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Is Feminism the Answer to Sexual Harassment?
So, the friendly morning host with the warm smile was a serial sexual predator? He had a secret lock installed on his office door operated by a button under his desk like a Bond villain? The NPR guy was a Prairie Home wrecker? Next, you’ll tell us that that nice Bill O’Reilly is a creep. Never mind about that last one, he never even seemed nice.
One popular response to the daily casualty toll of harassers is to suggest that we should all embrace the feminist explanation of male/female relations. That boils down to “believe all women” because women don’t lie about these things. It’s hard to imagine a flimsier philosophy. As the New York Times’s Bari Weiss observed, this fetishizes women as “Truth personified,” which cannot withstand a second’s scrutiny. Of course, women lie about these things. The Duke lacrosse team was falsely accused of rape, as was a University of Virginia fraternity. Remember the Scottsboro Boys? And a woman working for the ironically named Project Veritas attempted to sting the Washington Post by spinning a false tale about Roy Moore (in hopes of discrediting the Post and Moore’s truthful accusers).
Women are often victims, but they are not angels. Yes, powerful men abuse their positions to get sex. But any serious reckoning with sexual misbehavior has to take account of the women who use their sexuality to gain advantage too. Just as everyone knows men who’ve harassed, they also know women who’ve slept their way to the top.
There are other reasons that feminism provides no safe harbor for those wishing to find the moral high ground on questions of sexual propriety. Feminists damaged their credibility by rallying around Bill Clinton – a partisan taint that persists, as we’ve seen with Nancy Pelosi’s late and grudging condemnation of John Conyers. Feminists cannot pose as impartial champions of women if they’re only moved by the plight of those victimized by Republicans.
Beyond partisanship, the feminist record is unhelpful. From the inception of “second wave” feminism in the 1960s, the movement embraced sexual “liberation” as part of women’s liberation. Feminists weren’t so much upset that some men behaved like pigs as they were that women couldn’t do the same without loss of reputation. It was the “double standard” they took aim at, not sexual license itself. In fact, much second wave feminist literature was devoted to boosting the idea of women’s supposedly superior orgasmic capacity compared with men. In Sexual Politics, Kate Millet declared that “All the best scientific evidence today unmistakably tends toward the conclusion that the female possesses, biologically and inherently, a far greater capacity for sexuality than the male…”
Like the New Left they emerged out of, feminists joined hands with sexual revolutionaries in rejecting all of the old sexual mores – including marriage. “Destroy the patriarchy,” they chanted. They agreed with the Playboy Foundation (a contributor to the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund) that linking sex with morality at all was an outdated idea.
And so professional feminists actually helped midwife the loose sexual culture we have today. Arguably, this culture has permitted men to behave even more shabbily toward women than the old mores did. This may sound odd, but I think it’s true — even the sexual harassment has become grosser than it was a few decades ago. I know of a few women who faced harassment in the 1970s and 1980s (myself included), but honestly, it was practically as polite as a Victorian drawing room compared with the stories we are hearing now about Louis C.K. or Harvey Weinstein or Mark Halperin. Womanizers used to at least make an effort at seduction. Now they seem to act out repellent narratives from porn movies.
Our 50-year excursion into sexual excess may yet provoke a counter-revolution. Women are clearly finding their voices, and men (at least many men) are recognizing how dishonorable and grubby this behavior is.
To find our way out of this mess, we need to apologize to our ancestors who understood that sexuality requires careful fencing. Openly sexual talk – such as Matt Lauer and others apparently indulged — does not belong in the office. Watching porn should not be normalized. And at the risk of being called a prude, I’ll also add that we should clean up our language. Profanity defiles. Let’s rediscover aspiration.
Published in General
There are times when we need a button that says “Love” instead of “like.” This would be one of those times. Spot on, Mona. Spot on.
I generally agree, but I question the following juxtaposition in the OP:
I don’t think that the “old mores” allowed men to behave shabbily toward women. Quite the contrary. Doubtless some men departed from those old mores. I agree with Ms. Charon that things are vastly worse under the new mores, but the obvious solution is to return to the old mores.
