Nearly one thousand online readers have signed a petition urging Dilbert creator Scott Adams to apologize publicly for his controversial column about sex scandals.
Here’s more from the petition website: “[Adams] has written a blog insinuating that the act of a man raping a woman is a natural instinct and that society is to blame for these things, not the man who committed the rape … This is a man who has tremendous influence in pop culture and the very fact that he would post something so outrageously degrading about women in truly frightening. How many men, or worse yet, boys will read this and agree, absorbing the belief that it is in their nature to rape and therefore it should be acceptable?”
Adams column tried to explain why “powerful men have been behaving badly” recently–discussing a list of behaviors that included “tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive.” His argument that “society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges” generated over one thousand negative votes on his own website.