Wingnuts now deny the existence of "sexual harassment"

Back to the proven playbook. (Why not? The rubes fell for it last time.)
Dahlia Lithwick writing at Slate has this excellent commentary:

Conservatives aren’t just defending Herman Cain. They’re denying the very existence of sexual harassment.

I have no idea what Herman Cain did with the two, or maybe three, or possibly now four women who have raised allegations of improper sexual behavior about him. I don’t know whether any of them will come forward and run the risk of being labeled a slut for their efforts to do their jobs without being treated like pole-dancers. I do know that—as Amanda Marcotte so eloquently explained this week—the very same people who insist that we don’t know what actually happened all those years ago seem to know exactly what happened: nothing.

Sexual harassment is now nothing. Welcome to the era of gender harassment denialism. The harassment skeptics claim that harassment, like racism, used to exist but is now over. ...[G]reat swaths of [Cain defenders] have opted to assert that there could never be a valid sex discrimination claim because the whole thing is just a racket. And they went even further: The same folks criticizing the National Restaurant Association employees who came forward with claims that they were uncomfortable in their workplace are willing to deploy the most archaic and gender-freighted stereotypes to get there. Sexual harassment can’t be “real” because the women who claim it are money-grubbing, hysterical, attention-seeking tramps.

Hope it never happens to one of your daughters, friends. It would suck if someone called her a humorless hooker, even before learning her name.

Lithwick then presents her case; for example, John Derbyshire:

“Is there anyone who thinks sexual harassment is a real thing? Is there anyone who doesn’t know it’s all a lawyers’ ramp, like ‘racial discrimination’? You pay a girl a compliment nowadays, she runs off and gets lawyered up.”

An excellent piece.

Movement wingnuts are so used to winning simply by making assertions, and then making them true simply by re-asserting them, that you could almost guess this would happen. (Remember "racism"? Ask your grandparents about it.)

After all: (1) They're the "say anything" crowd. It's what they do, their bread-and-butter running play.

(2) The billionaire-controlled corporate media is reliably "repeat anything" — so long as billionaire-financed politicians are the ones who are talking.

(3) This is the age of "perception is reality" — can't tell you how many times I've walked past a corp presentation room and found that on one of the overheads. What, nothing exists unless you say it does? This is an entirely corrupt philosophy for an ad-age corrupted era — and an ad-saturated public. (For example: "Manliness," a wholey-owned concept of Miller Lite.)

We have always been at war with Eastasia. Until we weren't.