With
territory and wealth cometh the flesh.
It’s
been that way since the dawn of Homo sapiens, who, for the past
300,000 years and still counting has been nature’s favourite
predator. But in less than a century, the presumed DNA-deep
trading of territory for flesh has suddenly fallen into the
major disfavour of women, who not so long ago were only too
happy to submit to the dominant male.
In
a mere evolutionary blink of the eye, women have made remarkable
advances in delinking the ‘your abode for my body’
one-sided deal, which suggests that men who have been slow to
react to the virility-breaking new order perhaps deserve to
be 
granted
some slack – not to be confused with impunity -- in respect
to their reluctance to radically change behaviour that dates
back to the Middle Paleolithic. Lest we forget, we are all manifestly
creatures of habit and categorically prefer pleasure to pain,
so it is surely predictable that men will not voluntarily change
their behaviour unless the rewards (being spared from public
shafting and shaming) are at a minimum equal to the rewards
of not changing.
In
the present century, women are empowered as never before and
are no longer beholding to the authority and protection of men.
However even prior to this recent sea change, women have always
understood, or intuited that the harsh conditions of life —
and not biological imperative — obliged them to seek out,
flatter and give themselves away to the king of the beasts in
fair exchange for the security he offered. In other words, men
who conveniently confuse the habit/expectation of ‘with
territory comes the flesh’ for a natural right are in
fact exploiting a vulnerability that isn’t fixed but variable
or reversible. When there is choice, women are inclined to take
responsibility for decisions that bear directly on the unfolding
of their destinies.
The
facts on the ground speak for themselves: women are no less
capable than men in providing the invention and expertise upon
which all nations depend for their advancement. Where women
are granted equal rights, opportunity and protection under the
law, they are leaders in every field of endeavour: they direct
films, head multi-national corporations, are elected to run
countries, and many count among Forbes’s 40 richest billionaires:
(Liliane Bettencourt, Alice Walton, Jacqueline Mars, Maria Fissolo,
Susanne Klatten, Laurene Jobs).
For
most of human history — and with the blessings of nature
— women competed among themselves and used their sexuality
to win the breeding rights and protection of the dominant male.
We note parenthetically that the much-derided groupie who gives
herself away to the rich and famous is simply the modern face
of that time-tested ethos. It wasn’t so long ago that
being selected for the harem or concubine was tantamount to
winning the lottery. Allowing for cultural variations, this
is how men and women arranged their lives for hundreds of thousands
of years. But with the invention of the printing press (Gutenberg)
circa 1440, and the ensuing democratization of knowledge, women
rather suddenly began to refuse the traditional roles that had
been assigned to them and to began to fight for a say in decisions
that concerned their bodies and the shaping of their societal
values and cultural institutions.
The
most significant chapter to date in this historic movement is
being written on our watch. In the wide and limb-strewn wake
of the many powerful men in politics and the entertainment industry
who have had their heads chopped off for preying on the vulnerable,
the 21st-century woman is now sufficiently positioned in her
working relationships with men to refuse the exchange of sexual
favours for career opportunity or advancement. Of course there
will always be men, coarse creatures of habit for whom pleasure
and power are the be all and end all, who will refuse to acknowledge
the new order that obliges them to share power and respect women
once under their command. But they will now have to do battle
with other men, former allies, who understand where their best
interests lie.
If
men, dating from the Middle Paleolithic era to the near present,
were traditionally feted and envied for their conquest of territory
and flesh, today, for that very same behaviour, they now risk
being outed and publically shamed. That women have dared to
speak out and completely rewrite the playbook redounds to their
courage, tenacity and wherewithal to exploit the various communication
platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) which obviates having
to wage their identity struggles and rights wars in isolation.
Men caught abusing their power and position in order to extract
compliance from women now risk being exposed and severely punished,
and the whole world is watching, including men who will have
observed how precipitously the mighty have fallen, and will
be the wiser for it regarding the emergence of a new power dynamic
that obliges them to radically change their ways or pay —
proof that a 300,000 year old habit can be broken, that broken
women can repair themselves as more and more men are broken
down into their nasty bits and pieces, the first necessary step
in reconstituting themselves as men for whom women are equal
partners in the unfolding human drama.
