Summary: Men in the Leftist-dominated media, entertainment, academia, and the San Francisco Bay area are falling like ten-pins to the #MeToo campaign. Also tarred are some politicians of both parties — plus a larger pool of anonymous accusations of a bewilderingly wide and growing range of behaviors called harassment. This is unexpected outcome, like poison gas blowing back on our own troops. So bien pensant leftists are having second thoughts about the crusade.
Here’s an unpopular opinion: I’m actually not at all concerned about innocent men losing their jobs over false sexual assault/harassment allegations.
— Emily Lindin (@EmilyLindin) November 21, 2017. She is the founder of the unslut project and an award-winning documentary filmmaker.
“The Upside of Office Flirtation? I’m living it.“
By Allison Benedikt (executive editor) at Slate.
“When I was 23 years old, my boss …was an older and more powerful editor. My career, at the time, was in his hands. Once, when we had finished working on a story together, he suggested we get a drink to celebrate. …I remember feeling extremely nervous as we sat across from each other in a dark bar. He was flirting with me, I could tell. The next weekend, he asked me out again. A few days later, he kissed me on the steps of the West 4th subway station without first getting my consent. We’ve now been happily married for 14 years and have three children. …
“If I had not been interested in my husband’s advances, would that have been harassment? Was it harassment anyway, since he was my boss? Today, many people seem to think the answer is yes.
It is an understatement to say something has shifted in the culture. And that shift is unquestionably to the good. …
“Men like Harvey Weinstein and Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer and their less famous counterparts deserve to be kicked out of polite society, ruined, and, in certain cases, indicted. …But a byproduct of these welcome developments has been an expansion of our collective definition of harassment. Reading accounts of others’ experiences since the great outpouring began, I’ve vacillated between horror at the abusive situations so many women have endured and alarm at some of the interactions being considered misconduct. I’ve felt a rift with many of the younger women I know, who claim to understand exactly where to draw the line between legitimate behavior and abuse and seem to view harassment as any interaction with a man that has made them uncomfortable. …
“If a younger woman asks an older and more professionally powerful man for job advice, and that man ends up hitting on the woman, is that on its own harassment? Is it always wrong when a man is attracted to a woman at work, and acts on that attraction? If that man tries to, say, kiss the woman he is attracted to, and she’s not into it, and they leave it at that, was that forcible kissing? If a woman is not attracted to a man who comes on to her, and that man is in a position of any sort of power, is that clearly a fireable offense? I don’t think the answer to these questions is definitively yes. And yet, these tales and others like them have been stitched into the narrative of behavior that’s truly beyond the pale, and at times punished accordingly. …
“I also fear the consequences of overcorrection, of the concept of harassment ballooning to include perfectly legitimate attempts at seduction — the initial touch, the scooting closer in the booth, the drunken sloppy first kiss, the occasional bad call or failed pass. …
“A friend of mine told me about a recent date he went on with a woman he met online. After dinner, he asked her if she wanted to go back to his place. She declined. They went on several more dates, though, and eventually she told him that the reason she didn’t go back to his apartment that first night was that he didn’t ask forcefully enough. That same friend told me of a memorable line he’s seen in several Tinder profiles: “likes to be chased.” I laughed, because who doesn’t? But what my friend saw in this current moment were mixed messages: It’s good to be aggressive if your date is interested, but read the room wrong and you are done. It feels great to be chased when you are attracted to the person doing the chasing. Otherwise, the chaser might be seen as a predator. …
“A world where abusers fear crossing a criminal boundary is clearly a better world. But a world where interested parties fear crossing this new boundary we seem to be edging toward, where any power differential or wrong move is seen as predation, robs women of the ability to consent as well. Women should have power — the power to move about the world without fearing for our safety, but also the power to not be threatened by an unwanted but unmalicious move, the power to say no to a man’s advances without being that man’s victim. …
“It is completely within the norm of human exploratory romantic behavior for people to take steps — sometimes physical steps — to see if the other person reciprocates their feelings. It is OK to flirt with a person who you aren’t sure wants to be flirted with. It is OK to not be 100% great at reading signals. It is even OK to be grossed out by someone’s advances, as long as those advances stop once you make clear you aren’t into it.
