The #MeToo Mullahs Issue a Fatwa Against Sex
by Alexander Zubatov
I didn’t watch the 2018 edition of the Golden Globes for the same reason I haven’t, in many years, watched a single one of these navel-gazing exercises in out-of-touch celebrities celebrating themselves: most of the works of art being honored are middlebrow schlock, the host’s stand-up act is invariably pure juvenilia, the majority of acceptance speeches cover the narrow range between cloying and insipid, with frequent pits stops at profoundly annoying, the musical numbers feel like the involuntary expectorations of comatose clowns no longer able to spruce up or scrub off their smudged makeup, and the sanctimonious political statements being made are in the same category as what you’re likely to get from overhearing boozed-up pub patrons pontificating on sports — everyone has an opinion, but that doesn’t make it informed or interesting. With that said, I couldn’t resist watching a few after-the-fact highlights from these last awards … you know, moments like Natalie Portman classlessly pointing out the all-male character of the Best Director nominees, who might’ve expected they were going to be honored rather than upbraided, or Oprah doing her usual shtick of making anything and everything she touches look superficially like it’s about something or someone else while always really being squarely about Oprah (if you think Trump is a narcissist using the Oval Office to enrich himself and extend his brand, look who’s got next, America…). And, of course, I duly noted the fact that this particular awards show, had I watched it, would have struck me as distasteful even beyond the usual examples of the genre due to the overdetermining predominance of the #MeToo moment.
But, I suspect, there are (unfortunately many) others who did watch the spectacle. There are those who were gobbling it all up. There are plenty of folks in our celebrity-obsessed cesspool of a culture who spent the night sitting on their overgrown asses, slurping down sugar and processed junk, staring at their oversized screens and fawning with overwrought admiration at the alternatively self-congratulatory and self-castigating display of political bloviation about sexual harassment. On these people, all the ironies of the event were likely missed. And so I see myself as performing something of a public service in writing this little screed to bring those ironies to the fore.
The first such irony involves a point that should not be a secret to anyone: we are living in an increasingly sexualized society, where, for instance, butts are growing ever bigger while the pieces of fabric intended to cover said butts are growing ever smaller. This results in the normalization of — depending on your perspective — both pleasant vistas like this …
… and less pleasant vistas like this:
Midriffs are being bared with reckless abandon, which likewise has both appealing …
… and frightening
consequences. Not wearing pants over one’s underwear on public transportation is now apparently okay. And last time I checked, women using Instagram to prostitute their bodies for publicity were leaving less and less to the imagination:
With that in mind, I have a simple question to ask: is there something more than slightly hypocritical about a society that increasingly encourages women to parade themselves around as sex objects in public and private and yet increasingly expects men seeing the wares on display to behave like sexless eunuchs? But — the refrain goes — those women are merely exercising their rights to display their bodies and assert their sexuality as they see fit. This is about power and self-determination and the basic right to live in a society free of unwanted attention and dehumanizing harassment. These women are going about their daily business; they are not doing anything that forces the hand of their would-be-harassers, and mature men should be expected to exercise discipline and self-restraint.
Perhaps an analogy will help in rebutting this faulty line of reasoning. Imagine cops in hot pursuit who see their suspect pull out a gun. The suspect doesn’t shoot, but the cops do. And in most such situations, that’s expected and perfectly okay. If you’re dumb enough to pull a gun on a cop in the midst of an adrenaline-charged chase, you deserve what’s coming to you. Now let me take the analogy of the cop pulling the trigger one step further and adapt it to this age of trigger warnings: like cops who are charged by law with the duty to pursue their suspects, heterosexual men are charged by evolution with the genetic imperative to pursue the opposite sex and, going mushy in the head and weak at the knees at the sight of bare female skin or a bit of flirtatious behavior, are being triggered by the flagrant displays they are now seeing all around. Just like the suspect who doesn’t need to pull the trigger to trigger the cop’s reaction, the woman doesn’t need to take any further step to get many men to react, and thus, she should not be surprised when, depending on the situation, she gets catcalls, reciprocal flirting, touches, advances, attempted pick-ups and more. 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. Sometimes the dancers hit it off and create a perfect natural flow that works for both, sometimes they both feel like they’d like to move on as quickly as possible, and sometimes one is loving it while the other really isn’t. It’s in that third situation that these #MeToo scenarios generally arise, but a dance in which one partner clumsily steps on the other’s toes shouldn’t, in a sane society, be the subject of public shaming or reprisals. The classy thing is to do is forget it and move on. We shouldn’t be encouraging women to think they are powerless victims who need to feel traumatized, and we shouldn’t be making men into perpetrators in retrospect.
