Commenter “Lizzy” writes:
I’m thinking it’s no coincidence that women have recently expanded their definition of sexual assault and out-of-bounds male behavior to include things like morning after regret, the unwelcome male gaze, and “slut-shaming.” So women still expect expressions of respect and recognition of their control within the relationship (as was previously demonstrated through chivalry), it’s just been twisted into bizarre expectations in an age of nearly no-strings sex.
When I was in college, curfews were in effect. Freshman women had to sign in and out of the dorm, and on weekdays we had to be back by 11 PM and on weekends 12:30 AM. We could sign out overnight on weekends, too, if we put the name and address and phone number of the people with whom we were staying. For upperclasswomen it was more lax, but I don’t remember the details because by the time I got to that point the rules had simply evaporated, abolished by the administration. Even the rule against boys visiting girls’ dorms and girls visiting boys’ dorms (and I use the terms “boys” and “girls” because that’s what we called ourselves back then) were pretty much finito, all in the space of two short years.
I’m not sure what the rules had been for men when I first entered college, but they had them. I’m pretty sure they were allowed to stay out later than women, but not indefinitely.
The end of the rules occurred because of a combination of pressure from the late-1960s student body and a lack of commitment on the part of those enforcing the rules. Simply put, the administration didn’t seem to care, and one by one the rules fell in record time at college after college across the country. As I remember it (and this description of what happened at a single university bears me out if it’s at all typical), universities became tired of standing in loco parentis and washed their hands of the whole affair once the demand ceased.
Fast forward to now, and the effort by school administrators, egged on by the Obama administration and politically correct thinking, to put new rules of behavior into place for how the sexes ought to relate to each other now that the old rules are a distant memory. Discussions of a supposed campus “rape culture” and what to do about it—including whether it actually exists and what constitutes an objectionable sexual assault—are legion.
One way to conceptualize the whole thing is with an analogy to an endoskeleton versus an exoskeleton, an inner support structure versus an outer one. When I was in school we had both: the university rules were the exoskeleton, and our own personal rules for behavior were an endoskeleton. When the campus rules got jettisoned so precipitously at the same time the sexual revolution was happening, the whole thing turned to a sea of endoplasm for young people of the time, who were left without much guidance, either internal or external, for their sexual behavior. Some people (the religious, for example) retained their previous internal standards as well as the external ones provided by their religious subgroups. But many of the rest became lost, although they probably would not have described it that way—they would have described it as “free.”
But other problems crept in. Morning-after guilt. Women feeling pressured to have more sex than they were comfortable with, either by mores or by men or by their own idea of what their own sexiness should be. Men feeling pressured in other ways, including the perception that they weren’t getting as much sex as other men. Confused communication, misunderstandings.
In recent years all of this has led universities to institute a new exoskeleton, a set of guidelines that are somewhat different than they used to be but that attempt to make explicit the restrictions within the generalized freedom: for example, “yes means yes” laws, rampant “rape culture” fears, and the burgeoning practice of judging men’s behavior without traditional due process protections.
As commenter “mizpants” put it, some of this is a “reaction to the vulnerability of women after the breakdown of traditional social constraints on sexuality.” And it ends up making men more vulnerable, too, particularly to false accusations.
The moral of the story? Societies have always had rules about sexual behavior, and sex among young people who are thrown together at an age when the drive is particularly high and the pressures particularly intense cries out for external and internal rules to assist in dealing with the complexities and temptations of it all.
