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It seems not to matter how many attempts are made to lay to rest the silly idea that all men and all women are totally alike in their thoughts and deeds, their words and needs. No matter how many news articles make it clear that there is a total disconnect between how men and women think about sex and about the other gender, our impervious leftists and feminists continue to deny reality and behave as if both genders are identical, interchangeable and mutable in that any person can decide to be some other gender merely by declaring it to be so.
As we discussed in the first article in this series, this utterly wrongheaded worldview has metastasized with the #MeToo movement into a situation where any man's career can be destroyed by an accusation of sexual impropriety regardless of its truth. So many men have been replaced by formerly-subordinate women that men are finding it prudent to have nothing at all to do with women in professional or college settings.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that women do not understand masculine reproductive drives; men are just as clueless about women's dating and mating desires. Being absorbed with combat, conquest, and power, however, men have no doubts at all about a woman's willingness to use just about any weapon in her arsenal to get ahead at work. Time's March 12 issue heralded women rising in the movie business since the #MeToo movement pushed so many men out. The cover shrieked, "Lights. Camera. Power. How women are redirecting Hollywood ... and America." A few weeks earlier, Time magazine's title editor wrote:
Women Are Getting Male Harassers' Jobs. But Don't Call it a Coup [emphasis added]
The woman who wrote the article listed men who were replaced by women after being fired because of accusations of sexual harassment, none of whom have been convicted in court:
On day two of the New Year, Hoda Kotb officially became a co-host of NBC's Today show, taking the seat vacated by Matt Lauer, who was let go after allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct
TIME has counted more than 100 high-profile men (and one woman) called out for sexual misconduct since the first Harvey Weinstein story broke, in October. Many of those guys lost their jobs. And now women are being hired to do some of them. Christiane Amanpour is hosting in Charlie Rose's old spot. Alex Wagner will take Mark Halperin's place on Showtime's politics show The Circus. Robin Wright became House of Cards' leading star after Kevin Spacey got the ax. Top editors at National Public Radio and the Paris Review are now women. Tina Smith has just filled Al Franken's Minnesota Senate seat. On it goes, and likely will keep going. [emphasis added]
Time claims that these promotions went to super-qualified women whom the evil patriarchy blocked for years from taking their rightful places at the top of the heap. On the other hand, assuming that there's truth in the accusations that the men above them "took advantage" of their gender, cynics may suspect that these women got as high as they did in return for such favors. Time admitted that their qualifications might be in doubt, but for a different reason:
Kotb, Amanpour and their incidental sisterhood are going to be under considerable pressure to perform, since there will be some suspicion that they got the jobs in the name of overcorrection, not talent.
These stories have become sufficiently numerous and widely publicized to lead to an unavoidable conclusion: Men who associate closely with women put their careers at risk. The Times pointed out that even though Mr. Khan had been acquitted of criminal rape, Yale's investigation of the matter had been delayed pending the trial. Now that it was over, their misconduct panel could still throw him out of Yale:
Had the case gone before Yale's own internal panel, the outcome might have been different. The panel, the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct, uses a "preponderance of the evidence" standard in determining responsibility, and its members are trained in a notion of consent where only "yes means yes."
The accuser seems to have admitted that she'd consented, and the jury seemed to feel that way too, but her argument of being too drunk for her consent to have actually meant "yes" may get a more sympathetic hearing elsewhere. Despite the acquittal, the university could still declare that Mr. Khan's behavior was unacceptable to the college:
Alexandra Brodsky, a lawyer at the National Women's Law Center who graduated from Yale College and Yale Law School, said, "Schools have adopted consent as an educational tool, but that sometimes means we end up using words that mean different things in different contexts."
"There are many forms of violence that would be condemned on campus, where a prosecutor would have trouble getting a jury to convict," she added.
Even if Yale decides to let Mr. Khan graduate, what's the first
thing any prospective employer will see when he Googles "Saifullah Khan
Yale?" One hopes Mr. Khan has made lots of good friends at
college whose parents are CEOs, otherwise he'll have a hard time paying
back his college loans even if he is a free man with no felony
conviction to his name.
