It is the year of our lord 2017 and everyone is sorry. I’m sorry we’re here, you’re sorry you have to read this, and the parade of high-profile sexual offenders are the sorriest of all.

Louis C.K. is sorry he’s so famous and so admired that whipping out his dick caused women to be upset (even though he totally asked first, you guys). Harvey Weinstein is sorry that he grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. Al Franken? He’s just sorry he let everybody down. (Minus the 36 SNL alums who swear he treated them with nothing but “respect and regard.” Which I guess will not be the title of his inevitable tell-all.) But not as sorry as Kevin Spacey, who’s sorry that Anthony Rapp has terrible memories of him.

“I owe him the sincerest apology for what would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior,” Spacey wrote. Because yes: It would have been pretty bad had he come onto an underage young man in this hypothetical situation that Spacey would like us to believe never happened.

So congrats! Everyone is sorry! (You get a sorry, and you get a sorry, and you get a sorry!) Now Matt Lauer is the latest carrier of the sorry torch.

“To the people I have hurt, I am truly sorry,” he said in a statement following his firing from NBC for sexual misconduct. “As I am writing this, I realize the depth of the damage and disappointment I have left behind at home and at NBC.”

And had he just left it, we at least would’ve been an apology on par with Jack Berger’s in Sex and the City when Berger dumps Carrie Bradshaw via Post-It: “I’m sorry, I can’t, don’t hate me.” But alas, Lauer continued — they all have to continue — one-upping his predecessors with a cornucopia of feelings, sentiment, and … nothing concrete. Plus, a denial.

“Some of what is being said about me is untrue or mischaracterized, but there is enough truth to these stories to make me feel embarrassed and ashamed,” he continued. “I regret that my shame is now shared by the people I cherish deeply.”

So he is sorry that he’s ashamed. And sorrier still that he has to share that shame. (This was his shame, goddamn it, and how dare he be made to divvy it up.) But even worse, amid his sorries and regrets and appreciation to those rallying around him, he is sorry that we’ve been given information that isn’t necessarily true. “I’m sorry,” I can imagine him saying, “that some of you don’t know the whole story.”

And I get it, man, I do. I get it as much as I get the apology of George H.W. Bush, who blamed his tendency to grab women by their derrieres on his wheelchair and on our inability to recognize comedic timing. “At age 93,” a statement from Bush’s people read, “President Bush has been confined to a wheelchair for roughly for five years, so his arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures,” a statement read. “To try and put people at ease, the president routinely tells the same joke (‘Do you know who my favorite magician is? David Cop-a-Feel!’) — and on occasion, he patted women’s rears in which he intended to be a good-natured manner.”

“To anyone he has offended, President Bush apologizes most sincerely.”

The former president is sorry that you humorless women weren’t into his bit — “David Cop-a-Feel” being indisputable comedy gold — and he is sorrier still that they couldn’t distinguish between a good-natured tap on the “rear” and the kind that causes women’s stomachs to drop in shock and revulsion. And while I personally am sorry the word “rear” was used in a professional context — and sorrier still to be reminded through that “joke” that David Copperfield has had his own allegations against him — I am still less sorry than President Bush, who regrets that we don’t know that wheelchairs exist on a plane where you have no choice but to be handsy.

But with so many allegations floating around, it’s important that we press pause to acknowledge that while someone may have done something bad, the accused might not have known it was “bad.” Maybe, when the door locked at the press of a button in a certain Today show host’s office, it would’ve helped if a woman hadn’t internally screamed or sat frozen in fear and learned to laugh it off because it’s just flirting, it’s just a joke, and I thought we were all just having a great time. Because, Jesus, lighten up! These men are sorry.

And they have so much to be sorry for. They’re sorry they got caught, sorry they weren’t smarter and sneakier, sorry they have to take time out of their day to say they’re sorry. They’re sorry they’re being painted as someone they tell us they aren’t (despite being exactly that thing).

“I’m sorry that people are so jealous of me,” Gretchen Weiners infamously says in Mean Girls. “But I can’t help it that I’m popular.”

At least Gretchen was being genuine.

