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

hi I’m Andy schmookler uh author of this series I call a better human story I think a lot about the relationships between men and women it uh feels to me like it’s one of the deepest areas of the human reality uh in which the payoffs or costs of things being in good or not good shape are are of enormous importance to human well-being and uh there’s a place in my own you know spiritual map of things that uh concerns the relationship between men and women I have a piece uh called uh the Sacred Space of lovers um which was a whole project I undertook I didn’t keep going with it but I wrote a few things that you can find on my website a better human.org and it’s a a vision of an ideal that can happen uh between lovers and uh in a relationship which has been so Central to uh the survival and the perpetuation uh of our species so in that spirit I continually look around the world what I can see and understand about what the state of things is and and one and I look at the these things in an evolutionary perspective because that’s how I see you know what this whole thing about uh you know two Sexes and the relationship and and the whole concept of a a family of a uh as uh our species finds a way uh to create a life that can continue so a better human.org and the piece is um uh the Sacred Space of loverss an ideal of what can happen so it is H in the context of my thinking about those things in evolutionary perspective and also in a historical perspective because my whole life’s work is about how the rise of civilization introduced so much Brokenness into the human world and and part of that Brokenness has had to do with the relationship between men and women and so in that context text I write I do this uh this analysis of why the well-being of women requires men to keep it to themselves with a subtitle of 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 yes women do do 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 H 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 sometimes urges upon women cultures throughout history have given men that 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 Force kisses through sexual harassment in the workplace to to rape our society is as well the movies from the 1940s and the 1950s provide abundant evidence that American society approved of men compelling 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 suris surprising anyway to me of sexual intrusions involving force and we learned how traumatic so many of these unwelcome sexual encounters were even to the point of lives being forever thrown off course egene Carol’s apparently never recovering in terms of her own sexuality from the traumatic effect of Donald Trump’s sexual assault against her is also illustrative of how ser ious a matter this is and a monster like Harvey Weinstein was just an extreme example of a widespread male pattern but on the other hand these monstrous forms of male sexual assertion represent perversions of a natural inclination in the human male The evolutionary evidence plus the pretty Universal interest among males in our times in pornography shows pretty clearly I think that it is a part of inborn male human nature to have sexual feelings aroused by the sight of an attractive female over the eons I’m supposing 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 in 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 one 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 and buing bodying a culture which has given men way too much permission but it’s not nothing either in some future the lines might get drawn a little differently with 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 I think that there’s reason to believe that women had some vulnerability to male sexual aggression but the the coming of civilization magnified such a problem 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 for male dominance a shift from what it had been when we were bands of Hond gatherers what the war of all against all required of men was injurious to the men and it also fostered misy toward women and in that respect I propose I invite you to if you’re interested take a look at the chapter uh in my book out of weakness healing the wounds that drive to war a chapter called damaged in the mail because the social evolutionary process into which we plunged had particular effects on the role of the male in a world where there’s war all the time that requires an injurious transformation to males for which everybody is paid a price as a result of the way civilization evolved around the problem of power when men have approached women with their sexual feelings it has also been about the assertion of power at least as much as it is anything erotic think of the en encounter with EEG C Carol in a department store dressing room think of the encounter meaning how much is this about sex and how much of this is about a man choosing to dominate and humiliate a woman because he has the power to do so so the heart of the issue today is the wider issue of the balance of power between the Sexes and as the relationship between men and women in 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 ever since the first Warrior societies emerged ever since women uh were first treated as sexual property the wounds of that history goes so deep after all that history what is required is women’s rights to be protected from Men the making from Men’s making them deal with the the men’s sexual feelings whether they want to or not must be inert asserted without Nuance uh that’s a bad sentence I’ll have to prove that basically a pretty absolute rule uh is probably required at this point Nuance may come later eventually we may be a 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 there any expression at all of it creating 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 evolve to want to express if we can make our civilization more whole in the ways that the hunter gatherer Society were then sex can become less contaminated by the pathologies of power and Men less broken themselves inside will be able to express their nature in more unobjectionable

ways well that’s that’s as far as I’ve been able to take that inquiry uh I think uh I’m aware that um one of the things that I I know from experience is that talking about the relationships between men and women about what’s natural and all that and and what’s right and what’s not right it’s very it’s been very dangerous and I’ve had various people tell tell me to um just stay away from that field because there too many emotional landmines and I’ve had the experience of acting in what I feel is good faith and having people women um because I believe of past trauma becoming traumatized becoming triggered I mean um so that I I you take a beating if you say something which

somehow is contrary to some important position I don’t mean any harm or unfairness and I have I have the most positive feelings uh men can have about about women generally so uh I’m making a good faith effort to understand I’m coming from Goodwill and I don’t mean to disturb anybody with any of the things I’ve said okay well that’s my uh my video for today I if you like it I appreciate if you would indicate so if you want to subscribe to my various uh videos on whole lot of the topics that are involved with the forces that are at work in the human world these days including the Battle of democracy versus fascism and the struggle to get our act together as a species before we destroy ourselves invite you to re look at the other videos I’ve made on a variety of topics that are all together form a kind of Integrative Vision but that integrative nature of that very coherent picture of what our species challenges have been and remain is to be found with what I did as a writer which is really basically who I’ve been for the last 60 years and that’s to be found on my website a better human.org uh and one of the portals on that site is um called The Sacred Space of lovers which I invite you to see because it’s one of the one of the the beauties of uh the human existence as I Envision it has had the Good Fortune to experience it that’s my wedding

picture a lot of things in life are tough but it’s very good to have some meaningful connection with the Sacred Space of Lovers. Thanks. bye-bye