The sex bureaucracy: I think curfews worked a lot better
It’s a funny thing.
When I went to college many moons ago, we had boys’ dorms and girls’ dorms. Not only that, we called ourselves “boys” and “girls.” I had just turned seventeen when I went away to school, and I was happy to live in an all-girls dorm and be able to kiss my boyfriend goodbye at the door at curfew time.
It wasn’t perfect, but it seems it was a darn sight better than this dreadful state of affairs:
Writing in the California Law Review, Gersen and her husband Jacob argued that the creation of a “sex bureaucracy,” as the title of that article christened the system of administrative oversight of student sex lives [during the Obama administration as a result of the “Dear Colleague” letter], entailed “the enlargement of bureaucratic regulation of sexual conduct that is voluntary, non-harassing, nonviolent, and does not harm others.” The Gersens go on to note that “watered-down notions of nonconsent” embedded into regulation allowed “ambivalent, undesirable, unpleasant, unsober, or regretted sexual encounters to meet the standard.” The system thus “will investigate and discipline sexual conduct that women and men experience as consensual (if nonideal) sex.” The conduct deemed illegal, the Gersens wrote, “plausibly covers almost all sex students are having today.”
Are pre-sex consent forms next? They’re going to be long ones, too:
These expansive definitions of wrongdoing were paired with an adjudication system lacking nearly every aspect of fair process. “In recent years, it has become commonplace to deny accused students access to the complaint, the evidence, the identities of the witnesses, or the investigative report, and to forbid them from questioning complainants or witnesses,” Gersen noted in a recent piece in The New Yorker looking back at the changes wrought by the Dear Colleague letter.
The sex bureaucracy, in other words, pivoted from punishing sexual violence to imposing a normative vision of ideal sex, to which students are held administratively accountable. Georgia Southern University, for instance, explains that “Consent is a voluntary, sober, imaginative, enthusiastic, creative, wanted, informed, mutual, honest, and verbal agreement.” The California Law Review article culminates in a discussion of a case in which a gay male student was found responsible for sexual misconduct for waking his partner with a kiss (the sleeping cannot consent) and for looking at his partner’s genitals without consent while showering (consensually) with him.
Students living under this regime are in a system that is stark raving mad, deeply unfair, and tremendously destructive to human relationships.
“Students living under this regime are in a system that is stark raving mad, deeply unfair, and tremendously destructive to human relationships.”
I wholeheartedly agree neo, and think in addition that this result squares quite nicely with Mencken’s “. . . good and hard.”
If that’s so, then one may hope the lesson sinks swiftly home.
“consensual, if nonideal sex”
What percentage of “sexual encounters” are “ideal”? First cut – the number is higher for men than for women.
Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.
– Prometheus, in the poem “The Masque of Pandora”
And I remember when the democrats were ranting about keeping the government out of the bedroom, but that was soooo two or three decades ago.
Big Brother is watching you while you shower (without your consent !).
I just saw a freshman girl (I suppose I can say freshman and girl) wearing a t-shirt with the outline of the state and “consent y’all” written on it.
Thank God I went to college in the 70’s.
I am so glad the 2 sons we raised are married. I honestly would worry if they were single and seeking a wife. How ironic that in times that casual sex on your own terms (as opposed to our formerly Judeo-Christian framework that most of society observed) is fraught with such deadly consequences hinging on “she said”-“he said”, “she said” being the overriding determinate. Like so many things that have disregarded that age-old code, The Ten Commandments, the unintended consequences are upending and destroying the culture.
“… imaginative, enthusiastic, creative, wanted …”
Haha Just having moments ago spoken of how the organisms of the left’s minds construe the principles which they assert condition moral judgments …
I swear before eternity and all that is valuable, I could not care less than I do now, if one homosexual male awakens his partner with the surprise explosion of a lit stick of dynamite shoved up his goddamned arse.
The only thing that I do care about relating to this question is the fact that our psychic and moral lives are impinged upon and polluted, and our public and civic lives cluttered with, this kind of worthless, pointless, valueless kind of dispute, between persons who are both objectively morally disordered, and not worth consideration as moral fellows in the first place.
Not having sexual relations with someone until you’re willing to raise children with them — which, for legal/prudential purposes of guardianship and inheritance means that you’ve married them — is the ideal.
