and abusive enterprise. It is the framing of this criminal, abhorrent and abusive behavior as “other”.  As the outlier behavior of some spoiled rich jerks who ran out of other things to amuse themselves with.  Not something that regula’ folk need trouble themselves with at all.

But if the regula’ folk in question identify as women, most of us can tell you this is not the exception we are talking about here.  This is explicitly what it’s like to be a girl.

And abusers are not just creepy, sleazy womanizers like Epstein (and Trump. and Clinton). The fact that Deepak Chopra was a cohort of this disgusting man is the exact reason why women have learned not to trust men, even those who appear to be good guys (or even enlightened spiritual gurus). I was so aghast at this revelation that I actually googled their text exchanges, hoping somehow it was more innocent than it sounds.

It wasn’t.

And just like that, pretty much everything that Deepak Chopra has ever written or taught sounds like the self-serving B.S. it so obviously was. Every quote seems icky. When he said, “When you blame and criticize others, you are avoiding some truth about yourself,” I guess he meant that when we blame and criticize child abusers, we are actually revealing some ugliness in ourselves.

Or, and hear me out, we recognize that the sexual abuse of a child is literally the most damaging and destructive thing you could do to a young and innocent human, something from which they will never truly recover, that will always lurk in the back of their minds as a hovering spectre in any new relationships they try to form?

I think probably the second one, but I am not a doctor, like Deepak.

I had a conversation with a man recently where he said that he thought these men are the fringe and that most men are not “bad actors”. I told him there were many, many, many women who “thought” they were dealing with a nice guy, right up until the moment he assaulted them. Sad but true. We don’t deliberately put ourselves in harm’s way—we find ourselves in harm’s way when that “nice guy” turns out to be the kind of man who will not get out of your car when you ask him to.

I think everyone should familiarize themselves with the people who have been implicated in the Epstein files, and I think every single person who can be definitively linked to the abuse of women and children should be prosecuted.  Weird that this is suddenly a radical opinion, but hey, here we are. But honestly, I would also like this to open up a dialogue that goes beyond the #MeToo paradigm.

This is not just about individual abusers and their victims. This is about a systemic problem so widespread that it has been normalized, even by victims. Sexual abuse does not just happen on private islands and elite compounds.  It is an every day, everywhere problem.  And sexual abuse offenses have increased, not decreased since the #MeToo movement.

The fact that we can’t even trust someone like Deepak Chopra (Matt Lauer, Bill Cosby, and other men who seemed like “good guys”) is really where the burden of sexism shifts entirely onto women’s plates.  We are supposed to give everybody a fair chance, and if we don’t, we are labelled feminazis, and if we do and end up being assaulted, it our judgment that is called into question more than the behavior of the aggressor (our faces get in the way of their fists, so to speak).

There is a popular social media post circulating right now that goes like this:

Out of ten men,

one makes a sexual joke directed at a woman,

two laugh alone,

three don’t find it funny but still chuckle to fit in,

four say nothing, they pretend they didn’t hear it at all.

Not a single one speaks up,

not a single one stops it.

Later, aside from the man who made the joke, the other nine all believe the same thing – men like that are a minority, most men aren’t like this.

They all see themselves as part of the good majority.

But from the woman’s perspective, the one being harassed, there is no big difference between them.

The laughter, the silence, the looking away – all of it creates the same environment.

So when women say most men are the same, this is what they mean. Not every man harasses women but most men participate in protecting the system that does.

To be clear, Jeffrey Epstein is the one who “made the joke”.

But Deepak Chopra was one of the men who laughed.

Will it ever not be like this?

At The Good Men Project, we have invested the past 16 years into the belief that this can change, and that sexism poisons the entire well, harming men and boys as well as women and girls.  We have published literally hundreds of thousands of articles devoted to the idea that this is a paradigm shift that is not only possible, but inevitable.  Our contributors give us the hope and spark to keep moving, even when it turns out that Deepak Chopra is a total scumbag.

Whew, having a hard time with that.

I will close on what I hope is a lighter note, paraphrasing Adam Sandler in “The Wedding Singer”, who eloquently summarizes my feelings about Deepak’s books and teachings in light of his relationship with Epstein:

It all was bullsh*t

It was a goddamn joke

And when I think of you, Deepak

I hope you f*cking choke.

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This post is republished on Medium.com

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Photo credit: iStock