Sexual Anarcho-Tyranny in the 1980s & 1990s
Part 3

2,357 words

You can buy F. Roger Devlin’s Sexual Utopia in Power here.

Part 1, Part 2

Besides date rape, “sexual harassment” is the major criminological innovation of the modern feminist movement. As noted in a previous essay, when the expression was first introduced in 1978 it referred to sexual extortion, the use of threats or reductions in a woman’s options in order to elicit sexual favors from her. This has always been recognized as wrong, and no new term was needed to describe it. But the term appeared anyway, and the first “sexual harassment” legal case called by that name was adjudged in 1979.

Then a small but extremely serious broadening was made to the term’s denotation. Not merely threats but promises, not merely narrowing a woman’s options but widening them, were soon said to constitute “sexual harassment” as well. The original intention behind this broadening of the definition was presumably condemnation of crude quid pro quo propositioning, such as the offering of money or promotion in return for sexual favors.

The problem here is that all male courtship behavior is an effort to win a woman’s favor through blandishments of some sort. Saying to a woman “marry me and I shall treasure you forever,” e.g., involves promising a reward (viz., being treasured forever) in exchange for sex (marriage). It would thus formally come under the new, broadened definition of “sexual harassment.” If such a rule were enforced literally and uniformly, no marriages or reproduction could take place.

Bad as this is, the conceptual broadening of the term did not end there. Within the course of a few years, “sexual harassment” suffered what the French call a dérapage sémantique, a wild and uncontrolled expansion in meaning reminiscent of a speeding automobile skidding out of control. It came to mean anything any woman might find objectionable, even if unrelated to sex. Academic feminists declared that ignoring a woman was a form of harassment.

Institutions of all sorts soon became legally liable for failing to prevent anything some judge or jury might decide after the fact constituted “harassment.” Obviously, under such circumstances the only way for any institution to protect itself from liability was to treat all accusations as proof of guilt. Men found themselves being escorted out of buildings by armed guards for what only a few years ago would have been universally recognized as harmless flirting. Many quickly learned their lesson, and began reducing all interaction with female employees or colleagues to the necessary minimum. In other words, harassment law quickly “created a hostile work environment”—but that was fine with feminists, because the new hostility was directed exclusively against men.

Unsurprisingly, the main targets of harassment accusations are unattractive men. To my knowledge, no one has never suggested punishing unattractive women, and there are two sound reasons for this: 1) they did not choose to be unattractive, and 2) punishing them will not make them beautiful. But many women do not see any injustice in holding “creepy” guys responsible for their own creepiness. Perhaps women are not as capable as men of distinguishing the moral from the aesthetic.

At that same nondescript college campus where I followed the acquaintance rape trial in the 1990s, a new “sexual harassment” policy was also being hammered out by the local feminists. This would seem to have required a definition of some kind, I naïvely assumed, so that men could know whether they were guilty of a violation or not, and defend themselves accordingly. But the local feminists did not see matters that way. Their proposed definition began by stating that harassment differed from normal and acceptable sexual behavior by containing an “element of coercion.” They then provided a long laundry list of disconnected items, anything they could think of that some woman might find objectionable, most of which did not sound coercive at all. Much of it amounted to what I would call “bad manners.” And long as it was, the list was explicitly declared to be incomplete (“sexual harassment shall include but not be limited to…”). So even a man who could demonstrate he had done nothing on the current list of proscribed behavior might still be found guilty for something the feminists decided had been inadvertently left out. The list was quite simply infinitely expandible. Obviously, no due process was possible with such an open-ended “definition,” and this seems to have been the authors’ deliberate intention.

The designers of the proposed policy were especially concerned to rule out of bounds any expectation by man or woman that a sexual relationship should endure beyond an individual act of coitus. You were guilty of “harassment” if you assumed otherwise. This, of course, excluded the possibility not only of lifelong marriage but of any continuing relationship between the sexes. Accordingly, much of the document sounded like it had been written to govern a homosexual bathhouse: if two Homo sapiens both wanted to do it, they could do it; otherwise, they couldn’t. Perhaps not accidentally, it was around this time we started hearing the expression “hookup.” The proposed harassment policy amounted, in fact, to a declaration that hookups are the only permissible form of human sexual behavior.

Nowhere in the policy was there any allusion to the circumstance that heterosexual intercourse is where human beings come from, nor was any consideration given to how children arising from such behavior might be provided for. The pleasure and convenience of the adults involved were the only consideration. It was the most utopian document I have ever seen, and I wish I had saved a copy. It is especially hard to understand how any woman could approve such absurdities, but the feminists not only did not object—they were the ones behind the proposal. Perhaps they saw such rules as a reliable source of the angry, disappointed young women they needed to keep their movement going.

Since I was an adjunct faculty member at the time, I could not help noticing one clause stating that sexual relations between faculty and students were “discouraged,” and that if followed by an accusation on the part of the student, virtually no defense would be possible. The faculty member’s “power” was said to be the reason such relationships were dubious. I was not carrying on an affair with any student at the time, but was still made uneasy by the thinking behind the proposed policy. I could barely get my students to do their assigned reading, and here I was being told I wielded such fearful power over them that my female students would feel compelled to grant me sexual favors on demand. This was obviously preposterous. Any girl in my class would have marched straight into the Dean’s Office to denounce me had I been so foolish as to do such a thing, which I would not have been. A college instructor does not have “power” over his students, but only authority, and only enough authority to ensure that proper instruction can take place.

