I’ve been reading about the #YesAllWomen movement, which has
now attracted well over a million followers (I’ve never known exactly what to
do with hashtags, but I have to pay attention to this one). Even trying to
write about it is like walking into a very dense minefield, but here goes.
The movement, as many of us know, was touched off by the Isla Vista killer, who preceded his attack on women at UC
Santa Barbara with a long manifesto about it not being fair that women weren’t
attracted to him and that he was still a virgin at 22. So here we are, talking
about the prevalence of misogyny.
I’m hearing an echo. “Not all men will harass women, but at
some point, all women will have been harassed by a man” sounds a little like, “Not
all Muslims are terrorists, but most terrorists are Muslims.” Was the killer a
sexual terrorist, who has thrown us into a new period of suspicion and mistrust
between the genders?
Where did the killer’s misogyny come from? His sense of
entitlement to the sexual favors of females? Sexual attraction is natural and
beautiful, but we’re Americans, we’ve never quite learned what do with it and
where it belongs in our lives. Why was virginity a “thing” with the twisted
young man in Santa Barbara?
Why was losing it a goal (used to be that keeping it was – and BTW, when did
virginity get to be a male issue, anyway?).
After Isla Vista, we’re
scrambling to find who’s to blame for the killer’s feeling that women owed him
something. In a radio interview I heard, one analyst suggests that it could be Hollywood, for producing
streams of films in which the nerdy, unattractive guy gets the beautiful girl.
No wonder, he argues, that clumsy young men have a sense of entitlement. I don’t
know if I’d go there, but do the media bear some responsibility? Does the same
art that has the power to educate us about ourselves infuse us with a sense of,
“If it’s happening for him, why can’t it happen for me -- right now?”
Ours is not a culture of patience. Still a virgin at 22? I
wish someone could have told that Santa
Barbara guy that if he had just been able to wait a
bit, some woman would come along and find him attractive. He wouldn’t even have
to deserve it.
In the really old days, losing virginity wouldn’t have been
a big deal for a young man. The experienced older man was there to accompany
the younger one to the bordello. It’s terrible to say, perhaps, but there was
something honest about this approach. Instead of steaming himself up about
being a virgin at 22, why couldn’t Mr. Isla Vista have just paid for it somewhere
and gotten it over with in 20 minutes?
Whatever happened to courtship? A young woman I know told me
a while back that while she was constantly bedeviled by much older men being
attracted to her, she had to concede that older men knew how to treat women,
and most young men these days had no clue.
Courtship is not an alien concept. It is built into much of
the animal kingdom by instinct, with rituals among some birds being
unbelievably complicated. There are no short circuits with those species -- it’s
a process. And at the end, there is a time and a place for the sexual act.
I persist in the idea that human beings, whether we realize
it or not, have very similar wiring. Here’s hoping that more of us – especially
men – will learn that the best sex is part of a real relationship, which takes
a while to develop – usually more than the two hours in a movie.
In the meantime, in the words of Rodney King, can’t the
genders all just get along?
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