More on Misogyny

Amanda Bennett, author-journalist and former editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote the piece "Snapchat CEO’s e-mails show need to confront misogyny" for the the June 2 Washington Post op-ed page. It echoes my own beliefs about the rise of shameless misogyny in today's America.

Bennett writes of certain e-mails, recently published, that went back and forth among Kappa Sigma frat boys at Stanford back in 2009-10 and how those messages betokened a craze for misogynistic sexual behavior among many — though by no means all — young men nowadays.

Snapchat Inc. CEO
Evan Spiegel

Snapchat Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel, who has apologized for his crass undergraduate behavior, was apparently one of the frat boys who took part in the Kappa Sigma crudities.

"Let us .... thank both him and the anonymous leaker," Bennett writes, "for the x-ray vision they have given us into a world that many suspected existed but had no real way to know for sure. Then, after giving thanks, I would like to exhort all mothers, fathers, college administrators, young men, young women and, above all, employers to take a deep breath and read the e-mails in their entirety."

Then, says she, all those concerned should "consider: Are these just words? Clearly there is a lot of hormonal prancing there. Yet, given what we know about binge drinking on campus, I think we all know that the references to blackouts are real. Aren’t the references to sexual domination and contempt real, too? And if we long ago acknowledged that what we now only coyly refer to as the N-word is a real word with real powers to hurt, then why do we feel differently about allowing ourselves, our daughters, our sisters to be called bitches and whores as if it were funny?"

My attitude: Bennett is being, if anything, way too tentative here. There can be no doubt — none at all — that applying the B-word and the W-word to women in general is beyond the pale of honorable, decent, civilized behavior. It always has been, it always will be.

There was a time, long ago, when the prancing hormones of young men led them to become knights errant, sworn to uphold the dignity and honor of womankind. Women have more recently said, "We don't need to have our dignity and honor upheld by men; we can do that ourselves. And we don't want to be put on a pedestal."

Men seem to have responded by now dragging women through the sexual mire instead.

Can't there be a happy medium?

Amanda Bennett

Finding it is mainly up to the young men themselves, I'd say. Bennett writes, "Young men: I completely agree with the #notallmen hashtag. It is clearly not all men who are this vile. You who are not need to stand up against those who are."

I'd add that there needs to be a way for men to swear an oath of proper behavior towards women. Oaths are sworn before others, publicly. They are not taken privately. Wouldn't it be nice if the oaths they swear to when joining a college fraternity would contain such language?

Finding the happy medium, Bennett says, also will have to involve parents, schools, employers ... and the young women themselves. She addresses this last group by saying, "You are party to this, too. Read those e-mails. If you like what you see, keep going to those [fraternity] rages. Sex on your own terms is great, ladies. But are you sure it is on your terms? Is it sex you read in those e-mails, or power? Is that really where you want to be on the power spectrum."

Feminists point out that sex was really about power, back in women's pre-liberated past. It still is today. It's just that men have nominally lost their former positions of power ... so they've now begun trampling women beneath their prancing hormonal feet instead. The relative power relationship is the same. But now it's concealed not by the veil of centuries-old tradition but by the haze of alcoholic stupor.

Code of Honor

Petula Dvorak's May 27 Washington Post column, "#YesAllWomen: Elliott Rodger's misogynistic ravings inspire a powerful response on Twitter," reveals how appallingly crazy the culture has gotten in terms of men's attitudes toward women.

Rodger is the young man who went on a shooting rampage in California last week, targeting young college women — women who, he said in a previously made "selfie" video posted on YouTube, would not deign to go to bed with him. Rodger died of a gunshot wound to his head, possibly self-administered, during the ensuing police chase.

Dvorak (@petulad on Twitter) says Rodger was but an extreme example of the misogyny that affects "millions [of men] who share the same twisted view of women that he did."