Our perception that this ideal is out-of-date has to do with the fact that…
(a.) The ideal never was, nor ever could be, perfect bliss for everyone; it often even caused heartbreak; but it was, all things considered, the optimal solution in an imperfect world;
(b.) Widespread availability and use of contraceptives created the illusion that unrestrained indulgence of one’s mating appetites was now, suddenly, a cost-free proposition;
(c.) The combination of (a.) and (b.) created a further illusion that the grass was greener on the other side of the “wait until you’re married” line;
(d.) That further illusion has been progressively debunked by the last 100 years of human history, if its consequences are viewed objectively;
(e.) But, most people don’t clearly, let alone viscerally, remember the ways that things were better or worse before now except within a 20-to-30 year time horizon, which is too narrow to permit sober analysis of the civilizational catastrophe of the ethos of “recreational sex sans familism”;
(f.) Consequently, there is no realistic, gut-level appreciation of the way in which the destruction of the emotional and practical norms of family stability have produced several successive generations of emotionally-scarred “walking wounded” who erroneously perceive their childhoods to have been “normal” or “good enough,” but whose collective traumas and neuroses have made our whole civilization dysfunctional and more likely to collapse under pressure.
Tangentially:
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/08/14/american-bar-association-tables-new-definition-consent-criminal-sex-assault-cases
I once went on a very short relationship with a woman who turned out to be married to an infantilist and was polyamory… she came included with a 20 page form of things one could do or have done to the self or another, and was broken into columns of what your willing to do, want to do, wont do, etc…
ahead of her time i guess…
RC: “Not having sexual relations with someone until you’re willing to raise children with them “
Back in the days Neo and I remember, when girls’ dorms were only for girls, and when contraceptives were not widely available, and abortions were not legal, this was the default thinking for most girls and women. Obviously, some girls made mistakes and got into messes, but in general it was a much better situation for girls and women than today’s environment.
I am so glad I had the option of attending a single-sex college. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.
RC: “Not having sexual relations with someone until you’re willing to raise children with them”
You are dreaming of an ideal that never was and never will be.
“Are pre-sex consent forms next?” – Neo
Used to called marriage licenses.
I do not consent to be in a relationship where I cannot be awakened with a kiss.
RoyNathanson:
What ideal world are you referring? The one R.C. refers to was inhabited by moral responsible individuals, (who had some grounding in the non-atheistic non-secular culture). I know, an alien world to you, but one that did exist and function for a long time.
“… bureaucratic regulation of sexual conduct that is voluntary,…” If it’s voluntary, what’s the need of regulation?
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/jwmvxd/chappelle-s-show-love-contract
Michel Houellebecq in his novel The Possibility of An Island writes about a near future in which people clone themselves so as, in a sense, not to die. The first thing that is lost is the sense of humor. Along with this goes curiosity, creativity, and any notion whatsoever of “testing the boundaries” or breaking a rule.
We’re not that far away from this ideal of right thinking and right living becoming realized without any necessity for clones.
Already, so many would readily subsume wills to a centralized computer in order that they might never sin, overeat, fail to moderately exercise, not wear a bicycle helmet, indulge in alcohol or unprescribed drugs, commit any act of violence, fail to recycle… a chip implanted in the brain would probably do the trick.
Limiting available vocabulary and then available thought would soon be a breeze.
“… but in general [life before “the sexual revolution”] was a much better situation for girls and women than today’s environment.”
And for children. And for men, for that matter.
I wonder about the interplay between the sex bureaucracy and the increasing juvenilization of young adults. We seem to have extended the teenage years until well past 18. We don’t treat these adults as adults, we treat them as utter children. And I agree, of course, that many of them act as children. But our culture has slowly been infantilizing these legal adults to the point where we don’t expect them to mediate and govern their own life experiences and choices, but we require an arm of the state (public state universities) or an overly bureaucratized private university to do so.
In my opinion, it’s just a sign of the decline of our culture and our institutions.
‘tremendously destructive to human relationships’ As the saying goes; that’s a feature, not a bug.
Solution: Don’t attend such a lunatic institution
When I went to university the only reason there were segregated (by sex) dorms was because there were 7 times as many women as men in attendance (Florida State University early 70s). It was a glorious time to be alive.
Both women and men are much worse off under the present rules. Men, however, are rapidly coming to the conclusion that the “relationship” game is rigged and not worth playing, especially since the stakes are so high and the consequences so drastic if they have children and then are divorced. Young men see their dads/brothers/friends get legally raped in family court and think, “That could be me if I’m stupid, and ‘stupid’ means getting involved with one of these harpies. No thanks–I’ll play video games, hang out with my bros, save my money and take trips to Thailand if I want to have sex with young women.”
This means that Western, particularly American, women, who are given near-absolute free rein to do as they please since the game rules favor them so heavily, are STILL angry since so many men won’t put themselves in a situation where they are bound by those rules.