Because the thing about the year’s apology marathon is that they all lack the one thing that makes sorry stick: remorse. By hiding behind excuses, behind success, behind technicalities, or behind the names of SNL alums who swear Al Franken is good enough, smart enough, and goddamn it, people like him, they make it very clear what they are sorry for: being unlucky enough to be dragged publicly in the wake of their bad behavior.

Real remorse looks like quiet, simple defeat. It is the sound of the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack with your head down shamefully walking off into the night. It is the complete and total acceptance of one’s own shittiness, and the acknowledgement of being The Worst. It is taking accountability and retiring your post to somebody better, somebody more worthy.

So let’s save time on the next one. Let’s prematurely accept the apologies for being so famous, so rich, so slim-seeming in a suit. Let’s prepare ourselves for how sorry somebody is for their affinity for explicitly describing their sexual fantasies to a co-worker, or how their khaki zippers keep opening without being prompted, or how well-endowed they are. (So, honestly, it’s actually your fault for being offended at what you saw in the first place.) Over the next few days and weeks and months and years, we are going to be hearing the word “sorry” a lot. I’m just sorry no one actually is.

Anne T. Donahue is a writer and person from Ontario, Canada. She’s written for Esquire, Cosmopolitan, and Playboy, and her first book, Nobody Cares, comes out in September 2018. You can find her on Twitter at @annetdonahue.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

Earlier this week, we were treated to the gentle sounds of another Trump Twitter tantrum, this time targeting MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. What set this one apart from his usual ranting was a few horrifying descriptors.

“I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore),” he began. “Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came … to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Years Eve, and insisted on joining me.”

“She was bleeding badly from a face-lift,” he continued, referring to Brzezinski. “I said no!”

His description of the encounter was a lie, and an obvious one at that.

The tweets are not, sadly, all that surprising given the president’s record of being mad online. But the grotesqueness with which he targets Brzezinski, painting an image of her as a desperate, aging shrew, feels like a new level of shock horror even for Trump.

It’s also in line with other comments Trump has made throughout the years where he paints women’s bodies as disgusting, confusing bags of flesh and blood whenever they function outside the role of eye candy.

Trump’s tweets aren’t just a reflection of his obvious psychological undoing. They’re an extension of a complex that prevents him from seeing women as people. The fact that they bleed is gross, their bodies are strange, and he wants everybody else to think so too. Which would be an alarming trait in any person. But for a president with access to policy changes, it’s downright dangerous. Worse, he’s given us warning for years.  

Mika Brzezinski and the stigma of plastic surgery

Behold: the latest example of Trump’s tendency to depict women’s bodies as disgusting. By using Brzezinski’s face as a special effect, he attempted to make us believe a she was so desperate for a place in the boys’ club that she was willing to stand on the steps of a sub-par resort, gushing blood. Bitch, please.

To start, anyone who rolls up to a members-only club with a bleeding face deserves the loudest of kudos for being the most punk of all people. But while Mika Brzezinski’s “little hands” clapback was punk in itself, it’s really none of our business if she chose to get plastic surgery. Nor is it the business of the president.

Not that he cares. By painting such a grotesque image in his tweets, he implies that Brzezinski underwent what he considers a shameful procedure. And we can assume this because he uses “facelift” as a pejorative. In his narrative, Mika wasn’t bleeding from an injury or from a preexisting condition, she was bleeding from a facelift — a cosmetic procedure. Likely to seem young and desirable — exactly the way Trump prefers women to look.

Isn’t that funny to see a woman try to conform to beauty ideals of youth? Or so suggests the man who uses hair plugs and a spray tan as an attempt to look younger, or who spent his first meeting with press as president-elect complaining that they printed photos of him with a double chin.

Megyn Kelly and the fear of menstruation

Every 28 to 35 days, most women of childbearing age tend to menstruate. And while the process might seem strange or unnatural to the leaders of Gilead, it also confuses and frightens the president, a (tragically) non-fictional man.

Back in 2015, Trump again used blood as proof that women were gross, describing host Megyn Kelly as having “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever” in the wake of what he felt was an unfair line of questioning.

