I wanted to take a moment to expand on the recent New York Time’s article 3-D Printed Gun Promoter, Cody Wilson, Is Charged With Sexual Assault of Child.

It should be clear from our cultural zeitgeist that we have a problem with sexual violence and that there’s something deep happening.

But — taking this story, for example — it’s not the guns. Guns aren’t the problem. It’s the place the guns are coming from: the need to dominate. A desperation, that feeling of emptiness that: as a man you have to rise to the top to feel worthy and full and like you’re not bleeding out from the inside.

We have a problem with sexual violence in our culture, yes. And also deeper: it’s no wonder that people who climb to the top of our social-cultural hierarchy to the point where we discuss them at length on Facebook, in the news, etc. — be they this guy, Trump, Kavanaugh, etc. — are sex criminals. That’s the reason they got to the top in the first place and the reason we are even discussing them: a collective chip on their shoulder and a patriarchy-induced existential hole deep inside them that drove them to climb, climb, climb to the top of the social-cultural hierarchy.

We have to teach men that masculinity — and cultural things we associate with masculinity — is fine. Guns are OK. I even think a strong sense of ambition in your career and in life are great, even healthy. But only if it’s coming from the right place. You shouldn’t act out of desperation; you are full as a man just because. No desperate need to dominate, in politics, in the social-cultural hierarchy, or — critically — other people’s bodies.

At least that’s my analysis.