The past 12 months—the #MeToo year—have taught us plenty. Many of us had our eyes opened to the frequency and the damage of sexual assault and harassment. Also, the corrupting nature of power was once again laid bare. And we seemed, as a culture, to realize that the post-1970s framework of sexual morality was inadequate.
Specifically, the stories of sexual coercion and exploitation revealed that one cannot build a sexual morality on the single pillar of consent. Given the right environment of unequal power, people can be manipulated into consenting. Harvey Weinstein’s predations, and those by Charlie Rose and Al Franken and so many other powerful men, taught us how inadequate consent is as a moral guideline for sexual encounters. Consent is the bare minimum, of course, but it is not sufficient.
Much more of a foundation was needed to protect women (and men) from trauma and abuse. This was perhaps the most important lesson of #MeToo. And now, after a year, we’re at risk of discarding that lesson.
The Brett Kavanaugh episode has returned us to a world of ideological point-scoring, partisan posturing, and simplistic arguments. The discussion of sexual predation, coercion, and abuse has veered into stupidity.
President Trump, as is his tendency, took a specific occurrence—Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against Kavanaugh and the accompanying smear campaign by the likes of Michael Avenatti—and proclaimed that this was the real threat. The less frequent and second-order evil—a false accusation of sexual assault—was in his mind the real danger to confront.
In response, some liberal commentators returned to their own simplistic moralism: “Just teach your sons not to rape!”, as if decent people had ever taught their sons otherwise.
Making that simplistic idea even dumber is the common insistence that this is the beginning and end of reducing rape and sexual assault. This threatens a return to the pre-#MeToo framework of sexual morality, where the only consideration was consent. Much more is needed if we want to protect women (and men) from trauma or suffering that can result from unwanted sexual approaches.
No moral system can consist of only proscriptions, of “thou shalt nots.” Avoiding sin is not the same as being good. If we’re talking about what we’re going to “teach our sons” we need to do more than steer them away from doing the worst possible things. We need to fill them with virtues.
Lust comes very naturally to men. This is biology. And it can’t just be swept away – it needs to be replaced by virtues like prudence and temperance.
[Also read: Melania Trump on #MeToo: ‘I support the women,’ but they need to have evidence]
Chastity is a virtue that means something bigger than mere abstinence. Chaste love overcomes the temptation to treat the other as an object. It respects the other person’s full dignity as a human being. Imagine how much a little bit of chastity could have kept Weinstein or Matt Lauer from being the monsters they were? With enough practice exercising this virtue, they would have treated wives with love and fidelity, and the women in their workplaces with respect and professionalism, all for the same reason.
There are bigger issues to discuss about building a real safe and positive foundation for sexual interactions. And yes, that might include reserving sex for a lifelong, monogamous commitment, embedded in a community and oriented toward family formation. But that’s for another day.
For now, let’s stick to the virtues parents can “teach your sons” about sexual impropriety. Because it’s never enough merely to not grope or pressure women into sex.
Among some feminist scribes these days, it’s popular to denigrate “toxic masculinity.” I don’t mind that at all. There are certain vices and sins, including sexual predation, toward which boys and men are much more prone than women and girls. Sexual predation is a corruption and abuse of distinctly male attributes, including the male sex drive, male aggression, and male physical strength.
But accepting that there is “toxic masculinity” doesn’t imply that masculinity is itself toxic. We need to teach our sons to have and practice a wholesome masculinity.
The story that Christine Blasey Ford told reminded a friend of mine of an incident from college. Some old high school friends had a party, and many of the revelers were crashing at the party house. My friend was dozing off on a basement couch when a guy she had known for years forced himself on her. She shrieked and pushed the guy (call him Ted) off of her.
She was still vulnerable, though. It was late and dark. Teddy was drunk. It was a long night and she had no ride home. So she ran upstairs to where a friend, call him Fred, was already asleep. She awoke Fred and told him what happened. He stormed downstairs to Ted and made it very clear that his actions were despicable, and that he was to keep his distance.
Fred then (chastely) slept in the same room to protect the young woman.
When I recounted this to colleagues, one woman told me that in college, she always tried to go to parties with a couple of male friends whom she knew could protect her from creeps. Fred, or these other male friends, weren’t safe like defanged cats who have been taught merely not to take advantage of a vulnerable woman. These friends were solicitous and even physically protective. Armed with a clear view of what is right and wrong, informed by an instinctive understanding of dignity of the women around them, they acted like real men.
If we teach our sons virtues of bravery, of chastity, of defending the vulnerable, they won’t merely learn how not to treat women. They will learn how to treat them – to be good men, which is what the world needs.
