Gender Wars, Take 2?

This is a subject about which I may have some unwelcome things to say, and how many friends I will have at the end may be slightly in question.

There has been much talk since the Isla Vista shooting about misogyny, the prevalence of rape on college campuses, and similar topics. #YesAllWomen, says the hashtag, will be sexually harassed, if not assaulted outright, by a man at some point. Men counter, but not all men are like that (which usually means “I’M not like that!”). But enough are.

Among the most debated issues is dress. Rape victims are naturally offended when the cops ask them what they were wearing. Of course, it shouldn’t matter what a woman was wearing, there is NO excuse for sexual assault of any kind. But can it be a factor?

Taking up a different crime for a moment: The same cops often tell us around the holidays not to leave a wrapped gift in the back seat while we’re away from the car. Someone may break in and steal it. Of course, it’s a crime, and most wouldn’t do it. But the temptation may prove too much for somebody, who may even feel entitled to steal.

When it comes to dress, most women in my experience, especially the attractive ones, know that dress sends a message, and they usually know exactly what message they want to send, especially if it’s a first date – or a job interview. They want to be attractive, of course, but there are degrees and intentions. I’m not talking about wearing short skirts or showing cleavage here. Sometimes it’s the exact opposite: a beautiful woman may dress down somewhat and cover more, because she wants her beauty to be just an a-ttraction, not a dis-traction. Or, she wants to send the right socioeconomic message.

Hugh Hefner and others succeeded in liberating Americans from sexual repression, but he also opened the door wide to the fetishization (don’t make me say that fast) of women. The media, including music and games as well as TV, print, film and the Web, create strong impressions in young straight men’s brains, often long before flesh-and-blood females do. The sad part is that men and women usually learn to be gender warriors long before they learn to be friends.

We go on and on about how human civilization is speeding up global warming, and the steps we must take to protect the planet. What is modern culture doing to our souls? Why is it all of a sudden so much more dangerous for women? Why do some men feel such sexual entitlement in what seems like an otherwise free and equitable country?

Am I saying here that women should be walking around in burkas and men in black suits? Or that men who assault shouldn’t be held accountable? Not at all! What I am saying is that just as things are way out of balance in our physical environment, they are similarly out of balance in our cultural one. What can we do to restore that balance? And in the meantime, don’t parents have the responsibility to raise both male and female children to respect others -- and how to navigate safely through what can sometimes be a dangerous world?

A Time and a Place

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?

Isla Vista and the NSA

Before all of us who are outraged about NSA spying demand that the whole apparatus be flushed down the toilet, maybe there’s an overlooked beneficial application.

The shooter in the UC Santa Barbara incident telegraphed his murderous intentions by posting them on the Internet before he carried them out. Maybe an intelligence whizbang could figure out how to flag such pronouncements instantly so that the authorities could step in to prevent these tragedies (and then, of course, the authorities have to act). Allegedly, the system was set up to catch foreign terrorists. Wasn’t Isla Vista a form of domestic terrorism? Is a twisted romantic passion any less dangerous than a twisted religious one?

Gun control is a wonderful idea, but crafting legislation that plugs all the loopholes immediately is virtually impossible. Richard Martinez, whose son died in the Isla Vista shooting, called Congress and the national leadership a “rudderless bunch of idiots.” Wrong. They are not rudderless at all. They know exactly where they’re NOT going. Maybe this time, they will be prompted to do something, but we have to accept that it would likely be largely symbolic. Still, we have to start someplace.

As many observers have told us, the problem is cultural. You are not going to take guns out of the American psyche with a few pieces of legislation. The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t end the love of slavery, and we’re still not through with discrimination. It just takes time.

The unbalanced young man who carried out the Isla Vista shooting apparently never learned that a sense of entitlement when it comes to women doesn’t lead to success in that sphere. Where did his sense of entitlement come from? And where did his conviction that the use of a gun would make him feel better come from? Movies? TV? The Internet? Bad parenting? A chemical imbalance?

As for Congress, a female religious leader from the 19^th century, Mary Baker Eddy, speaking about women’s suffrage, felt that  a reasonable means of making it happen would be to raise a “nobler race for legislation” and that it would require an “elevation of society in general.” That takes time, and she was speaking about women’s suffrage more than 50 years before it came along.

If I may put it very bluntly, the holders of outdated views have to die off before a full cultural change can take place. In the meantime, it’s up to young people of child-bearing age to start raising that “nobler race,” and demand that those profiting from the gun culture change their ways. That means everyone, Hollywood included.

But we have to do what we can when we can. If you hit the Congressional mule over the head with enough logical 2-by-4s, will it eventually get the message?