Which seems to be Ms. Charon’s point. But then why the backhand slap at the old mores?
It might be better to just quote the old Judds song Grandpa. From 1985, by the way, when the problem was already obvious. Of course, I imagine that it was obvious to anyone with a lick of sense back in the 1960s when the whole feminist thing got started.
Now that I’ve ranted, it does occur to me that maybe Ms. Charon is writing to a different audience, and trying to soften her tone for Left-leaning readers. It is true that shoving someone’s nose into a plate full of crow is not likely to be a successful method of persuasion.
With all due respect, Arizona Patriot, I think the “old mores” Mona is talking about–at least as I understood it–are those of the “Mad Men/early Playboy” era of the mid 60’s, rather than the older chivalrous mores. Once women had birth control pills and easy abortion available in the mid 70s, they could “catch up” with the way men were behaving rather than being a civilizing influence. They also no longer had fear of pregnancy as either an excuse (if they weren’t ready for sex) or to help keep the men in line. Sad downward spiral. And now look where we are.
The answer is “No”, and that was obvious during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. And by saying “Clinton”, I mean Hillary, not Bill.
Face it – everyone knew Bill Clinton was a horndog. However, the real Blue-Dress scandal was how Hillary buried feminism by putting politics ahead of principle (I have an aside about this later). Hillary stood by her man, and even blamed the “Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy” for it. Hillary’s behavior (backed up by mainstream feminism) ensured sexual predators had cover as long as they supported leftists causes. Looking at the right, there may have been that going on too (think O’Reilly).
The answer to sexual harassment in the workplace has always been for the woman to immediately come forward with the charge. However, I sense we’ve gotten to the point where professional womens’ careers are so valuable, they’ll put up with it. A lady lawyer friend of mine told me about this term, “You can’t rest on your rights.” It had to do with lawsuits filed the day a statute of limitations ran out, but her point was an accuser’s case was drastically weakened the longer she waited to bring it forward. Does that apply here? I think it does, but it doesn’t excuse the behavior of the men. However, these women need to be held accountable. If Weinstein’s first victim had come forward back then, how many actresses would have been spared the horror of being sexually violated, just for an Oscar-winning role? Or even a starting job? Who knows . . .
Modern feminism is at best dead – at worst, a cancer on women. I’m with Christina Hoff Sommers and her book Freedom Feminism. My take is it’s about what feminism was, and what it should really be. I haven’t read it in a while, so I may be confusing it with some other books I’ve read. Just buy it and read . . .
Bottom line? Pardon my language, but modern feminism sucks. May it die the death it so richly deserves.
My aside: We really must make sure Roy Moore gets into the Senate. My position is that two potential Supreme Court nominations hang in the balance. If you really want to return to the rule of law, then you have to put this (potentially) unsavory person in office.
I think Mona ignores one of the fundamental edicts of feminism, Andrea Dworkin’s claim that “all sex is rape.”
Now that we’ve gotten post-modern enough for college students to think that speech is violence, it’s no stretch for feminism to include “the male gaze” as one degree of rape insubstantially different from most others. As even consensual sex, because of its penetrative nature, is a transgression against womanhood, what the sexual revolution really did was free humans to pursue the natural state of humankind: men raping women in volume, fulfilling feminism’s basic claim, and one which only emasculating men can cure.
Wow, this topic is a minefield: bad men, bad women, men just now recognizing how dishonorable and grubby some men’s behavior is, second wave feminists responsible for some portion of the problem…what will we all do?
Maybe the same thing we do with all bad behavior? Call it out, own your part, change your behavior? That’s what responsible adults do, but I only hear people informing others of what they ought to do. You know, the “here’s some New Years resolutions, white guys” gang, or the folks who want to tell others how to run their day-to-day lives via a government solution crafted by people who need hired help to carry out their day-to-day lives. No mea culpa, no resolve for changing behavior.
