Your exceptions tend to prove the rule. Don’t forget Golda Meir. Maggie Thatcher.
The whole ‘accountability and reason’ meme came from the movie, ‘As Good As It Gets’ with Jack Nicholson playing a very successful and reclusive author.
A female fan buttonhooked him at an elevator and told him what a fan she was.
She said that she loved his female characters, and asked how it was he was able to capture them as he did.
His reply, “I think of a man, and then I take away accountability and reason.”
Something I never considered about this statement, which is hilarious in the movie, is the obverse of it - that accountability and reason are the things that withstand the other, baser aspects of a man’s nature.
Eh, maybe, but what I do know is that masculinity doesn’t necessarily equate to reason and accountability. I know it certainly didn’t with Jean-Paul Sartre, George Lucas, or any of those guys. Heck, technically, the feminists of the 1960s actually hated femininity, to the extent that one could be forgiven for thinking that, had transgender surgeries been around, they probably would have taken that. I know Mallory Millet, the sister of Kate Millet, once commented that Kate was exactly the type of person who probably would have surgically changed her gender to be male if she was given the opportunity to do so. And Simone de Beauvoir’s reasons for advocating for abortion was specifically to have women “kill like men do”, not to mention made some extremely anti-femininity statements that actually comes across as downright misogynistic, like claiming that women should “lop off their breasts” due to them “not serving the individual economy,” plus referring to housewifery as “parasitic” while strongly implying they should be gotten rid of, plus referring to even merely possessing maternal instincts as “oppressive”, and bashing female bodies as being “sick.” That’s why, with all due respect, I’m not particularly fond of the whole “femininity = lack of reason or accountability” meme.
I have a complex view on Jack Nicholson myself. On the one hand, I’m not particularly fond of his very left-wing politics (even shilling for the likes of Cuba). But on the other hand, I do have immense respect for the fact that despite his leftist politics, he is a staunch pro-lifer and against abortion, and actually has a pretty sound reason for being that (he himself was nearly aborted).
As far as reason, well, that would depend largely on what you mean by “reason.” After all, the French Revolution used “reason” (especially the type of “reason” promoted by the likes of Voltaire and Diderot) to commit its horrific murders and actions, so in that sense, reason did nothing to withstand the baser aspects of a man’s nature, and if anything, reason made it the baser aspects even WORSE.