Whither, liberal sexual mores?

It's been a tough year for older men who like to charm and/or pressure younger women out of their pants. There have been a lot of liberal men included in the purge. For the most part, this cleansing is something to grimly celebrate. We liberals claim we're the ideology that ought to appeal naturally to women, so it won't do for women to be unsafe among our most powerful men. Hopefully, we do better from here on out.

The effect on the brand

I'd guess a lot of people joined Team Liberal because it seemed like the cool place to be. I hang out now and again for gin fizzes and cigars with two friends who are both a good deal more conservative politically and culturally than I am. The two of them both concede, though, that when it comes to music, writing, art, and almost anything involving style, Team L has always been and will always be cooler. We've been that way about sex, too. We were the side that didn't judge you for what society told you was sexual deviance. We told people to quit being prudish, to have a more European view of sex, to accept that sex was just part of life, and a good part. All this Republican bluster over a President who had sloppy sex with an intern was just Puritan posturing, we said.

Come to the dark side, we said. We have orgies.

While Team L isn't about to start telling you that you've got to accept a lifetime of hetero-normative, missionary position sex for the purposes of procreation only, we do seem to be deciding to tone down the party a bit. One wonders if we can continue to be a party people want to be a part of under those conditions. Have people only been pretending to like us for the sex?

This is part of the larger process of figuring out what we're about after 70 years

All liberal systems begin by repudiating something. The current liberal consensus--or what remains of it--has its direct origins in the moments after the two World Wars. Meta-narratives of God and country had led us to the brink of destruction, we felt, and we had to deconstruct those. We were pretty good at deconstruction. Society, it seems, actually did kind of have a feeling something was wrong and needed to change, so we made headway. What we'd been told was moral no longer felt like it had authority. It didn't hurt that all the cool kids were on board with Team L. If the Hollywood stars didn't convince you to get on board, Jimi Hendrix's guitar would.

But time ground on, and eventually the revolution became something of a parody of itself. Moreover, having ripped down systems that needed to be ripped down, we didn't always have something great to offer in their place. We had mottoes, versions of liberty, equality, fraternity, but didn't understand how to incarnate them into policy. We also failed to understand that there is no utopia, and every system is merely a choice about which kinds of problems you want to have.

With sex, Team L is right that it's better to leave sexual conduct up to people to decide. A society that rigidly enforces sexual conduct wastes resources punishing people for acts that typically do not harm those involved. That is enough to offset any advantages such a system brings. Such a system also engenders psychological pathology by stifling natural desires.

But the downside of sexual liberty is that it turns out people can be kind of pervy, and don't always confine their perversions to those that another person won't find offensive. We try to moderate this by setting up rules, but lighter rules than a Puritan system. Basically, we outlaw only actions where one person's actions interfere with the freedom of another, such as rape, be it statutory, aggravated, date, or other. We also include incest, because we feel the danger to society outweighs the right to individual choice.

But sexual harassment has been a hard thing for Team L to deal with.We had hoped, back in our foolish days of young idealism, that people would work it out for themselves. We didn't want to dictate what you could or couldn't do, and we felt it was cool to be okay with gray areas. Now, we've come to find out that there were some advantages to that stifling old system where every man knew how to tip your hat to a lady and what it meant to be "fresh." It wasn't a lot of fun, but there also wasn't confusion that lead to those awful he said/she said kinds of situations where you have to ask questions like "how many signs of consent equal consent?"

Some colleges have been pushing this kind of unambiguous signaling, teaching students that in order for sex to be safely consensual, every touch needs a positive verbal affirmation. No alcohol can be involved in sexual intercourse. How fun. To say nothing of the precipitous crash in the world's human population if sex never happened after drinking again. 

Can we have our cake and eat it too?

Or more to the point, can we have our drunk frat parties without girls raped behind couches? Can we enjoy flirting and hooking up and making mistakes in dating as young people (or middle-aged or old people) without a girl having to ask herself whether last night was something she ought to report or just a night of bad sex? If we can't keep the fun, will Team L decline, as we become seen as the killjoy defenders of purity?

The short stories "Cat Person," which I recently blogged about, and "Gender Studies," from the 2017 Best American Short Stories, were built around the awful ambiguity built into dating in our culture. It's especially worse for women deemed attractive by our standards, who are taught that it's "bitchy" to be too direct about rejecting a man. This puts a lot of pressure on those women to get their point across in a way that makes their feelings clear but also saves the feelings of the man, especially with a man who does not seem to get the point.

Can we come up with a new rules of sex that allows us to keep the fun--fun that includes the possibility of making poor choices--but also prevents truly unwanted behavior? My friend Chris Hoffman has humorously suggested that the only way to get rid of the unwanted male gaze is to remove the male gaze altogether.