A coed can destroy a classmate or professor with an accusation, and the Time article shows that women can destroy men above them to advance their careers in the same way. Some women want very much to climb the corporate ladder in competition with men. Now that women have found a nuclear weapon of their very own, they're unlikely to give it up, and there's essentially no way for a man to defend himself against such accusations if he's known to have ever associated with her in any way. Indeed, Time didn't bother to discuss the accusations against the terminated men, regarding their guilt as self-evident truth.
The New York Times described the obvious and logical steps men are taking to defend themselves:
In Silicon Valley, some male investors have declined one-on-one meetings with women, or rescheduled them from restaurants to conference rooms. On Wall Street, certain senior men have tried to avoid closed-door meetings with junior women. And in TV news, some male executives have scrupulously minded their words in conversations with female talent.
... they worry that one accusation, or misunderstood comment, could end their careers.
The Times points out that building relationships with higher-ups in the hierarchy is the main determinant of who gets promoted and who doesn't. Underlings need sponsors who'll plead their cause when promotions are discussed, but sponsors "have to spend some capital and take a risk on the up-and-coming person, and you simply don't do that unless you know them and trust them."
Sensible men are starting to follow the "Pence rule," named after our Vice President's longstanding personal practices: don't spend any time one-on-one with women, for fear of being destroyed. The screaming from the media about how unfair this rule is misses the point: its purpose is not to protect women from predatory men, it's to protect innocent men from false accusations that cannot be disproved and which destroy lives.
Is every private meeting between two people of opposing genders going to automatically result in a sexual encounter? Of course not! The problem is that, since the truth cannot be proven after the fact and since our society seems to have decided that actual proof is no longer necessary before condemning a man as a predator, there is no other effective defense than to make it physically impossible for anything untoward to have ever taken place.
The problem, as the horrified journalists point out, is that this new reticence will make it even harder for women who want careers to climb the corporate ladder. They didn't notice that it won't help women find husbands either, but that's equally if not more true.
Such high-stakes career-killing turmoil at colleges and in offices, which are the prime locations where men and women find each other, makes it harder for singles to arrive at mutually satisfactory ways of life as couples. Despite feminists' shrill claims that all sex is rape and that women have no need for men, some women sincerely desire to associate with men and others want to belong to one and only one man.
On 25 September 1996, an Associated Press story discussed the autobiography of legendary sex symbol and courtesan Brigitte Bardot. She was thought to be one of the most desirable women in the world, yet she suffered three failed marriages and many bitter love affairs. How did she feel when one man after another dealt her out of his life? How could she believe herself to be an attractive woman when so many men left her?
Bardot said: I had a visceral need to be loved, to be desired, to belong body and soul to the man whom I admire, whom I love, whom I respect. [emphasis added]
Ms. Bardot was smart enough to know that she wanted to admire and respect a man in addition to loving him and belonging to him. She knew that her happiness needed far more from a man than sex; she wanted a man who acted honorably enough for her to respect and admire him so that she would enjoy belonging to him.
Her problem was that men are very possessive, for very strong evolutionary reasons - if a man wasn't possessive, if he didn't keep other men away from his woman, he'd raise other men's children and be bred out of the gene pool. Only possessive men passed on their genes.
Happily for her bank account but unhappily for her personal relationships, Ms. Bardot had given so much of herself to so many men through her acting and doing what she had to do to advance her career in movies that no man could see her as his special, exclusive treasure - because she wasn't, and couldn't be, any man's exclusive treasure anymore.
She didn't understand supply and demand. Nobody had told her
that if she scattered her kisses and other affections like snowflakes
the length and breadth of the land, no man would value her enough to
spend the rest of his life exclusively with her. Plenty of men
showed that
they were happy to spend some enjoyable months or years, but that's a
far cry from the "forever" that most women in general, and Ms. Bardot
in particular, really want.
