Sex In The Hysterical Age Of Feminism And MeToo - Consensual Sex? No Such Thing

In recent days (9/22) the head coach of a men’s professional sports team was given a one year suspension for consensual sex with a colleague.  There was no question of abuse, a powerful man taking advantage of an underling; no quid pro quo sexual favors for professional ones; not even a hint of anything out of the ordinary – a man and a woman who, attracted to each other and given the congeniality and proximity of the workplace, had sex.  The censorious, brutally intolerant code of MeToo was brought down with full force on the coach.  Just the possibility of impropriety, the mote of suspicion that somehow, despite is partner’s demurral, she was taken advantage of caused his harsh suspension, taint on his professional record, and likelihood that he would a basketball pariah for years.

In this accusatory age in which any complaint of sexual impropriety is guaranteed a six figure settlement, there was more than enough space for the woman to cry foul, to call out her abuser, see him punished, and watch her bank account fill up.  Yet, since the relationship was consensual, appropriate, and respectful, there were no accusations or howls of fury.  Yet, the coach was summarily dismissed.

The day when young women took up nursing in part because their chances of meeting and marrying a successful doctor seems ancient history.  Secretaries were willing to put up with the gantlet of off-color jokes, innuendoes, and sexual suggestions because the job was a means to an  end.  The office was fertile ground for sexual liaison, and while a woman took her chances that the advances of the handsome director were no more than opportunistic male adventure, the promise of a big payoff was worth it.  A stewardess in business class on long haul trips to Europe, dressed to the nines, cloyingly helpful to their passengers and kindly and attentive to their pilots, knew exactly what they were doing.

Women have never been given credit for their sex-worthiness.  Shakespeare’s Rosalind, Portia, Viola, Lady Macbeth, and Tamora needed no help from their male counterparts.  In fact they used them to achieve their own, deliberate, selfish ends.  They ran rings around the men who courted them, made fools of them, and showed that even in the restrictive, demanding Elizabethan Age, women could best men in a moment.

Ibsen and Strindberg created strong, defiant female characters – Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, and Laura – who had their way with men, neutered and destroyed them at will.  Lady Chatterley and Emma Bovary were strong, sexually mature, ambitious women who could negotiate their way in the most oppressive male society.

Even within the American sexual traditionalism of the Fifties, men knew that sexual conquest was not a done deal.  They understood women’s power of paternity, their sharp intelligence and willful insight, and most of all their ambition.  Women of an earlier age did not waste their time railing against social injustice or civil rights.  They looked after Number One, and did it with acumen and aplomb.

Somehow this strong, independent, historically admirable side of women got lost in feminism.  Feminists who insisted they were women’s champions claimed ironically that they needed protection from men; and every manner of legal, social, and emotional firewall was set up to do so.  Women who were always able to dismiss unwanted male interest were told that they were victims; but that in their victimhood they wielded great power.  Only the suggestion of sexual impropriety was enough to dismiss a student from school.  A woman’s accusation was enough to exact dire punishment.  No court of law was necessary.  Men who were considered genetically predatory rapists needed no counsel or judicial judgment.

The age old sexual algorithms – Hollywood come-hither allure, all right for the silver screen but inappropriate for the New Age woman, were dismissed as retrograde and anti-historical.  D.H. Lawrence who understood that sexual sexual equilibrium – the balance of dominance and submission – was the key to sexual harmony and emotional evolution – was thrown out of the canon in place of post-modernist notions of victimhood.

Men in downtown K Street office elevators, fearing female opprobrium, censure, and law suits, look at the ceiling when a beautiful woman enters.  The natural, normal cycle of allure, attractiveness, and male response has been short circuited. Forget a beautiful woman’s grace, figure, sexuality, and beauty.  Those are not only irrelevant but tender traps.  Go for the mind, feminists claim, and you will be rewarded.

So the modern American office is a gulag, with walls, firewalls, partitions, and roadblocks.  By executive fiat, sexual attraction does not and cannot exist in the workplace.  Maybe, just maybe, a man can suggest a meeting outside the office, but that is considered nothing but an extension of his unwanted interest.  The very fact that the sexual interest (predation) began on hallowed ground automatically inculpates the man at the bar with his female colleague.

So an unusual vetting has to occur.  ‘Where do you work?” is not simply an opening line, but the first step to establish propriety.  Only if she is far enough off the grid can he make further overtures; and once they are together, they must follow a protocol established by the MeToo hierarchy.  “Is it OK if I touch you there?”, says the timid timorous male.

Of course savvy men have always known that women are still women and respond to appropriate, confident, respectful male approaches.  These savvy men can woo, seduce, and bed a woman faster than you can say Jack Robinson because they have understood the permanent, irrevocable nature of women – hardwired, genetically determined, and honed and perfect with daddy-love, heroes, and social convention. They can skirt MeToo and the prying eyes of feminist overseers.  They are the few, the privileged, and the satisfied.  Their timid brothers who are always trying to do the right thing and who subscribe to notions of progressive sexuality and sexual consciousness, are left in the dust.

America is the most sexually benighted place on the planet, drifting so far from the potency of heterosexual desire, tempted by alternative sexualities, and educated to believe that sexual identity is the be-all and end-all of modern life, not Lawrentian mating.  Men in Italian elevators look squarely at a beautiful woman, nod appreciatively and with respect.   The woman is pleased that her toilette has been noticed, that she is in fact as alluring as she intended to be.  American women dress just as seductively, but have been trained to challenge the unwanted eye. 

The Kama Sutra, Ying-Yang and Tantrism have been instructing men and women for millennia.  Sex is at the heart of the human experience.

One expects the wheel to come full circle, and sooner rather than later men and women will behave as they always have done, jettisoning notions of identity and protection.  It will take some time, given the fact that feminist MeToo hysteria is still loud and ringing in every quarter; but it will happen.