Perhaps the problem is we’re hearing mostly from people who aren’t responsible adults. You know, the people who issue non-apologetic apologies, apologists for green energy who are obviously green with envy or the people who are mostly concerned with the number of “likes” they get in the first hour after they retweet another’s words.
It isn’t just about one gender or one group or one -ism. It’s just that we have built a drama queen society. Today’s drama is sexual harassment. Yesterday’s was worrying about which restroom I could use. And before that we revisited our old favorite, “who gets to kill an unborn baby?”
We keep the cycle going because we all know drama queens and we know they don’t discuss sin, except for the sin of someone else. You’re right Mona, you’re a prude. A wonderful, valuable prude because profanity does defile and aspiration matters.
I would love to see a bipartisan all female congresswomen sponsor a bill requiring the disclosure of all the congressmen that have used the slush fund to payoff their victims. Who would dare vote against that except the guilty. Either way we would know their names.
I must respectfully disagree with Mona. I don’t think mores have very much to do with sexual abuse, and I don’t think that the amount of sexual abuse has changed very much from the first half of the Twentieth Century to today. It has been my experience that women have always wanted to be treated with respect, and that most men try hard to do just that. The small percentage of men who do not treat women that way seem to have remarkably inflated egos, which may or may not be a cover for low self-esteem. Or they have something even more serious wrong with them.
Some things have changed. In from the late 60’s into the mid-80’s women were far more open to consensual sex than they had been before (or after, once AIDS came along). And as the risk of sexual harassment complaints and lawsuits became known, men have generally been more cautious of making attempts at work place romances. But the changing mores have never given any man a reason to think he was free to grope women, pursue underage girls, or engage in exhibitionism of his “junk.”
Heh.
Well said. Thank you.
Re: comment 8
As a 60 year old woman, I have reason to think that the sexual revolution caused men in the 1970’s to be a lot more sexual with and around young, and even under aged, women than they would have been in earlier decades.
That quickly changed back, somewhat. Certainly, by the mid 1980’s, it was again seen as something more wrong than just illegal for, say, a thirty year old man to hop in the sack with a fifteen year old girl. But the 1970’s were a very ugly time for young women.
There’s always a lot going on. Humans abuse power and the bigger the pay off the greater the leverage people in power have. In our digital economy of infinite economies of scale, this includes all media, entertainment, and content including sports. In our centralized nanny administrative state the pay off to key political positions is also of a different magnitude. Politicians can expect to be rewarded in ways only the deeply corrupt used to reach. The pay off in power, prestige and income has been a qualitative change as well as quantitative. Moreover, the sixties generation changed everything, their shear numbers and the war, their doting parents turned them into peer dominated, self absorbed poorly educated, flabby European relativists, nihilists, neo marxist romantics that, again because of their numbers and impact on marketing, swept, the culture. These post modern notions went from a minority of intellectuals to main stream culture. And, of course, the pill gave this new generation lower risk, always central, outlet for their prolonged adolescents. The pre sixties was rooted in traditions and inherited mores and some connections with western literature philosophy and history. Our leaders, whether hypocrites or not, our films and culture whether true to the values or not shaped the broader culture who accepted those traditions. When the avant guard became everybody, in stead of a tiny minority of boozing BS spouting, artists or would be artists or poets and writers our middle class turned on itself and began eating it’s own innards.
Caryn, I think that you’re incorrect. Here’s a longer quote from the OP, to put the “old mores” statement in context:
I submit that this makes it clear that Ms. Charon was referring to traditional morality — what you properly call the “chivalrous mores” — as the “old mores.” Your suggestion that she was using the term “old mores” to refer to those of “the Mad Men/early Playboy ear” is contradicted by her own reference tying the feminists to the Playboy Foundation just two sentences earlier.
Thus, it is clear that she was denigrating the “chivalrous mores” when she stated that the new mores have “permitted men to behave even more shabbily toward women than the old mores did.”
I think that you and I, and Ms. Charon, are all on the same side in this argument. My point was that her backhand slap at the old, chivalrous mores seemed out of place in her post.
