I’m afraid your argument is directed against an absurd caricature of the article I actually wrote. In no way did I say or even suggest that scantily clad women walking along the street deserve whatever’s coming to them, including rape, while the men who engage in such behavior are totally blameless. Rather, I pointed to the increasingly hypocritical nature of our society, which expects women to dress and act more and more provocatively while expecting men to be more and more disciplined in not being provoked. This does not mean that women wearing revealing clothing on the street deserve to be fondled, raped or otherwise sexually assaulted. My point, which you appear to have missed, was, this: “What is or is not appropriate in any given scenario is a matter of a very complex dance, not an exact science or something that can be dictated by the new breed of vengeful puritans that have arisen amongst us.” In other words, sexuality is inherently complicated, playful and risque. It’s a give-and-take, where women often do things to entice men or lead men on, and men might misread signals or think something’s being suggested or offered that’s just in their heads. And women also change their minds about events that transpired. If they feel self-disgusted after what they did during a boozy night out, they might suddenly start feeling like victims when, in fact, they were complicit. This should not later become the subject of this kind of public shaming, firings, disciplinary actions, etc., where decades have passed since something may or may not have happened.

The #MeToo movement has, in my view, actually trivialized real sexual assault by completely conflating legitimate concerns about serious sexual assault that goes unpunished with trivial nonsense about mere “unwanted sexual advances” of the kind engaged in by Al Franken, Donald Trump, Louis CK or Charlie Rose that mature women should be able to get past without thinking it’s a big deal that scars them for life. There are power imbalances in life and in the workplace all the time, and this is not gender-specific. On a daily basis, in every aspect of life, powerful men and powerful women behave abominably towards less powerful men and less powerful women. Workplace hazing rituals of all sorts are common. Bosses mistreat, insult and berate their employees, get them to do things they don’t want to be doing, etc., and the employee has to grin and bear it, at the risk of losing a job. Sexual advances are just one sub-species of this larger problem. This is life. We need to be raising kids that are resilient, that will be able to take it on the chin and move on without feeling victimized by this kind of stuff. What we’re doing instead is trying to turn a bit of over-the-line behavior at some office party that got out of hand into a big deal 10 years down the road and, as a result, create a generation of women who feel like they’re traumatized victims of sexual assault, just like we’ve already created a generation of African-Americans who feel like they’re they’re traumatized victims of racism and white supremacy.

We need balance, and we need to stop infantilizing women and start frankly acknowledging the manner in which women avail themselves of their sexuality to achieve their own goals. I would bet that for every one man in the media or entertainment industry that has crossed the line with a woman, there are probably two or three women who tempted, teased, flirted and slept their way to the top. Why is it okay for women to take advantage of men by using their sexuality in this way, but it’s not okay for men to take advantage of women in response? Do we need a #MenToo movement in response to the #MeToo movement? The reality is that sexual interactions, as I said above, are complicated, and we’re best off leaving most of them in the private realm, where they belong.

I agree with the gist of your article re Western society’s simultaneous sexualization and repression of women, though it did come across as rather hateful towards women of all cultures (“we don’t need women because we have porn and rubber sex dolls”). I found your claim via pics that only models with perfect bodies are allowed to wear sexy clothing in public to be particularly distasteful.

I think you missed the point here as well. Of course the photos are distasteful. That’s the whole point. My photos of “hot” and “not” were meant ironically. The idea is that the more women exhibit themselves like this, the more men are going to be judging such exhibitions and reacting to them, and that’s to be expected. I’m also not seriously suggesting that women are replaceable by porn and sex dolls. What I’m saying is that if the current assault on natural male sexuality continues, men are going to flee to porn and sex dolls. I’m not saying this is a good thing.

I have news for you — we have ALWAYS been “a society where every aspect of sexual and gender relations becomes the subject of explicit norms of behavior”. That’s why we wear clothing for modesty, to cover and control access to our sex organs. That’s why we have criminal laws and rules about acceptable and unacceptable sexual behavour. That’s why we have inherent taboos like the taboos against incest or sex with children. That’s why we have marriage, to enforce monogamous sexual relationships. These laws and moral codes began when we started walking upright, long before “ultra-orthodox Jews” or “Islamic fundamentalists” came along.

The mistakes people, both the #MeToo movement and you, often make in this area is to conflate everything and not notice significant differences where they exist. We in the 21st century West have many implicit norms of sexual and gender relations, and then we have a few explicit ones (workplace dress codes, etc.). Even the implicit norms we do have are generally receding, in that more and more behavior that would’ve been deemed too sexually open in earlier times is now totally okay. Islamic fundamentalist and ultra-orthodox Jewish communities, on the other hand, are governed by strict codes of explicit religious law governing all manner of relations among the sexes. As an example, ultra-orthodox Jewish men cannot even touch women who are not their wives, even to shake their hands (based, as it was explained to me, on the notion that you never know if the woman might be menstruating, making her “unclean” in some religious sense that I won’t even attempt to justify or explain). We obviously have nothing like that in “liberal” Western societies built upon the separation of Church and State and Lockean notions of civil liberties. So, without making any judgments as to which kind of approach is superior, there are clear differences here, and we in the West have chosen to live in and build a certain kind of open society. The #MeToo movement, however, endeavors to introduce what would be restrictive but unilateral norms of sexual behavior (meaning, norms that would govern how men can interact with women but not how women can interact with men) that are inconsistent with the foundations of our open society, even while preserving the growing sexual explicitness of Western societies in every other arena. This is a schizophrenic approach on many levels. It’s an approach inconsistent with the fundamental principles upon which our societies (as opposed to theocratic societies) are built.

So which is it to be — should women (of any culture) be walking around in public half naked to titillate you and other men, and attract your sometimes unwanted (but “asked for”) attentions in the process, or should we all be wearing burkas to protect males from having to control or take responsibility for their baser urges? Or here’s a thought — how about letting women choose what we wear by ourselves, instead of being treated like sexual chattel and told what we can wear by men.

Or here’s another, more egalitarian thought: how about letting women chose what they wear and how they act and letting men choose how they respond, and as long as no laws are broken in the process, it’s all fair game, and if either a man or a woman feels a little bit uncomfortable as a result, we explain that life does that to you sometimes, and it’s not a big deal, so we give them the old (metaphorical) high-school-gym-teacher pat on the butt and tell them to “walk it off.”