Matt Lauer at the Time 100 in 2012. Photograph by David Shankbone.

In his Sunday New York Times’ piece “The Unexamined Male Libido,” writer Stephen Marche offers this revelatory thought: “Men arrive at this moment of reckoning (about sexual harassment) woefully unprepared. Most are shocked by the reality of women’s lived experience.”

Translation: Men live with women. Men sleep with women. Men father women’s children. But they don’t know them.

And perhaps because they don’t know them, they don’t care. How else to explain all the mighty who’ve fallen in this narrative? The latest – Matt Lauer of NBC’s “Today” show and Garrison Keillor of “A Prairie Home Companion” fame. Once again, it’s shocking but not surprising. What is particularly sad and has gone largely unreported, though, is the collateral damage: What happens to the assistants and staffs of men who can’t keep their hands still and their pants zipped?

As more big fish are caught in a net of their own making, the backlash has begun. There are those, including women, who worry that the pendulum is swinging too far in the other direction, that this has become a witch hunt. I say it’s a chance we have to take. Eventually, the pendulum will come back to the center.

And there are those who wonder how these men could be gone so quickly when Senate hopeful and mall exile Roy Moore and the Groping Denier in Chief remain. But politics doesn’t move like the media, which is dependent on advertising dollars. When money’s at stake, expect a swift result. This is the court of the marketplace. Whereas politics is a slower, negotiated dance – as Russkiegate is proving.

Finally, let’s keep our focus on the subject and task at hand. In Lauer’s case, critics noted that he threw former colleague Ann Curry under the bus and queried Hillary Clinton unrelentingly over her emails. But Clinton had many criticize her use or private email for public business. And Curry made every story she reported about herself.

Just because men behave badly doesn’t make women perfect.