That's sad. Although men desire sex strongly enough to go to war to get it as the Economist reported, a woman has value far beyond sex. Having a woman love, respect, and admire him enough to help him in his endeavors is as great a benefit and joy for a man as being loved, appreciated, and desired is for a women. The saying, "Behind every successful man, there's a woman" goes back a long way.
Yet modern times have made the pursuit of women much more fraught with risk, and mutually destructive, than ever before. How are couples supposed to find mutual happiness together?
As with most things in life, it's easier on the men. If it comes down to it, men can avoid risk by having sex only with paid professionals who can be found anywhere. For most men, that may not be ideal, but it's at least marginally tolerable.
But this approach won't help them settle into the
long-term relationships which children need so badly, and a society
without children growing up to be productive adults soon ceases to be a
society at all. What's more, since most women would prefer not to
be paid sex professionals, yet want a man in their life on a
non-transactional basis, how can rightly skittish men be persuaded that
this woman won't turn around
and destroy their lives tomorrow with false accusations?
Whether she
wants a successful career, marriage, or both, a woman is going to have
to give some sort of assurance that a man can relate to her or pursue
her without having his career and life destroyed. Otherwise, men
will simply move on with life without permanent associations with
women, leaving women... well, not where they wish to be.
Many of the #MeToo accounts describe women being somewhat traumatized by the man's sexual demands even if they'd fled without succumbing. If merely being pushed to have sex she doesn't want can upset a women, the claim that women are strong enough to defend themselves through "Just say 'No!" is another feminist falsehood.
Indeed, both
Pajamas Media and Vox
described women who are so reluctant to make a
man unhappy that they gave in to a man's pressure for sex even though
they didn't want it at all. This is a profoundly unfortunate
situation, but is entirely outside the realm of any judicial
intervention since we can't read people's minds. Yet if men and
women are at war, as the feminists seem to have successfully caused
them to be, this collateral damage is only to be expected.
In order to work out an armistice in the modern war between the sexes, women are going to have to recognize that the feminist proclamation of women's freedom to enjoy commitment-free, recreational sex is simply not true of most women, and find a way to explain this calmly, tactfully, but implacably. Getting off the pill so that she can't have sex just any old time would at least give some credibility to her assertion that she wants more from a man than sex, particularly if she declares her desire to be a man's long-term treasure.
By destroying the historical cultural norms and mores without providing any effective new ones that actually work in the real world with most people, feminists have also created a serious gap in the legal system. Once upon a time, marriage was recognized as constituting a written, witnessed, semi-permanent granting of consent.
Today, men observe that women seem to feel free to redefine sex as rape even if he heard "Yes!" at the time. Not even a marriage license is effective proof of consent; the concept of "spousal rape" is being recognized in more and more states. How does a man legally protect himself against a woman's right to change her mind?
It sounds like we have to go back to the Victorian custom of women being protected from predatory men by their families. In medieval times, a woman who fancied a young man would give him her token. He would go off and do something spectacular and dangerous to prove his devotion to her. Only after "slaying a dragon" on her behalf would he be permitted to court and marry her.
Fathers were responsible for protecting their daughters. When vigilance failed, there was always the 'ol shotgun to persuade the bounder to "make a good girl out of her."
It's true that back before no-fault divorce, men sometimes gave their wives a hard time, but #MeToo suggests that men still give women a hard time. By claiming that sex was the only thing that interested a man and that women were free to enjoy recreational sex, feminists gave men an excuse to pursue women with no expectation of taking responsibility for any relationship at all, as if they needed such an excuse.
Since marriage licenses aren't taken seriously any more, sensible men will insist on prenuptial agreements that can be legally enforced as marriage agreements were once enforced.
It will be ironic indeed if feminist efforts to "liberate" women from men led to such great unhappiness for both genders that we have to go back to the societal customs of generations gone by, with detailed contractual agreements specifying sexual services authorized to be demanded and provided in the course of the relationship.
Kind of takes the romance out of things, doesn't it? Have you hugged a feminist today? Better not....