Which, admittedly, would have been extraordinary. Should Megyn Kelly had begun bleeding from her eyes on live television, it could be assumed that she boasted unfathomable powers, including the ability to moderate a debate while simultaneously battling the virus from Outbreak. But what scared Donald the most was a natural bodily function: the shedding of one’s uterine lining.

Of course, the private school system may have failed Trump, spurring a mistaken belief that menses is a source of evil. But somehow, despite being a nearly 70-year-old husband and father, the man remains unfamiliar with — and intimidated by — periods. He doesn’t experience them, so he equates menstrual blood to wrongness. So to Trump, Megyn was bleeding as an act of aggression, as a way to scare and to challenge him — maybe even to knock him from his pedestal and usurp the throne as a demon-witch. Which I admittedly attempt every month.

Breast milk is “disgusting”

In 2011, attorney Elizabeth Beck requested a break from a deposition to pump breast milk and Donald Trump was appalled. Allegedly, he turned bright red and screamed, “You’re disgusting, you’re disgusting,” which arguably should’ve made for a better campaign slogan than “Make America Great Again.” 

Of course, his own lawyers disputed some of the claims, arguing that Beck ultimately whipped out a breast pump to buy time because she had run out of questions — a method that all women learn in health class, should we ever find ourselves backed into a professional corner.

But as if refusing to learn from the episode of Friends in which Ross Geller cowers at breast milk, Trump’s distrust of women’s bodies continues in his use of the word, “disgusting.” Trump seems to believe that breasts — and the women attached — have no purpose other than to appease him sexually or invoked to brag about the hotness of his own daughter. And because the president increasingly equates women to sexual objects, he’s grossed out to learn their bodies have purposes outside the realm of heteronormative sex (with him).

So when confronted with a new reality, Donald believes he’s being rallied against; that women can weaponize their bodies as a way of disgusting him to death. The fact that he was likely fed through breast milk as a baby doesn’t matter — if his own adult body doesn’t benefit now, the act is ungodly.

Women shouldn’t have a properly functioning G.I.

In 2003, Donald Trump made what could be construed as the most upsetting claims of all: that then-girlfriend/now-wife Melania Trump had never “[made] a doody.” And angels wept. 

Having detailed the revelation on the Howard Stern Radio Show, both Stern and Donald sang the praises of their respective partners who’d apparently never had gas or a bowel movement. At least nothing either had experienced.

So while the president may equate a working digestion tract in the female body as a great source of upset — because only men poop — here’s hoping no one witnesses the meltdown that comes with confronting the realities of over a decade’s worth of a backed-up intestine. I guess Everybody Poops remains at a reading level far out of his reach.

The thing is, any person who thinks this way is dangerous. To actively hate and be repelled by women’s bodies is the source of toxic masculinity that fuels sexism, assault, and even worse. But because Trump’s in power, his disgust at the mere existence of women extends to policy.  

I believe the most recent proposed health care bill — the Republicans’ ironically named Better Care Reconciliation Act — is a direct assault on women. Unsurprisingly, 13 men helped pen the bill that plans to overhaul and cut funding to Medicaid, which pays for half of all US births and provides insurance for millions of American women. It also promises to defund Planned Parenthood, an organization that provides breast exams, pap tests, HIV tests, STI treatments, birth control, and abortions.

But that isn’t everything: Should the bill go through, it will become increasingly difficult for women to undergo abortions entirely by banning them from using tax credits that cover the procedure. Add to this the fact that pregnancy and maternity leave could be considered non-essential under this coverage, and American women seem to be quickly backed into a corner by an administration high on their misogyny, fueled by disgust at the mere existence of a particular gender. Being a woman would be a preexisting condition.

So when Trump tweeted about Brzezinski’s alleged facelift, it was to perpetuate his disgust and to shame her into silence. Trump wanted his followers to see Mika Brzezinski as a desperate woman, grotesque in appearance, who was a dispensable source. What he didn’t consider was that not everybody thinks that way. It’s not Gilead … yet.

Anne T. Donahue is a writer and person from Ontario, Canada. She’s written for Esquire, Cosmopolitan, and Playboy, and her first book, Nobody Cares, comes out in September 2018. You can find her on Twitter at @annetdonahue.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.