But feminism, like other radical movements, has a settled tendency to mistake authority for power. This is also seen in the movement’s interpretation of a husband’s traditional authority as reducing a wife to “slavery.” Once feminists sweep such traditional forms of authority aside, they replace them with the rawest and most tyrannical exercise of their own power. So their ascription of “power” to male academics was the purest hypocrisy.

Furthermore, if the authors of the new policy were really so concerned about objectionable intimacy between faculty and students, why not simply forbid it outright? The reason seems to be that for feminists it is axiomatic that women have the right to do as they please. Female students must enjoy the same inalienable right to fornicate with faculty members as they do with any other featherless biped within reach. But if they decided afterwards that they did not like the experience, then (and only then) the faculty member would be guilty of wrongdoing. As with “date rape,” a man’s guilt or innocence depends not on his own actions, but on the thoughts that pass through a woman’s mind afterwards, and over which he has no control.

I also wondered if the warning against faculty-student intimacy applied to lesbians among the Women’s Studies professors, notorious for their personal interest in female students. More likely, such a harassment claim would be met with charges of “homophobia” against the student. But who knows?

All the hand-wringing about faculty-student intimacy in the 1990s was a desperate attempt to find some substitute for marriage as a way of regulating human sexual behavior. And it was, and is, bound to fail. John Kenneth Galbraith had it right in 1937: marry your student after she graduates or reaches her majority, and it’s nobody else’s damned business. The same goes for “sexual harassment” in general. In a monogamous society, everybody understands that married men are not supposed to make sexual advances toward women other than their wives, while bachelors are allowed to engage in fairly well-defined and socially approved forms of courtship behavior. No possible sexual harassment regulations will ever improve upon such a system.

But, of course, socially enforced monogamy grants women no right to do exactly as they please either, so it remains unacceptable to feminists. The feminist program is liberation for women combined with criminal liability for men if women’s actions do not lead them to happiness. In other words, sexual anarcho-tyranny. Babbitt’s insight that there is simply a conflict between happiness and the maximization of sexual pleasure must not be entertained for even a moment.

“Date rape” and “sexual harassment” were not the only new male crimes devised by feminism, although they were the most important. In the 1990s there was a sudden rash of publicity about “stalking”—men following women around. This is something that often follows breakups, and is one of the reasons divorce-on-demand is so dangerous. Observing that men who commit violent crimes against women must first go where the woman is, somebody got the bright idea of renaming this going-where-she-is “stalking” and outlawing it per se, even apart from any violent sequel. California passed the first anti-stalking law in 1990, and within three years every state in the union had one. But apart from a violent dénouement, it is difficult to distinguish between stalking and attempting to contact a woman for any innocent purpose. A man cannot easily prove, e.g., that he was not “stalking” a woman to whom he hoped to sell a vacuum cleaner, and if she should take a mind to be afraid of him such an accusation is entirely possible.

Watching the madness of the feminist date rape, sexual harassment, and stalking campaigns unfold in the 1990s, I wondered how the many normal, non-lesbian young women who availed themselves of these new weapons in the battle of the sexes could fail to see that they were alienating virtually their entire pool of potential husbands. For despite the worst feminism could do, I suspected most young women still wished to get married and having families one day—at least once those high-flying careers of theirs had been securely established.

Of course, they did still want this. And they continued to read Cosmo—where Helen Gurley Brown remained as editor until 1996—to learn how to snag not just any man, but a very handsome, successful, and exciting one. It sounded like the perfect formula for happiness: outlaw date rape and sexual harassment, while teaching every girl how to obtain a highly attractive husband! What could possibly go wrong?

What went wrong, of course, is that you cannot punish your way to utopia. All sensible men had long since grasped that the male sexual utopia of a harem full of hotties for every man was never going to materialize. But feminism kept the flame of sexual utopianism alive among women for another generation or so. They were always one reform away from having all their wishes come true: punish unattractive suitors as harassers, pursue the most attractive men freely, learn all the exotic sex tricks that are sure to get these dashing fellows to commit, then punish them as date rapists when they don’t.

The inevitable human end-product of influences like these is a monster of feminine egoism. Cosmo has her convinced both that only men so attractive as to be out of reach for her are good enough for her, and that they are not out of reach at all. At the same time, convinced by feminism that she has a “right” to be free of unwanted male attention, she tells every young man interested in making her acquaintance to leave her alone. As her fertile years pass and whatever attractiveness nature gave her fades, she discovers that the out-of-reach men she has been dreaming about are just as out-of-reach as ever, while the men she has been commanding to leave her alone for the past ten years—are leaving her alone! She panics, asking herself how such a thing could have happened to a wonderful, deserving woman like her. But it is already too late.

The higher you fly, the harder you fall. Women who signed on to this utopian program only crashed into unforgiving reality the more painfully. When daddy’s little princess finally realizes no Prince Charming will be forthcoming at the end of her story, the resulting fury is not pretty to behold. But at least our heroine knows whom to blame: men. The male sex was collectively responsible for the failure of her girlish dreams to come true. I have heard such post-1990s women giving vent to their anger and disappointment with men, and it can be shocking. Some are so enraged that they are unable to speak coherently. But what can men do for women with such an attitude toward them?

It struck many men as ironic that women for whom more had been done than any previous generation in human history should be so angry. It seemed to me that they were angry precisely because so much had been done in a futile effort to ensure their happiness. It was essentially the same phenomenon as spoiling a child, which always results in the child’s own unhappiness—in addition to making it insufferable for anyone else to be around.