Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. Mark Twain
George Rebane
[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 2 May 2018.]
For millennia females in all cultures were shielded by their families. Marriages were arranged for commercial or political benefit, love was optional and came later if at all. Extra marital trysts and affairs were di rigeur at all levels of society. Females were treated as chattel, to be kept on the shelf in a perfect condition for display until a desirable customer came along.
In the west, the female perquisites of love and, therefore, choice began to emerge during the Renaissance in the 1400s, and blossomed during the French Enlightenment (ca 1740). Although almost all proper marriages were still arranged, or at a minimum still required the blessing of the prospective bride’s closest senior male relative or appointed male guardian. As the years passed, requiring the male imprimatur became totally optional in the most developed nations during the 20th century in the aftermath of the Great War. This signaled the liberation of both partners, giving each gender the freedom to go through a semi-formal game of ‘pick and choose’, during which a number of prospective partners were given the ‘try before you buy’ treatment. The dating game was on between boys and girls of all ages.
As moral strictures loosened, it became socially acceptable for prospective partners to advance the game to the ‘fly before you buy’ phase. In this manner things appeared to be going swimmingly. And after the Great Society was launched in the 1960s, no one had to be surprised any more on their wedding night.
While all this women’s liberation was going on, the progressive agenda started displaying its, well, more progressive facets. The next step toward progress was to launch the global gender equality initiative. Word was put out that men and women were equal in every pursuit from ground combat to computer science. Well almost.
The elite social engineers, while expanding the landscape of sexuality – you know, the LGTBXYZ movements – decided to take heterosexual relations to a new point of asymmetry. Men were to remain the brutes they had always been, but now women would have a new weapon to aid their climb to and maintenance of that coveted gender equality. The #MeToo movement was launched to enable any woman to destroy the reputation of a man by simply alleging that the brute had sexually harassed her in some now bygone and distant year. Such allegations allowed no defense since sexual harassment could denote literally anything starting with solicited or unwanted flirtation. Today men are guilty with no apparent means of defense, and the social punishment for such accusations is severe, involving the destruction of career, family, and reputation.
So how will the new age courting and mate selection game be played? I don’t see any alternative to the advent of lots of legal pre-contact paperwork both parties will have to negotiate, sign, and notarize. The documents will lay out terms of anticipated and permissible engagement available to the couple, specific activities for which both parties agree not to seek any post hoc recourse. Perhaps both sides will again resort to chaperones prepared to serve as witnesses for any future litigation, should it come to that.
But wait, the sexual harassment problem has been recognized, and the first signs of pre-coital phone apps are already appearing. Check out uConsent.com where prospective partners can use their smartphones to lead them through a discussion of their sexual preferences, while still keeping their hands to themselves, and then log their agreement to proceed, which is then stored in the cloud for future reference. The discerning among you will realize that our advanced society has now expanded the meaning of ‘protected sex’.
And this is just the beginning. The progressive listener will immediately conclude, and correctly so, that anything to do with unrehearsed spontaneous flirtation, let alone sex, is so yesterday.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the addended transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
Addendum – As WSJ columnist Elizabeth Bernstein allows us to conclude, women walking around in sexy outfits or exposing unmentionable body parts is no longer to be considered as de juris enticement (more here). Now we all know that the de facto interpretation cuts through all the bullshit and is still correct, but should you act on it, that recollection will not subsequently stand up in the lamestream nor in court.
The unavoidable humor in this commentary is not an isolated aspect of our new politically corrected culture. The comedy of errors that combines into our national tragedy is that progressives have never known how an individual is motivated, or the fundamentals of economics, or how a society works. Their cornucopia of catastrophes, both in governance (e.g. the nation’s major urban areas) and legislation (here) attests to this gross ignorance, especially when viewed within the historical preamble of 20th century socialist cum communist states. Closer to home we now hear of the latest example in a bill (SB174) introduced in Sacramento that, if passed, would allow illegal aliens to serve on all California boards and commissions that have always required citizen members. These are not people who want to preserve the United States of America.
[8may18 update] Eric Schneiderman, NY AG, ultra-progressive politician, and a leading women’s rights activist, resigned yesterday after the New Yorker published accusations by four women who described some pretty dramatic pre-coital “role playing” (aka sadomasochistic acts) that they had suffered in the hands of the AG. Mr Schneiderman denies the whole thing and claims that all that went down was just good consensual fun. From these career terminating allegations we can underline the need for the kinds of anticipative agreements described above, especially if one is into some of the more elaborate and creative types of sexual encounters. (more here)
[9may18 update] Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute writes ‘The Negative Impact of the #MeToo Movement' in the April 2018 Imprimis. Her excellent dissertation opens with –
Our nation is about to be transformed, thanks to the #MeToo movement. I am not speaking about a cessation of sexual predation in the workplace. If that were the only consequence of #MeToo, the movement would clearly be a force for good. Unfortunately, its effects are going to be more sweeping and destructive. #MeToo is going to unleash a new torrent of gender and race quotas throughout the economy and culture, on the theory that all disparities in employment and institutional representation are due to harassment and bias. The resulting distortions of decision-making will be largely invisible; we will usually not know of the superior candidates for a job who were passed over in the drive for gender parity. But the net consequence will be a loss of American competitiveness and scientific achievement.
And concludes with –
As the #MeToo movement swells the demand for ever more draconian diversity mandates, a finding in a Pew Research Center poll on workplace equity is worth noting: the perception of bias is directly proportional to the number of years the perceiver has spent in an American university. The persistent claim of gender bias, in other words, is ideological, not empirical. But after #MeToo, it will have an even more disruptive effect.
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