Megan McArdle suggests that we listen to the “bad” feminists:
How has the most empowered generation of women in all of human history come to feel less control over their bodies than their grandmothers did?
Let me propose a possible answer to this, suggested by a very smart social scientist of my acquaintance: They feel this way because we no longer have any moral language for talking about sex except consent. So when men do things that they feel are wrong — such as aggressively pursuing casual sex without caring about the feelings of their female target — we’re left flailing for some way to describe this as non-consensual, even when she agreed to the sex.
Under the old code, of course, we had ample condemnatory terms for men who slept with women carelessly, without much regard for their feelings: cads and rakes, bounders and boors. Those words have now decayed into archaism. Yet it seems to me that these are just the words that young women are reaching for, when instead they label things like mutually drunken encounters and horrible one-night stands as an abuse of power, a violation of consent — which is to say, as a crime, or something close to it. To which a lot of other people incredulously respond: now being a bad lover is a crime?
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If you cast an eye back over history you’ll see that what most societies have actually come up with is the social equivalent of a cartel: if you want the sex, you’re going to first have to invest in some sort of relationship, because it’s not (readily) available any other way. Those regimes, of course, were often quite punishing to women, but then, that’s how cartels often work; when a cartel member cheats by selling below the fixed price, it is the member, not their customer, who suffers retaliation from the rest of the cartel.
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Tragically, any suggestion that women have the power to change the dynamic is labeled “victim blaming” — as if we lived in an ideal world where being the person most likely or able to change something was always neatly synonymous with being the person who caused the problem in the first place.
“as if we lived in an ideal world where being the person most likely or able to change something was always neatly synonymous with being the person who caused the problem in the first place.”
Congratulations, Ms. McArdle, you have won the Gaikokumaniakku Award for Excessively Hedged Writing!
As peculiar as the comment might be from me, McArdle may be overstating just a tad.
Some of the cases that have drawn the most press attention seem to have wildly exceeded the bounds of “mutually drunken encounters” or “horrible one night stands”.
Then again, some cases do enter this territory.
Many examples also seem to take clumsy opening moves like old-school touching of the knee to be a horrifying bodily violation, which strikes me as [non-metaphorically] insane. But then that might just be in the British version of this argument. They tend to extremes when their native sentimentalism is engaged.
“…social equivalent of a cartel: if you want the sex, you’re going to first have to invest in some sort of relationship…”
Divorce laws being what they are, that contract is broken.