I keep reading that women’s happiness levels have been in a steady decline since the 60’s and the Pill’s introduction of consequence-free sex. I don’t doubt those claims. From my observation, most Western women have not only lost the knowledge of proper home and family management, but have actively decided that even knowing anything about such subjects represents “grovelling submission to the patriarchy,” or some such nonsense. Consequently, they bring little to the marital table except the ability to provide sexual favors, and even that only when they feel like it.
On the other side, men are expected to not only perform their traditional roles of family provider and protector even more thoroughly and competently, but they must also be “sensitive” and “caring” and “understanding of a woman’s rights and needs,” even when the women often act like immature, spoiled and unreasonable children. Failing to keep the wife blissfully happy, no matter what the reason, is considered (by both the courts and most other women) as justifiable cause for divorce, with all its attendant disasters for the husband and any children involved. No wonder most smart American young men either reject marriage outright or look overseas for a potential mate!
After watching this sad comedy since the 60’s, my estimation is that the ongoing disconnect between the sexes is going to continue to get worse before it gets any better, if it ever does, and that the fault lies mostly with the women.
Hey Mac, I largely agree with your sentiment and comment. I’m not sure that I would necessarily agree that the fault lies mostly with the women. Plenty of blame can be laid at the feet of the men as well. In my opinion, of course.
Hi Mike,
The reason I blame it mostly on the women is that the balance of expectations has shifted so greatly toward the men. When I was a young man, women prepared for marriage by learning how to cook, sew, shop, and run a home. Men were expected to work and bring home enough money to support that home. All of the 1960’s expectations for men are still in place, along with a lot more of them. No woman in 2019 is going to put up with Don Draper, for example. On the other side, no man in 2019 marrying an American woman would think he had a right to expect that his wife could cook or sew, and most women would think he was “controlling” if he did. Good thing men don’t have those expectations about American women since most of them can’t come close to meeting them, and the vast majority wouldn’t want to.
Now, with that said and it clearly established that women’s expected skill set for marriage, circa 2019 is considerably less than it was in 1960 while men’s is considerably greater, we still have a 50% divorce rate. Something is wrong with this picture, and I think the male component bears a much smaller part of the blame for the greatly higher failure rate.
One thing is absolutely certain: young men think so. We now have a smaller proportion of married young men, relative to the population’s size, than we have had in this country since they began keeping records of such things. In my recollection, men used to be anxious to marry in the mid-20th Century. They are clearly much less so in the early 21st.
Why this is the case is, of course, open to interpretation.
One of the advantages of curfews, and chauffeurs, is it allowed the girl to deflect her refusal into another, more powerful authority. It made it easier to say no. Now, all the pressure to say no comes directly on the girl. She used to be able to deflect it and say, “Oh I’m sorry, I have curfew. Too bad!” It was a more graceful and less difficult way to let the guy down.
Sorry, that should have read chaperone. And I could had added, dad’s with shotguns.
@ Mac.
It’s a complex matter where economics, metaphysical perspectives, anthropology, and personal preferences and capacities all intersect.
You mentioned birth control and the rise among some larger portion of the populace than before of an unapologetic interest in, and assumption of a right to engage in, recreational sex. And, by implication, their ability to do so in a social solidarity infused environment where others, not necessarily sharing those values, are nonetheless expected to pick-up the costs of the practitioners missteps.
Well that one example serves as a paradigm case highlighting all kinds of values shifts and declensions relevant to just that one activity.
– The idea that self-governance and occasional continence constitute and build objective moral virtues and strengths on the one hand; versus a promotion of the unrestrained satisfaction of sexual urges as being the ultimate in baseline human fulfillment and liberation, on the other.
– The notion on the one hand that the body is the temple of the spirit; versus the conviction that the body is (exemplified in the words of Madonna) simply a material world playground, for a material world girl, on the other.
– the perception that for the vast majority of mankind a healthy heterosexual pairing brings the greatest long term self-realization; versus an undeniably justified perception that for the ugly, the sexually perverted, the wanton, the homosexual, this is simply not, or not as assuredly, the case.
And thus their struggles to socially normalize their dysfunctions so that they may feel themselves socially inclusion-worthy and respectable when compared to those who actually and by their natural acts create the human material that constitutes the society which the dysfunctional must live in, or alongside of, if they are to survive.
It’s easy to imagine a healthy and attractive heterosexual woman being content to be what she biologically is, and perhaps to voluntarily assume certain specialized duties in a marital relationship in return for certain privileges and respect.