My mother gave birth to 3 boys and three girls. Mom’s oft repeated admonition to my sisters was to recall that only half of the jerks — and pigs — in the world are men. We boys were made to listen.
And keep our hands to ourselves.
I suspect that Ms. Charon’s contradiction is a symptom of something deeper. My thinking on this topic is still developing, and perhaps deserves a full post, if I figure out how to articulate it properly. I’m going try to explain my early speculations, in the hope of some useful feedback.
The “old mores” contemplated wives submitting to their husbands. I can see how this would be a problem for the ladies. They also contemplated husbands displaying selfless, self-sacrificial love toward their wives, explicitly putting forth Jesus on the Cross as our example. I’m not a good enough man to follow that example consistently. He’s a really hard act to follow.
I agree with Ms. Charon that the feminists, by joining hands with the sexual revolutionaries, wanted to throw out all of the old, chivalrous mores. I agree that this has led to bad results.
I may be reading too much into it, but my sense is that Ms. Charon wants to keep some of the old, chivalrous mores, but throw out part of it. Specifically, she may want to keep the marriage part, and probably wants to keep the husband’s self-sacrificial duty part. But she may want to jettison the wifely submission part. I genuinely don’t know whether this is possible. I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit lately.
There’s something archetypal going on here, with the husband acting out the role of Christ as the ultimate authority figure who is worthy of that position because of his genuine self-sacrificial love (agape, in the Greek), and the wife acting out our difficult duty of submission to His authority. I don’t think that you have to be a Christian believer to consider this analogy. Think of it as a myth or archetype, providing an example for us to follow. In this view, Christ’s authority represents the ideal moral code, along with the wisdom and integrity to put it into practice.
In the Christian story, Christ also models both humility and submission. He demonstrates humility by washing the feet of his disciples. He demonstrates submission by obedience to the plan of God the Father, though it requires Christ’s own unjust and horrific death. In this part of the story, it is God the Father representing the ideal moral code. After His death and resurrection, Christ is exalted (or, more accurately, re-exalted) to the Godhead.
This is expressed by the statement that Christ is simultaneously the path that we must follow (“the way”), and the dedication to remain on that path (“the truth”), and the destination (“the life”).
I have a frustrating sense of having poorly articulated a deep truth hovering just beyond my understanding. Or maybe I’m just going a bit crazy. I’d appreciate any wisdom that the Ricochetti might have to offer in response.
RE: #15
@Arizona Patriot, I am not arrogant enough to claim wisdom. A few thoughts, but before that, a tip o’ the hat for the return to zeroth principles. Unfortunately, the unpleasantness in the Garden inserted a chasm between the biological and the spiritual that none can bridge without a serious desire to do so. (And Faith.) But the spiritual somehow intrudes unbidden; absent a Natural Law, why shouldn’t powerful men have their way with subordinate (or any other weaker) women, or at least have access to a series of trophy wives? But back to reality (or as real as this thread may be):
1. No matter what they teach you in Sexual Harassment 101, it won’t be a transgression if the aggressor is one of the Popular Kids and the aggressee is in any sense a wannabee.
2. It may become a transgression after the fact if the aggressee does not perceive having received expected value, or simply has second thoughts, or merely sobers up.
3. There is no sanction against the previously-noted transition.
4. There is no meaningful downside to a wholly false accusation.
Women have, for at least several hundred years, at least under what was once called Western Civilization, the ultimate Choice; that of saying No. (Really — within my lifetime, rape was a capital crime in many states. If that doesn’t enforce No, nothing does.) If violation of that choice is not made known immediately and credibly, it certainly seems that a choice has been made. And I don’t see what feminism has to do with it.
Re: comments 15 and 16
Arizona Patriot and YouCan’tMeanThat,
For some reason, your comments remind me of something short I read by Drew Ryun, at something called the maven.net. The title is “By What Standard?”.
I worry that this will detract from my more important point (#15 above), but I’ve now looked into the Matt Lauer story briefly, and I have a confession. I’m feeling something like a strange combination of exasperation and schaudenfreude.
