Why the Well-Being of Women Requires Men to Keep it to Themselves: About “Consent”

One might frame the question this way: Do women have the right to be spared having to deal with men’s sexual feelings about them?

I’m going to address that question in a historical perspective, and in the perspective of the evolutionary process that crafted us.

Yes women have that right — particularly at this stage in the history of human civilization.

But it also must be recognized that the current rules do demand something of men that goes against their inborn nature.

The answer is yes because throughout the history of human civilization, men have asserted a great many rights that have hurt women profoundly. And one of those has been the right to impose their sexual thoughts and feelings and urges upon women.

Cultures through history have given men the right to force women to deal with them in sexual terms — whether they want to or not. The spectrum runs from wolf whistles at sexually attractive females, through forced kisses, through sexual harassment in the workplace, to rape.

Ours as well: the movies from the 1940s and 1950s provide abundant evidence that American society approved a man compelling a woman to deal with his sexuality, uninvited.

From the “Me, Too!” movement, we’ve learned just how ubiquitous this imposition of male sexuality without consent has been in our own society, and how injuriously. A surprising number of sexual intrusions involving force.

We learned how traumatic so many of these unwelcome sexual encounters were. Even to the point of lives being forever thrown off course. (E. Jean Carroll’s never recovering – in terms of her own sexuality – from the traumatic effects of Donald Trump’s sexual assault against her is also illustrative of how serious a matter this is.)

(A monster like Harvey Weinstein was just an extreme example of a widespread male pattern.)

But these monstrous forms of male sexual assertion represent perversions of a natural inclination of the human male.  The evolutionary evidence – plus the pretty universal interest, among males, in pornography – shows pretty clearly that it is part of inborn male human nature to have sexual feelings aroused by the sight of an attractive female.

Over the eons, it has been useful for males in the evolutionary game – where the object of the game is to get one’s DNA into the future – to be responsive that way to being around a sexually attractive female.

So when we ask men to break the ancient habit of communicating on the erotic channel with a female toward whom he has sexual feelings, we should recognize that we’re asking men to keep something to themselves that they have a natural impulse to communicate.

That’s not asking for a huge sacrifice. (Not nearly as huge as the price that women have been paying for our society embodying a culture which has given men way too much permission.) But it’s not nothing, either.

In some future, the lines might get drawn differently, with certain kinds of expression being permitted to men that are objectionable now. But for now, at least, there’s a lot of history that needs to be undone, to allow the scars to be healed.

Back before civilization, there is reason to believe that women had some vulnerability to male sexual aggression.

But the coming of civilization magnified such problems considerably. Civilization inevitably brought about a “war of all against all,” and this resulted in power playing a much greater role in the human world—including a shift in the balance of power between men and women toward male dominance.

What “the war of all against all” required of men was injurious to the men and fostering of misogyny toward women. ((See the chapter “Damaged in the Male” in my book, Out of Weakness: Healing the Wounds that Drive Us to War.)

As a result of the way civilization evolved around “the problem of power,” when men have approached women with their sexual feelings it has been about the assertion of power at least as much as it is anything erotic. (Think of the encounter with E. Jean Carroll in a department store dressing room.)

So, the heart of the issue today in America is the wider issue of the balance of power between the sexes. And as the relationship between men and women in a society is part of the heart of the human world, any brokenness in that relationship should be mended to the fullest extent possible.

So these new rules about consent are one of the means by which women are – quite properly – insisting that men no longer have the right to dominate women as they have for thousands of years, since the first warrior societies emerged, and since women were treated as sexual property.

The wounds of that history go so deep, after all that history, that what’s required is that women’s rights to be protected from men’s making them deal with the men’s sexual feelings, whether they want to or not, much be asserted without nuance.

Eventually, we may be able to ask: if a man in the workplace finds a woman in the workplace sexually attractive, how might that feeling be acceptably communicated? Or is any expression at all create a “hostile workplace”?

I am imagining that men and women in the days of hunter-gatherers dealt with all that pretty successfully, without the men having to block the expression of something they evolved to have. If we can make our civilization more whole in ways the hunter-gatherers’ societies were, sex can be less contaminated by pathologies of power, and men – less broken inside – will be able to express their nature in unobjectionable ways.