But we have had for generations now in our society, a strongly subversive undercurrent wearing away at the majority’s values simply because the subversives are constitutionally are ill-fitted to undertake that natural project.
What recourse do they have but either to rhetoric and subversion, or, to accept the traditional as normative, try to adapt, and in the case of failure to plead for pity?
What use, considering it from her standpoint, has a fat, physically ugly, mentally depressed lesbian for the kind of “deal” that a highly sought after hetero female can strike? What use has a homosexual male for a beautiful, sexually vivacious and fecund hetero woman? Even if they construct what they imagine to be facsimiles of natural families, there can be no biologically rooted relationships of the kind that exist in natural heterosexual families.
One of the things that struck me most forcibly recently was reading up on the history and origins of Roe V Wade. I had no idea that counsel for Jane Roe, were both lesbians on the lookout for a test case.
Think too of Madalyn Murray O’hair, and the recent revelations concerning her twisted personal life.
Consider also the so-called liturgical movement in Roman Catholic Church in the 1960’s, and the prominent role closeted homosexual males who had infiltrated the priesthood, had in revising the orientation and focus of worship from the “vertical” up to God direction, to a horizontal, more community focused activity.
In each of these instances people who were sexually abnormal and dysfunctional in serious ways which involved them in profound alienation from the natural order, committed themselves to reordering the sensibilities of all other persons in society in order to reduce their own personal alienation by revaluing broad social values in a way which they supposed would open up possibilities for their fulfillment … which they did not see, or refused to see, as fundamentally disordered.
It’s complex in the number of facets, but essentially one phenomenon looks at from different angles.
Or so it seems to me after considerable reflection.
DNW,
Excellent comment, and I agree with your observations completely. As a society, we have gone off the rails by being too inclusive. We have forgotten that not everything is beneficial, or even neutral in its effects. There are deadly behavioral pathogens that need to be rigidly excluded from a healthy society. Our national failure to do so has damaged our societal cohesion very badly, possibly to the point of collapse in the not-too-distant future.
Keep posting. Our nation needs all the rational voices we can get out there, since the dangerously irrational have long had their volume knobs pegged at 11 trying to drown out the voices of reason.
“In each of these instances people who were sexually abnormal and dysfunctional in serious ways which involved them in profound alienation from the natural order, committed themselves to reordering the sensibilities of all other persons in society in order to reduce their own personal alienation by revaluing broad social values in a way which they supposed would open up possibilities for their fulfillment … which they did not see, or refused to see, as fundamentally disordered.” – DNW
A well-phrased summation of the heart of the problem.
I note, however, that this revaluing could not have succeeded without the active acquiesence of the non-dysfunctional broader society.
The dilemma that always faces the “normal” population is between the task of excluding “dysfunctional” persons, which is a far too easy and generally quite harsh action in every society we know of, and the challenge of including them as members of the community without letting them redefine the bounds of acceptable behavior.
There is a is a well-known teaching from the Midrash about the result of tolerating criminal, or outright evil, actions — “Whoever is kind to the cruel will end up being cruel to the kind” — recognizing that someone is going to get hurt either way, and it is worse to let the innocent suffer than to stop the guilty.
I suspect that many of the strict prohibitions and punishments against aberrant behavior stem from an analogous observation. That the bans can be taken to extremes is a given, but it is hard to know where the balance point lies between being justly merciful to the outliers, and sliding into communal destruction.
And, of course, there are a host of associated problems in defining what behaviors is, in fact, criminal / evil, and must indeed be stopped in order to preserve the social order, which we are seeing in the ongoing “you’re the fascist” – “no, you’re the fascist!” confrontations of our current political factions.
Discussions of the maxim:
https://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php
http://www.acpr.org.il/ENGLISH-NATIV/06-issue/shochetman-6.htm
The second link is a very long exposition on Israel, terrorism, jurisprudence, and the ruminations of the Sages, but this section seemed relevant to the current topic, as we have seen in many ways that being “compassionate” (tolerant) when “cruelty” (firmness) is needed results in situations that are infinitely worse than the starting point (here, the unjust persecution of men accused of sexual impropriety).
Also applicable to the “First Step” penal reforms; see copious posts on the subject at PowerLine especially.
Riffing off of DNW’s ruminations:
https://thefederalist.com/2019/08/08/killed-god-family-community-now-killing-us/
On that idea of balancing the enforcement of social / religious norms with reasonable accommodations of other behaviors, here is an example of extreme non-tolerance; although the Palestinian’s goal is preservation of their community mores, Americans & the West in general now reject this kind of harsh persecution, but where is the line we crossed that reversed the power-positions of normal (literally the statistical norm) and outlying behavior?