It seems to me that the feminists, and the Left in general, are trying simultaneously to believe three things:
I think that this is a manifest contradiction.
My strange feeling is this. I have a sense of schaudenfreude at the feminists suffering the consequences of their wrong-headed and contradictory ideas. But it’s a weird sense, because “the feminists” are not the actual victims of these cads. I take no joy in the plight of the poor gals who were the victims of Lauer, Weinstein, Clinton, or other miscreants. Thus the sense of exasperation.
The feminist conundrum reminds me of two similar contradictions which I found more amusing (credit to Mark Steyn for at least one, maybe both):
When I think of the Sexual Revolution, followed by feminism, followed by sex seperated from biology for the invention of gender identity, I’m reminded of my grandmother saying that we eventually have to bolster with lies that are even more ridiculous the lies we tell ourselves.
I posted in the Ricochet film Society last week about an obscure western movie named “Westward the Women.” It was made in 1951 and set 100 years earlier. This was arguably a “feminist” movie before what we now think of “feminism” took hold. It’s about 140 women who wagon-train halfway across the country, with few men to help them, for the promise of a new life with husbands whom they have never met.
One of the most powerful aspects of this small-but-great movie was its depiction of marriage/family as not only virtues, but goals worth sacrificing for, even risking the ultimate sacrifice. Proving several men wrong, the women show strength, endurance, and self-reliance on their journey, demonstrating themselves not only equals of but even superior to some of the men who started out with them. There is no question, in this old movie, that these women were self-possessed people of great integrity. Their goal may sound absurdly regressive today, but only because we now, thanks to feminism, look at these issues in a fractured way, with each component debated on its individual merits and not how it contributes to the larger whole of the strength of family and how that lends strength to society.
From a micro perspective, for instance, we (in this very thread) categorically deride the notion that women should submit to their husbands in any way. Marital rape, right? Bad! That ignores the purpose of that command, which isn’t that women should be sex toilets for the husbands to use whenever and without respect, but to stress to women the importance of keeping the marriage bond strong by eliminating one powerful cause of discontent. This is just one section of the foundation of a healthy family, which used to be something worth striving for — and sacrificing for. Certainly, there are degrees in which a sacrifice can turn from something positive to some horrible, and we shouldn’t ignore those distinctions from either end.
Post-whatever feminism is not about men and women together, or women and children together, it’s about women versus those antagonizing forces, it’s about individual aspiration and achievement, it’s about sacrificing the values of family and the future for one’s own personal goals. It’s the foundation of “The Me Generation.” That’s what has been lost in its wake.
Surely, many men took women’s place in that “old-fashioned” paradigm for granted too many times, and failed to pay them the respect they deserved, and of course, some men used their physical power to treat women cruelly. Maybe second-wave feminism is the price we deserve to pay for allowing that to happen for so long, but it’s clearly degraded relationships between men and women more than did the old ways, making these sentiments, from a speech early in the movie, sound hopelessly outdated, despite how much we need them right now:
Re: comment # 20
I vaguely remember that movie on television when I was a kid. (Corny, wasn’t it? Though, from what I just read on Wikipedia, the plot seems grimly realistic. I’d like to see it again.) The beat “poets”, people like Frank Sanatra, and then Hugh-Hefner mentality, reflected and promoted to men the idea that women like that, and values like those, were pure poison.
AP, I just don’t understand the the conflict that is supposed to exist between 1/2 and 3. Some women are strong and independent. I like such women. My wife is one of them. And if women are open to consensual pre-marital sexual relationships, is that supposed to increase the number of incidents where powerful men try to use their positions to coerce sex out of unwilling women? If anything, I would think it would be the other way around. But, then again, the men who do this kind of thing are really sick, so I doubt that it makes very much difference to them one way or the other.
Personally, I think pre-marital sex is unobjectionable. I don’t think that you’re a contemptible prude if you object, but I do think you’re a busybody. Why is it any of your business?