"My view: these men were, as Kate Millett wrote of Norman Mailer in her masterwork Sexual Politics, “prisoner[s] of the virility cult,” and their chest-thumping machismo was, more or less, a pose—even if they didn’t know it. It’s always hard to gauge how self-aware other people are, but the overall sense usually seems to be: not very. We are unknown to ourselves. (Recall, in an extreme but useful example, that Mussolini wanted his epitaph to read: “Here lies one of the most intelligent animals who ever appeared on the face of the earth.”) So I attempted to take a nuanced view, even when the actions of the men were abhorrent. I tried to approach the behavior with a spirit of irony, leniency, and good humor … when good humor was musterable."