Michael Reagan, the son of former President Ronald Reagan and his first wife Jane Wyman (not First Lady Nancy Reagan, who died just last year along with almost everybody else), has sent out some incendiary tweets of a sexist nature in defence of disgraced former Fox News Channel star Bill O’Reilly, who was fired this week due to Sexual Harassment allegations from sexual women.
Reagan is against sexual harassment laws – despite not knowing what sexual harassment is
Reagan definitely has a fierce attitude towards sexual harassment, although he seems to have no knowledge whatsoever of what sexual harassment is.
The star of “The O’Reilly Factor” was fired this week due to the PR fallout following a New York Times report that Fox had settled lawsuits from five separate women who accused O’Reilly of all kinds of sexual harassment and abuse, from “verbal abuse” to “lewd comments” to “unwanted advances” and even phone calls to the women where O’Reilly seemed to be “masturbating” on the other end (and it’s unlikely this was a “Curb Your Enthusiasm”-style mix-up). The five settlements totalled $13 million, and if Fox is willing to pay out this kind of money to keep it out of the courts, they can’t just be mere accusations.
Using the firing of O’Reilly as a springboard to express his opinions towards harassment laws, Reagan sent out two very controversial tweets the night he was let go.
Being a straight white male aged 72, Reagan is of course the best man to listen to on the matter of whether or not leering at a black woman and calling her “hot chocolate” (which O’Reilly allegedly did) is sexist and racist harassment, and he doesn’t believe it is.
Reagan said in his first tweet that (misspelling it) “hot choclare used to be a compliment on your looks” back in his day, whereas now it’s referred to as “sexual harassment.” He sees this as a bad thing.
Everyone else sees this as progress.
Five minutes later, Reagan tweeted again
Five minutes after he called a sexist and racist comment as “compliment,” Reagan posted once again on his Twitter page to take on the topic of sexual harassment as a whole. He tweeted, “If women are going to wear low cut dresses that show cleavage don’t be harassed when we men look.” Ridiculous, isn’t it?
And then, to add to the sheer audacity of this comment, Reagan added that men should be allowed to “sue for sexual arousal” if women are going to look attractive in the workplace. So, he’s telling women that if men make them feel uncomfortable and advance on them sexually and leer at them, it’s their fault because of what they’re wearing.
It’s probably not worth trying to set Reagan straight and instead we should just wait for him to die in a couple of years, but it’s worth noting that the US government defines sexual harassment as “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favours, and other verbal or physical harassment of a sexual nature.” You can’t blame that on an outfit.
