The Well-Being of Women Requires Men to Keep it to Themselves

[This piece is appearing as a newspaper op/ed in late September, 2024.

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

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

At the same time, it should also be recognized that the current rules of “consent” do demand something of men that goes against their inborn nature.

The answer is yes because one of the “rights” that men have asserted — and that that have hurt women profoundly — has been the right to impose their sexual thoughts and feelings and urges upon women.

The spectrum of ways that men have forced women to deal with them in sexual terms – whether they want to or not – runs from wolf whistles directed at sexually attractive females, through forced kisses, through sexual harassment in the workplace, to rape.

We can see in the movies from the 1940s and 1950s abundant evidence that American society then accepted that a man could compel a woman to deal with his sexuality, uninvited.

Lately, the “Me, Too!” movement has made clear how ubiquitous, and how injurious, this imposition of male sexuality without consent has often been. And we learned how traumatic so many of these unwelcome sexual encounters were.

(Even to the point of lives being forever damaged. E.g. E. Jean Carroll’s never recovering — in terms of her own sexuality — from the traumatic effects of Donald Trump’s sexual assault against her.)

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, evidently, it has been useful for males in the evolutionary game – whose object 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 this male assertion has been about more than sexual feelings. It has also been about power.

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,” among civilized societies, 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 Trump’s brief, humiliating 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 first treated as sexual property.

The wounds of that history go so deep, after all that history, that what’s required is that women must be protected – altogether, without nuance — from being compelled to deal with men’s sexual feelings toward them, in the absence of a woman’s giving prior consent.

(The principle of “consent” gives women control over what does not happen.)

Perhaps such constraints need not be imposed forever.

I think it’s possible that in our ancestors’ hunting-gathering societies were free of such problems of human males inflicting “sexual injustice” on the females in their bands. If that’s true, perhaps someday humankind might fashion a future civilization whole enough to re-establish such a sexual order: one where the erotic is not so contaminated by the pathologies of power, and where men – themselves less broken inside – will be able to express themselves toward women in ways that work for everybody.