In my professional¹ opinion, shitty men are multi-tools.
- a couple lousy screwdrivers and they fancy themselves MacGyver
- a lot of otherwise nice guys keep one around because they think they're cool
- you'll break a nail trying to pry anything useful out of one
- they claim to be a survival tool—but they fold unexpectedly and will cut you in the process
- risk of injury increases when we act like the dull ones are still sharp
- where you find one lousy tool, there's a dozen more nearby
- and as @leigh points out in the linked post, if they're bad at one thing, they're probably bad at a bunch of other things too²
¹ working my way up from an intern to an executive in the gaming industry (also in fintech and fraud-detection/prevention)
² in my experience in fraud-detection, scammers also tended to be racist, sexist, and homophobic—like it was all a package deal
@alice @leigh My own experience corroborates this in a way: bigotries cluster. If someone is bigoted in one way, they are bigoted in others. And bigotry is a big factor in dehumanization which enables scamming and so many other ills of society