Some questions

To keep a balance between fun and safety, we're going to have to answer some questions I don't know we're equipped to answer. Like:

-I've seen it suggested that the entire problem with the Weinstein case was not the letchery, but the power. Once women have more power, this sort of thing will become less common. Fair enough, but I have some follow on questions. Are we ready to say that men should never attempt to date/hook-up with women who work for them? How directly must those women work for him for this prohibition to be in effect? May women date men they are in charge of? And if we prohibit all of these interactions, how do we deal with the fact that we thereby make that forbidden fruit unspeakably attractive?

Andy (on his girlfriend being in the Coast Guard): "She's probably so lonely with only two other women to talk to in her whole 40-person unit." 
Haley: "So you're saying it's just your girlfriend and 36 super in-shape dudes?" 
Andy: "Thirty-seven, and it's not what you think. The Coast Guard seriously frowns upon fraternizing. It's forbidden." 
Haley: "That doesn't make it hot."

-If we're going to nudge in the direction of saying you can't just have no standards, then what are the standards we're going to try to keep? Is adultery an important political matter again?  How about the number of sexual partners a man has? A woman? Is it scandalous for a man simply to be with someone much younger? Or are we saying anything is fine as long as it's consensual and between adults? What does that mean if the female secretary of the older male boss swears it's consensual?

-How dogmatic are we willing to get in order to avoid ambiguity or even the chance that someone will be the victim of unwelcome advances? At what point does that make us just an alternate version of social conservatives?

-What allowances do we make for transgressiveness? Being transgressive is what made us liberals in the first place. How rigid are we going to be with the new rules?

A word about (and for) men

I feel like if I even raise the issue that it's hard to know how to act as a man, I risk being attacked. Men don't face sexual violence like women do! Men have nearly all the power! And don't tell me it's hard to know how to act. How hard is it to not rape women and treat them with respect?

Well, if "Cat Person" and "Gender Studies" and many men I know can be believed, it is hard to know when you are treating a woman with so much respect, you're at a competitive disadvantage with other men. Whether there's any truth to it or not, men feel that women sometimes reject the nice guy for the bad boy. And there's probably some evolutionary reason to back up the thought that a woman would be attracted to a transgressive male. Transgressiveness shows that you have your own authority. It shows that you're an Alpha, that you call the shots.

Not that any woman wants Stanley Kowalski, but it is possible that there is an attractiveness in a man who shows a certain devil-may-care attitude. Even a sense of humor is somewhat subversive. So any rules we set up for the new sexual way to be are going to immediately be subverted by men looking for a competitive advantage.

What happened to my friend as an illustration of our confusing times

I know a woman in her twenties at work. I think of her as something between a younger sister or a daughter. She's not much older than my daughter. She coaches field hockey at a local high school. The other day, a father of one of her students hit her up on Facebook to ask if she was single, because, he said, "You're cute." He's 15 years older than her and has three kids.

Sigh. Any defense of men I wanted to make goes out the window with anecdotes like this one. My friend did great. She said that her dating status wasn't a topic of discussion, that her role was to be a coach. Good for her.

I take away a few lessons from that encounter:

-Men try for things they have no business trying for. It IS harder to be a woman than a man in the dating world. You have to constantly turn down aggressive and highly motivated salesmen. It's like life is a mall full of Russian kiosk workers.

-I bet that guy did not appreciate her directness, as much as guys always say they want candor and for a woman not to play with them. He probably thought, "What a bitch." So she can't win.

-It might be awkward at the next team practice, an awkwardness she did nothing to cause. Now, a part of her life she enjoys may become less enjoyable.

-There is no set of rules you can come up with that will preserve the possibility for fun and exploration that can also adequately protect women from the effects of the jerk.

-Then again, since I know nothing about that guy, was just asking so wrong? He's not her boss, he's just older than her. Dating his daughter's coach doesn't strike me as inherently wrong. He's divorced, I assume. Maybe he's lonely and really thought he had a chance. Does the dynamic change if he's really good looking? If he's doing well in life? If his wife left him and the kids because she's selfish and terrible?

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This was a low-stakes example. It wasn't McKayla Maroney getting groped by a team doctor. But it's instructive because of its everyday-ness. There is a spectrum of behavior when it comes to sex that ranges from merely unwanted and rude but also allowable to unwanted, illegal, and morally repugnant. In the middle is an area where liberals are going to be have to careful about prescribing right action. In general, when in doubt, liberals have erred on the side of personal liberty. Right now, we are at a moment when, in the completely legitimate service of protecting the powerless, we risk becoming who we are not and also demonizing men more than is reasonable. We should seek to increase empathy of those in power. We should also be judicious about telling people how they must act.

My cynical side wonders if we aren't making such an overdue fuss about how men treat women now because the guy we hate the most is vulnerable to accusations of treating women badly, so we need to make it seem like it's the most important virtue on Earth to protect women from unwanted behavior. This isn't good for us in the long term, and is likely to bite us in the ass when some lecherous liberal--and there are many of us, which is partly how we got to be liberals to start with--comes to power again.