SEXUAL
PREDATION AND CONSEQUENCES
In
the damning light of the Harvey Weinstein scandal, it is no
longer acceptable to compromise or exploit women who are looking
to better themselves in male-dominated hierarchies. Weinstein’s
conceit and arrogance combined with his unexamined sense of
entitlement make him the ideal poster child for the fraternity
of powerful men and their enablers for whom women are merely
conveniences or objects to plunder. But it would be a mistake
to regard him as a monster unless we regard all men as monsters
since they have been guilty of the same kind of behaviour since
the dawn of man. Weinstein and his kind cannot be accused of
violating a sacred trust between the sexes, but of simply doing
what comes naturally in environments that favour powerful men.
But in environments best served by equal opportunity, women
everywhere are beginning to agitate against the old order. In
Africa women are speaking out against FGM (female genital mutilation),
a practice that allows men to control women’s sexuality;
and in Muslim countries, more and more women are emigrating
to the West and/or forsaking the burqa and the mind-set in stone
view that regards the feminine form as a manifestation of the
devil in a red dress. While these developments are encouraging
and enjoy the support of some men, there are still far too many,
dissimulators par excellence, who for appearances and
due advantage, make sure they are publically noticed sidling
up to the new woman and her cause when in fact they harbour
a deep mistrust and resentment of the new order.
It
would also be a mistake to turn a blind eye to the fact that
the Weinsteins of the world, precisely because of the rewards,
are the secret envy of many males. “Power is the ultimate
aphrodisiac,” writes Henry Kissinger, former Secretary
of State.
Responding to recent allegations of sexual propriety, the 5'4"actor
Richard Dreyfuss writes:
At the height of my fame in the late 1970s I became an asshole–the
kind of performative masculine man my father had modeled
for me to be. I lived by the motto, “If you don’t
flirt, you die.” And flirt I did. I flirted with all
women, be they actresses, producers, or 80-year-old grandmothers.
I even flirted with those who were out of bounds, like the
wives of some of my best friends, which especially revolts
me. I disrespected myself, and I disrespected them, and
ignored my own ethics, which I regret more deeply than I
can express. During those years I was swept up in a world
of celebrity and drugs—which are not excuses, just
truths. Since then I have had to redefine what it means
to be a man, and an ethical man. I think every man on Earth
has or will have to grapple with this question.
As
more and more men are being pilloried in the public arena, is
it fair to ask if the pendulum (euphemism for axe) has swung
too far? Extreme radical feminists, with their own agendas and
sharp axes to grind (on the necks of men) have co-opted the
founding spirit of women’s liberation, turning it away
from rights issues into a platform that demonizes all men. Many
affronted women report feeling diminished and even threatened
under the masculine gaze, which they now regard as a form of
sexual harassment. In response, many men confess to feeling
uncomfortable and/or guilty for daring to even glance at a woman,
which leaves them caught between their natural inclinations
and a back-log of civilizational discontents. So in order to
placate their DNA-driven compunction to gaze and gawk at attractive
women they have cleverly legitimized activities and vocations
where they can, with impunity, visually devour attractive, sexy
women. From beauty contests, to beach volleyball (the ultimate
skin game), to morning exercise/fitness programs, to the bikini
babes who announce the rounds in boxing or latest line of sports
cars, to combining serious content with voyeurism (Playboy),
all cater to men’s irrepressible desire to visually objectify
women.
It’s
hardly a statistical oddity that in the 1970s, 70% of gynecologists
were men. Does there exist a male gynecologist alive (who was
once a pimply faced, hormone-topped teenager) who hasn’t
actively entertained fantasies about women’s private parts?
As for the proctologist, this is not the proper venue to get
into the nitty gritty of colon care, only to say that men and
women bent over with their backsides protruding presents opportunities
simply not available to the endocrinologist (during office hours).
It
takes a lot of civilizing to change the primitive promptings
that inform our cultural defaults. “Civilization is like
a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness,”
writes the director, Werner Herzog, of Fitzcarraldo
and Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
Harvey
Weinstein and kind have been enabled by the fraternity of men
greedy for the immunity and institutional privilege that assures
female compliance. Whether it is right or wrong is almost beside
the point since that is how it has always been until women decided
to rewrite the rules, and now the formerly unrevolted female
masses are speaking in one voice—and men are listening.
If
women are now in a position to hold up “half the sky”
a quarter of the time, it decidedly hasn’t been with the
consent of men, but by daring to wage the equivalent of the
Hundred Years’ War where the casualty count is a number
that will never be known. Mercifully, the enormous sacrifice
— physical and psychological — has not been for
naught; many men once hostile to the ascent of women are now
allied with them in the more pressing challenge of saving the
planet from man’s worst instincts.
