respectability

The 50-year-old's mask of respectability was ripped away in 2021 as an avalanche of testimonies piled up from women describing harrowing abuse he inflicted upon them.

Mr. Carlson, by contrast, can be smooth and affable with an air of perfect respectability.

Ms. Cheever began to understand that his stories came at least partly from the tension between his private feelings of shame and the effort to maintain his respectability as a literary grandee and paterfamilias.

Williamson chose this route for “Unconventional” because he wanted to make an unabashedly queer relationship show “written without respectability politics in mind, so I’d need to find a different pathway.”

It often arrives dressed in intellectual respectability framed as concern, skepticism or “just asking questions.”