Fourth year, just before classes began in Fall 1987, I was coming out of Clark Hall and passed some scaffolding. There were a couple of construction guys about 10+ feet up, and another in a pick-up in the turn-around. One of them whistled, another yelled “Hey baby, you wanna sit on my face?” Without even looking, I yelled back, “Is your tongue bigger than your dick?” and kept walking.
Sexual harassment is a fact of life for all women. In the The Profound Misogyny of a Popular Sexual Harassment Defense, Amanda Marcotte is correct that Kavinoky’s defense—“If he were hot it wouldn’t be harassment”—is fundamentally misogynistic, but then so are most incidents of harassment, so it would follow that any “defense” would be as well. The Filners of the world aren’t interested in sex; they are interested in exerting control. Ask any counselor or psychiatrist what motivates sexual assault and rape, and that expert will tell you “it’s not about the sex; it’s about control.” The same is true on the smaller scale of sexual harassment. Men don’t harass women because they want sex; they harass women because they want power over them.
Here’s the thing no one says out loud: We women are born with all the power in every relationship. Think about it. Having romantic relationships is about breeding, whether you intend to reproduce or not. It’s a biological urge that has found cultural expression through the formalization of marriages. Those marital relationships have, in turn, morphed through social contracts and romantic idealism into desirable goals themselves. But all of it stems from the need to breed.
Women literally sit on 100% of the breeding capacity in the world. We OWN it. Breeding is how our species continues, and breeding requires sex. Furthermore, we retain our power after the breeding. Women are still the primary caregivers for approximately 70% of all children and therefore control the results of breeding, as well as the access to it. If one accepts that species continuation is still a primary motivating force at all, women have it locked up. Therefore, many men see the equality scale as already tipped in women’s favor. That attitude is primitive and mildly abhorrent, but it is based on a fundamental biological truth. All of the analysis in the world will not change that dynamic.
It was late November 1990 at Trax, and I was with four of my posse–a mixed group of women and men, none of us obviously coupled up–listening to BTB rock the stage. The troll who had been eyeing me for a while approached as Debbie and I fetched another round from the bar. Instead of introducing himself, he said, “It’s cold outside. Wanna be warmed up by a real man tonight?” I replied, “I couldn’t warm up to you if we were cremated together.”
Take the next step. Sex has become a commodity. In today’s world it is glorified, marketed, and sold on a 24/7 basis. Women control 96% of the sex available to men in the U.S. (deducting the statistical 4% for homosexual orientation). To put that into perspective, imagine if any one corporation controlled 96% of any industry. It’s why Republicans don’t want to give women work equality or responsibility over their bodies. It’s why fashion and media moguls tear down our image of ourselves and try to mold us into something less than what we are–often literally less. It’s why many rapists don’t consider rape a crime. It’s why soldiers engage in gang-banging overseas. It’s why every man who makes a crude comment about your tits and ass when you walk down a city street thinks he’s entitled to do so. If you are a woman, you aren’t a person. You are a commodity, because you are an empowered, individual shareholder in life’s natural monopoly, and a man is not.
It was a slow sales day in 1995. I was at the front pump—an organ and a keyboard placed side by side at the front of the store—playing pop standards to in order to attract passersby. A work colleague suggested that if I opened up another button on my blouse maybe I could “work it” better. The “it” he was referring to wasn’t the musical instruments. I left the front pump indicating that he should take it over.
Sex is not fair, balanced, or equal, and women have no way of making it so. Neither do men, for all the legislation and social pressure they try to place on our bodies and our sexual behavior. Like women are, they are stuck with an unbalanced system designed by nature. Unlike women have, they have been inculcated over thousands of years with the belief that they are supposed to dominate nature. But men cannot harass, rape, dominate, or torture their way into reproductive equality.
Reproductive inequality is not an excuse for reprehensible behavior. Neither is the premium men have placed on sexuality in general. It is obvious by now that women are humans first, not a natural resource to be exploited, not a commodity to be marketed and traded. In our modern world, the population of breedable human females is not threatened with extinction. There is no compelling reason to treat women like breeding stock beyond the control and domination factors. The control and domination factors are societal and traditional, and therefore can be changed.