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/08/intersectionality-on-the-west-bank.php
@Roy Nathanson:
You quote my earlier post: “Not having sexual relations with someone until you’re willing to raise children with them”…, and then reply: “You are dreaming of an ideal that never was and never will be.”
Not so.
First, to point out what ought to be has nothing to do with whether one thinks that situation has ever previously obtained or ever will. I’m just laying out what works for human beings if and when they do it, which they can (I’ve known several couples; you probably have, too). That humans commonly don’t abstain from fornication when they should is only a specific case of the general rule that humans commonly do things they know they oughtn’t. But the humans who do abstain from fornication also statistically wind up better off in all the ways one would typically expect they would.
Now stating all that just isn’t the same as claiming that self-control in this area (a.) ever has been universal or (b.) ever will be universal. I don’t “dream” that either is the case.
Secondly, to say that abstaining from fornication is not universal is not the same as denying it was once the norm. “Everybody does it” is not true and never was; “Nobody does it” is also not true and never was. In fact, prior to widespread availability of artificial contraception, avoiding premarital sex was the norm…with one amusing proviso. For of course part of this “norm” was the then-common reality of 30% or more of all firstborn children being born 1-3 months prematurely…and, coincidentally, these “early births” nearly always occurred 6-8 months after the wedding!
The point is: Yes, of course there were persons having premarital sexual relations. They were not the majority, but they were a large minority. But, when it resulted in pregnancy, they typically got married and typically stayed married until one of them died. That’s the statistical reality. And because that was the statistical reality, and babies born 6-8 months after the wedding arguably could have been conceived on the wedding night, there was a seemingly uninterrupted social norm against premarital sex. This seemingly uninterrupted norm was further reinforced the then-universal reality that starting to be sexually active normally produced a baby sometime in the first several months: Anyone contemplating “going all the way” was asking themselves, “Do I want this other person to be the father/mother of my baby, and therefore hopefully also my lifelong husband/wife, starting sometime within the next calendar year?” Such a prospect was often (I never said it was always) sufficient to daunt even the raging hormones of teenagers.
So family life really was radically different in, say, 1900.
Now, if you’d confined yourself to saying that, now that the world has divorced sex from procreation through artificial contraception and widely-available abortion, it is impossible for fornication to ever again become a minority practice…why then, I’d have had nothing much to say in reply. It probably won’t ever again become a rarity. One cannot un-invent technologies; and while a ban on abortions would probably greatly reduce the number of abortions, a ban on condoms (!) will never happen. So, the cultural changes produced by contraceptive availability are probably irreversible.
But I think people don’t live for centuries at a time, and don’t remember much outside of the most recent decade of their lives. The result is a shocking failure to appreciate how much the severance of “orgasm” from “baby” changed the culture: Nobody can remember how it was, and the stats, when we review them, describe a world almost alien to us.
Why don’t we just go straight to Sheldon Cooper’s Relationship Agreement?
See: Meat Loaf, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”, 1977
“The ruminations of the sages …”
LOL … I liked that phrasing,
Well, I guess they said it first, if the texts you refer to are nearly as old as the original Talmud.
But as Neo has recently referred to Romeo and Juliet, this quote is worth bearing in mind as well …
An,
A small “L” libertarian polity solves to the minds of some, like our ancestors, a portion of these issues. The damned are free to be damned, and the Devil take them if that is what they want.
But the informal techniques of keeping the obnoxious at arm’s length are so fundamentally repugnant to some persons that they cannot abide living in such a polity, with its parallel societies … or better, in a larger society with its outcasts. So, they seek to reconfigure our political relations in the form of a “Great Society” in which “all are valued” and “none excluded” if their defect be though “no fault of their own”; or, eventually, as things evolve along these lines, due to “faults” which are not really their fault and thus not objective faults, since, ‘ we are all just social constructions and congeries of accidents and impulses beyond our control and responsibility, anyway. Please pass the salt.
Thus, “tolerance”, in the words of his greatness “The One”, is not enough. We must feel one anothers’ pains; “commit” in the words of Rawls “to a shared fate”; recognize as Rorty advises, “that chance is a worthy master”, that we simply wnat what we want as a result of historical accident, and that there is no objective there, there.
Of course you cannot really live like that for long. But you can for awhile; until the stored capital of previous generations runs out, and you find yourself completely morally bankrupt, stalled, and with no principles other than fear of death, if you do fear death more than life, to get you going again.