“There are predators and harassers, even more of them than I thought, and there are some lines that are simple to draw, even if we haven’t been enforcing them until now. But there has to be room for a relationship like mine to happen. And the difference between John being my husband and my harasser cannot just be that it worked out. The difference between actions that can get you married and actions that can get you fired can’t simply be whether or not the person you are interested in is interested back. Careers should end when someone tries, and is rebuffed, and does not heed that rebuffing. Careers should not end just because someone tried.”
Other interesting articles
Here is a similar article: “When Does a Watershed Become a Sex Panic?” by Masha Gessen in The New Yorker. Warnings about consequences of this plus lots of hand-waving. ”
“The affirmative-consent and preponderance-of-the-evidence regimes shift the burden of proof from the accuser to the accused, eliminating the presumption of innocence. If the presumption of innocence is rooted in the idea that it is better to let ten guilty people go free than risk jailing one innocent person, then the policing of sex seems to assume that it’s better to have ten times less sex than to risk having a nonconsensual sexual experience. The problem is not just that this reduces the amount of sex people are likely to be having; it also serves to blur the boundaries between rape, nonviolent sexual coercion, and bad, fumbling, drunken sex. …
“Of course, the balance of power favors men so much that it’s more likely that the guilty will get away with it than that the innocent will suffer.” {No worries!}
This NYT article is well worth reading: “Men at Work Wonder if They Overstepped With Women, Too.” It combines confusion with the new rules with exclamation that they are obvious — and that many precautionary actions with women are discriminatory. Ms. Benedikt says that this man’s concerns were “dismissed” on her work Stack.
“Consider Owen Cunningham, a director at San Francisco’s KBM-Hogue design firm. When he looks toward the annual corporate holiday party these days, he shudders. ‘Cancel the holiday party,’ said Mr. Cunningham, 37, adding that he means just until it has been figured out how men and women should interact. He said he considered himself progressive on gender issues but was thinking more about the behavior he had seen in the past: ‘What flirting is O.K.? Was I ever taking advantage of any meager power I had? You start to wonder.'”
A historical perspective
We cannot understand what is happening without seeing this as a part of a longer evolution driven by the Left. In The War on Sex
“Antioch College’s notorious Sexual Offense Prevention Policy, which required students to request and to receive explicit affirmative verbal consent before initiating each step in sexual relations, was widely ridiculed when it was introduced in 1991. But in retrospect it would seem to have been prophetic, for versions of it have recently become law in California (2014) and in New York (2015). …
State legislators elsewhere have proposed similar measures, and many colleges and universities are already implementing them by adding them to their administrative regulations. Under these regulations, college disciplinary boards must use an ‘affirmative consent standard’ in adjudicating complaints of sexual assault.”
For a clearer and larger perspective, we should turn to Allan Bloom’s great work, Closing of the American Mind
“Now we have arrived at one of the ultimate acts in our drama, the informing and reforming of our most intimate private lives by our principles. Sex and its consequences … have finally become the theme of the national project, and here the problem of nature, always present but always repressed in the reconstruction of man demanded by freedom and equality, becomes insistent. …
“The change in sexual relations, which now provide an unending challenge to human ingenuity, came over us in two successive waves in the last two decades. The first was the sexual revolution; the second, feminism. The sexual revolution marched under the banner of freedom; feminism under that of equality. Although they went arm in arm for a while, their differences eventually put them at odds with each other, as Tocqueville said freedom and equality would always be. …
“{Feminism} ends, as do many modern movements that seek abstract justice, in forgetting nature and using force to refashion human beings to secure that justice. …Just as smoking and drinking overcame puritanical condemnation only to find themselves, after a brief moment of freedom, under equally moralistic attacks in the name not of God but of the more respectable and powerful names of health and safety, so sex had a short day in the sun before it had to be reined in to accommodate the feminist sensibility.