Women by the "hundreds of thousands," Dvorak writes, have posted their resentment of this widespread misogyny on Twitter, using the hashtag #YesAllWomen. Here's an example:

Dvorak adds:

Elliot Rodger has exposed the sick world of the Men’s Rights Activist movement, self-described "alphas" who fume about any and all the times they don’t call the shots with women, specifically the airbrushed, inflated and photo-shopped creatures they assume are there for them.

Mostly, it’s about sex. Or the lack thereof.

A group of them call themselves Pickup Artists. And some sell their wisdom — tips that include stale bar tricks, ways to insult and ignore women as part of their seduction — as online courses, apps or seminars. They call this ability to get women to sleep with them "Game."

When desperate men who shell out cash thinking it will buy them Game fail, they lash out online. Not at the men who try to sell them Game, but at the women who didn’t buy the act.

Of Elliott Rodger himself, Dvorak writes:

He may have been mentally ill, but he was also the product of a culture that objectifies, demeans and sexualizes women. Nearly one in five American women report being raped at some time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The raging sexual assault epidemic in our military and on our college campuses is a reflection of the entitlement too many men feel they have to women’s bodies.

Every day we hear of another military man — powerful, disciplined, bulging with Game — who sexually assaulted a woman in uniform. This month, investigations began at 55 colleges and universities over the way their officials have handled sexual assault. These are our nation’s thought leaders — privileged, educated, bursting with tweedy Game — who have rebranded rape as 'non-consensual sex' so they won’t have to deal with the misogyny on display on their campuses.

Think it’s not real? Consider the texts and e-mails allegedly exchanged between members of a banished frat at American University. The young men — who also were identified as scholars, interns at prestigious nonprofits and senators’ offices — show a shuddering hatred and objectification of their female classmates.

Hatred of women? Objectification? Sexualization? "Game?" Sexual assaults? Rapes? Why is all this happening? And what can we do about it?

Those two questions, I realize, might draw our attention in different directions. The why question suggests we might be able, if we but knew the answer, to pluck out the entire problem by its taproot, as we would dig up a dandelion in our garden.

The what question suggests the problem will have to be solved more indirectly, as when we spray a dandelion with weed killer instead.

My own first inclination would be to go for the taproot. But what, then, is the deepest source of all this blatant misogyny?

*****

I suppose there were misogynists in earlier times, most of them secret, undeclared woman-haters. Today, it's different: misogyny is rampant and blatant. What's changed, and why? Well:

• Women nowadays occupy societal roles they were once excluded from: as students at coed universities, as soldiers in the military, in professional careers.
• The sexual revolution put paid to virginity and chastity as cultural norms, particularly for women.
• Women and men now wait longer to settle down and get married, leading to a time of life experts call "post-adolescence" or "adultescence." (This has to do in part with how long young people are staying in school today. Elliott Rodger was 23 and still a college undergraduate.)
• The Internet has made porn readily available.
• Social media have opened up avenues for misogynist rants and other craziness to reach a critical mass.

These fairly recent changes in our culture fall generally into two overlapping categories:

1. The victory of individual liberty over censorship, as with the availability of online porn, the sweep of unfettered social media, and even our having gotten out from under yesterday's sexual norms of purity, virginity, and chastity.
2. Changes that no feminists or right-thinking progressives would ever want to roll back: more college- and graduate-level education for both sexes; women in all walks of life; women, unlike in the olden days, being "allowed" to enjoy sex.

If changes of this sort are the taproot of today's blatant and rampant misogyny, or at least the feeder roots, then I guess I'd better reconsider my first inclination, which was to pluck out the misogyny by its roots. The deepest feeder roots are, after all, sacrosanct to feminists, to right-thinking progressives, and to proponents of civil liberties and open exchanges of ideas.

Putting weed-killer on the dandelion of rampant misogyny can, though, only go so far, I feel. We hear of reconfiguring how the military handles sexual assault. We hear of the Obama administration trying to get universities to do more to stop abuses on campus. Worthy approaches, I'd say, but not nearly sufficient.

What we really need is a new code of honor: individual young men need to swear themselves to proper behavior toward women.