In fact, I believe that this one of strongest arguments for why gender equality has to be expressed in our laws. Morals, which define personal character, are often informed by the social and religious culture in which we were raised (or which we adopted at some point, if we rebelled). They are individual and subjective. Ethics, which are codified in our body of law, describe a society’s standards of behavior and the system in which commonly accepted morals are applied. Harassment (and its more violent cousins, sexual assault and rape) is not a moral issue. It is an ethical one.
We, as a society, either believe that women have the right to be treated as humans first and foremost, instead of breeding stock, or we believe that women are a “special subset” of the species and therefore should be subjected to “special treatment.” Ethical, not moral.
As Ian Welsh once wrote in his blog, “The best short definition I’ve heard … is that morals are how you treat people you know. Ethics are how you treat people you don’t know.”
In 2000, I was managing a couple of political debate sites, covering mostly Constitutional and civil rights issues, including debates on Confederate flag displays, Internet privacy and free speech, public education, abortion, and gun control. An acquaintance “took me to task” on the boards for becoming a “feminazi” because of my strident pro-choice opinion. He didn’t “get how someone so morally correct in most other ways” could get this thing “so wrong.” For some reason, he believed that his opinion of my opinion should matter, but my opinion was not subject to his morality. I expressed my opinion, which was that his position was (and still is) unethical in its morality. I am a person first, not livestock. I do not believe he or anyone else so completely unrelated to my reproductive interests has a right to decide whether or not I can or should have kids. The acquaintance began to troll my boards looking for opportunities to mock, needle, and provoke me, while pretending to “respect” my point of view. This was not respect. This was harassment–sexual harassment–because I refused to accept his judgment on my “place” as a woman. In this case, because there was no non-personal reason for banning him from a public board, I asked my fellow web managers to help police him until he finally stopped posting.
So where am I going with this? I want to circle back to the individual level, because all sex is ultimately personal. That’s where we make the real decisions that impact our everyday lives and how we treat each other one-on-one influences how we relate to the aggregate. There are legal ways of recognizing equality and they are important if we want human society to progress, but the most important kind of equality is the sense of it you create in your own life.
I believe that, since women already own the sex, we should own the sexuality that goes with it.
And here, again, I am going to speak directly to (and possibly for) the ladies: Most of us spend some period of time (and some of us, our whole lives) defining who we are based on how men perceive us as sexual entities. This infuriates me, because it reduces the wonderfulness of us down to two boobs and a vag, and how they relate to the man standing in judgment. A man’s worth as a human being is not based on his looks or his sexuality. It’s based on the quality of his character, his personality, his mind, and his actions. We should accept no less for ourselves.
In a world where men are allowed to define a woman’s value through her sexuality, attractiveness, amiability, and malleability become more desired traits than intelligence, competence, and creative productivity. Getting married and even having children become goals instead of lifestyle choices. And every time a woman is harassed, sexually assaulted, or raped, it is her fault for somehow taking advantage of her natural monopoly.
More advice for the daughter I’ll never have: A man has the right to define who you are to him in his world; there are some prejudices and attitudes that he may own and changing or overcoming them may not be worth the effort. But you should never let a man define who you are. Not even in the context of a romantic relationship—not at the Madonna/whore stage, not when you run into compatibility issues, not when you are twelve years into a marriage with two kids, not when the relationship is done and you are laying in fetal position wondering what went wrong. You are a woman with a sex drive and a need to belong in an environment that encourages your safety, security, prosperity, happiness, and trust. You are no less entitled to any of those things than the men in your life. So define how much of each you need, and define what percent of them you require from your primary relationships. You have the power to define it, because such relationships exist precisely because you are woman.
There are real reasons for both men and women to want a long-term romantic relationship, but the sexuality required to make such a relationship happen can just as easily become a detriment to its longevity. In my previous blog post, I wrote that “[m]en are simple when the issue comes down to sex,” and that is as true for sexual harassment as it is for relationshipping, because in all sexual matters there is a natural imbalance of power. When a man feels like he has no control, he will look for ways to take control and, most often, because it’s there at the basest level of human functioning, his target will be the women he encounters in his life.
But if a woman is in charge of how a man’s treatment of her makes her feel about herself, then she can find emotional and mental equilibrium even when faced with harassment, sexual assault, and rape. Women, own your sexuality; do not let it, or the men with whom you share it, define you.
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