“In this case the project is overcoming what is variously called male dominance, machismo, phallocracy, patriarchy, etc., to which men and their female collaborators seem very attached, inasmuch as so many machines of war must be mounted against them. Male sexual passion has become sinful again because it culminates in sexism. Women are made into objects, they are raped by their husbands as well as by strangers, they are sexually harassed by professors and employers at school and at work, and their children, whom they leave in day-care centers in order to pursue their careers, are sexually abused by teachers. All these crimes must be legislated against and punished.
“What sensitive male can avoid realizing how dangerous his sexual passion is? Is there perhaps really original sin? Men had failed to read the fine print in the Emancipation Proclamation. The new interference with sexual desire is more comprehensive, more intense, more difficult to escape than the older conventions, the grip of which was so recently relaxed.
“The July 14 of the sexual revolution was really only a day between the overthrow of the Ancien Regime and the onset of the Terror. The new reign of virtue, accompanied by relentless propaganda on radio and television and in the press, has its own catechism, inducing an examination of the conscience and the inmost sentiments for traces of possessiveness, jealousy, protectivenesss — all those things men used to feel for women.
“There are, of course, a multitude of properly indignant censors equipped with loudspeakers and inquisitional tribunals.”
For More Information
Other articles about the ongoing revolution.
- “Whipping-Post Politics” by James Kunstler “The hit on Garrison Keillor by his old friend Minnesota Public Radio seemed like a new low in the whipping-post politics of the moment..”
- “Geoffrey Rush steps down as Australian Academy president amid allegations of inappropriate behavior.” Allegations about which he was never informed and so cannot defend himself.
- “Beware of Running with the Al Franken Story — Consider Where That Leads” by Douglas Murray.
- “Sexual Power Dynamics: Examining the Missing Part of the Story” by Douglas Murray.
- “Is Feminism the Answer to Sexual Harassment?” by Mona Charen.
- “Is ‘Weinsteining’ getting out of hand?” by Cathy Young.
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts by James Bowman, about society and gender issues, about feminism, about sexual assault, about rape, and especially these…
- It’s time to forcibly re-shape America to fight the campus rape epidemic! Even if it’s fake.
- The University of Virginia shows how change comes to America: through agitprop and hysteria.
- False rape accusations tell us something important about America.
- Feminist revolutionaries seized control of colleges. Now come the tribunals…
- See universities’ programs to regulate sex. The apps are amazing!
- The unexpected response to the sexual harassment crisis.
- Weaponizing claims of sexual harassment for political gain.
- Mysteries and ironies of the next new sexual revolution.
Another perspective on our changing system
Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy
“Sex is cheap. Coupled sexual activity has become more widely available than ever. Cheap sex has been made possible by two technologies that have little to do with each other – the Pill and high-quality pornography – and its distribution made more efficient by a third technological innovation, online dating. Together, they drive down the cost of real sex, and in turn slow the development of love, make fidelity more challenging, sexual malleability more common, and have even taken a toll on men’s marriageability.
“Cheap Sex takes readers on an extended tour inside the American mating market, and highlights key patterns that characterize young adults’ experience today, including the timing of first sex in relationships, overlapping partners, frustrating returns on their relational investments, and a failure to link future goals like marriage with how they navigate their current relationships. Drawing upon several large nationally-representative surveys, in-person interviews with 100 men and women, and the assertions of scholars ranging from evolutionary psychologists to gender theorists, what emerges is a story about social change, technological breakthroughs, and unintended consequences. Men and women have not fundamentally changed, but their unions have. No longer playing a supporting role in relationships, sex has emerged as a central priority in relationship development and continuation. But unravel the layers, and it is obvious that the emergence of “industrial sex” is far more a reflection of men’s interests than women’s.”