It could come as part of a 12-step program, à la Alcoholics Anonymous. Call it Misogynists Anonymous. AA participants are encouraged to confess to their fellows that they have a drinking problem. MA participants would have to confess that they have a woman-hating problem. Then the healing could begin.

As part of it, they would have to pledge to give up what amounts to their "bottle": calling women sluts and whores after picking them up and having sex with them; calling women stuck-up snobs after failing to pick them up and sleep with them; and like expressions of misogynist hostility.

Blush Before You Flush

The Maryland General Assembly recently passed Senate Bill 212, which Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) has just signed into law. Officially called the "Fairness for All Marylanders Act," it protects the rights of transgender people not to be, due to their gender identity, discriminated against in: 

• places of public accommodation
• the housing/real estate market
• employment and the job market

"Places of public accommodation" include public restrooms and "saunas, shower rooms, locker rooms, etc.," as long as these facilities are available in some degree to the general public. That is the understanding I get from the Web site of MDPetitions.com, an organization that is trying to gather enough signatures to force a November ballot initiative. The initiative would, if passed, set aside the act.

MDPetitions says transgender persons can now, under the new law which they call the "Bathroom Bill," use restrooms and similar facilities heretofore considered off limits to anyone not of the designated sex. So, those men who “sincerely [hold] as part of [their] core identity” that they are actually women, despite what their body says, cannot be barred from public ladies' rooms.

A real worry is, accordingly, that men will falsely claim to be transgender so they can prey on women performing their most private acts.

And, of course, vice versa.

How would it be handled? Say a person who is outwardly male walks into a ladies' room. Perhaps a female patron complains to the management, and the police are called. The nominally male person comes out of the ladies' room only to be put into handcuffs. Later in court, s/he tells the judge s/he sincerely self-identifies as a woman. Case dismissed.

S/he may have been telling the truth, in which case s/he has been needlessly inconvenienced and embarrassed.

Or, this person may have been lying about being transgender ... but how would the prosecutor ever prove that to the judge?

*****

Let's now studiously ignore that legal conundrum and look just at the situation without regard to the inner gender identity of the one who, outwardly male, walks into a ladies' room. Let's look at it from the perspective of the woman who went in just before (I'll use the masculine pronoun) he did.

All she really knows is that a man followed her into the loo.

She may or may not call to mind the notion that his inner gender identity is the same as hers. She may even support the right of a transgender individual to occupy the adjoining stall. But she can't really be sure this guy isn't just a sexual predator, can she?

Put bluntly, she's doing her business in a stall next to an individual who had a penis. That's the bottom line. It's downright odd, at the very least. It's discomfiting. It's threatening.

Now turn the situation around: A woman walks past a row of men using the urinals in a men's restroom at the ball park. She goes into a stall. (Or does she actually belly up to a wall-mounted fixture? Such things are never out of the question.) Is this act an assertion of her inner maleness, or is it just a way to avoid the long line at the ladies' room? Whatever ... if she is detained and required to go before a judge, she legally has an out.

Meanwhile, the shoe of discomfiture and embarrassment, undoubtedly well known to truly transgender individuals, is now firmly on the other foot. Pre-SB 212, those unusual individuals had to do their business in the "wrong" room, the "wrong" facility, every time. And one does feel sorry for them.

Still and all, there clearly is no practical way to make sure no one experiences such discomfiture and embarrassment. It's an imperfect world, and there will always be someone, no matter the laws on the books, who will have to blush before they flush.

*****

I am a liberal democrat who generally is in favor of LGBT (lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender) rights, but I do not support the new law as presently configured. It will subject untold numbers of people to discomfiture, embarrassment, and even implicit threats of sexual predation, just so a tiny minority can feel more comfortable in places of public accommodation. I don't think that's right.

The law does provide for the possibility of gender-neutral restrooms alongside more standard ones ...

... and I think that's good. People could use them or go to the usual men's/ladies' rooms. But few establishments have these extra added attractions. So my objection still stands, and I invite all who agree with me to sign the petition.