This is doubly the case because most women, of course, know all about the sexual magic they can wield and use it to their advantage on a daily basis. They use it in securing mates who are better than they are in every possible respect save one, viz., how good they look, they use it to get positive attention and special treatment, to get favors, get jobs and, in the entertainment industry, get roles, fans, followings and plaudits. How is it okay for women to brandish their sexuality freely and openly for their own advantage but not okay for men, within certain limits (I’m not endorsing rape here), to play the same game and respond to such overtures in the most predictable way?
This brings me directly to my second bit of irony. If what I have said is true to any significant extent of society at large, then Hollywood and the entertainment industry surely present an exponential case. We are speaking here of a milieu in which, in all too many cases, talent is secondary. How many supremely gifted actresses, one wonders, never make it big because they are passed over in favor of lesser talents with a greater share of more superficial gifts? How many female stars flirt, tempt and sleep their way to the top? And consider the particular case of awards shows, those celebrity skinfests where to be seen on the scene preening on the red carpet in scandalous attire is virtually the whole point. To attempt a political statement about sexual harassment in this very context by making a show of exhibiting oneself in a sexy black dress is an irony that verges far beyond the realm of the grotesque.
The mention of the band of beauties in black brings me to my third and final irony. The dress code, you see, was not exactly mandatory … but nor was it exactly optional either. Those few brave souls who dared to defy the blackout were subject to merciless shaming.
Wasn’t this supposed to be all about female self-expression and self-determination, not a herd of obedient black cows mooing “#MeToo” in lockstep and trampling underfoot anyone attempting to stray too far beyond the fenced-in perimeter? But, as most of us with a pulse well know, the sad reality is that self-expression and self-determination are being trampled on with ever-increasing frequency in our midst. We are living with ever-more-restrictive codes of speech and conduct at workplaces, universities and beyond. Heck, NBC recently went so far as to issue an “appropriate hugging” protocol to its employees.
We are well on our way to a society where every aspect of sexual and gender relations becomes the subject of explicit norms of behavior as carefully drawn and strictly policed as those that govern the same subjects among ultra-orthodox Jews or Islamic fundamentalists. And doesn’t this …
… already bear an eerie resemblance to this? …
or this?
In the process of liberating women, in other words, we are creating new species of restriction and conformity for women and men alike. This is irony, yes, but it is worse than mere irony. With all the self-righteous fervor of religious fanatics, we are turning sex — something that was supposed to be and has long been fun, dangerous, disinhibiting, awkward, spontaneous, creative, expressive, exhilarating and mysterious — into yet another arena for the staging of moralistic passion plays of identity power politics — something that is rigid, rulified, repressive, zero-sum, winner-take-all and deadly serious.
Lost in all this is a point the #MeToo Mullahs seem to have forgotten: men no longer really need women to get their kicks. Take the sexual dimension out of the picture, and most of us men actually seem to enjoy socializing with other men more than with women, and as for sex, well, with the free and easy availability of porn and a new generation of high-tech sex dolls on the way, the excesses of the #MeToo moment are going to make men abandon women like the excesses of #BlackLivesMatter got cops to abandon Baltimore, so that the only ones left for women will be the sniveling, groveling, apologetic men, the kind most women, when it comes down to it, don’t actually want. And all the lovely ladies now flocking to join in the #MeToo liturgy will start remembering fondly those good old days before they donned the black burkas, the days of those aggressive, demonized “powerful men” who used to roam the earth and who, in their incessant urge to bed the opposite sex, sometimes strayed just a little bit too far over the line.
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Alexander Zubatov is a practicing attorney specializing in general commercial litigation. He is also a practicing writer specializing in general non-commercial poetry, fiction, drama, essays and polemics. In the words of one of his intellectual heroes, José Ortega y Gasset, biography is “a system in which the contradictions of a human life are unified.”
Some of his articles have appeared in The Federalist, Times Higher Education, The Imaginative Conservative, Chronicles, The Independent Journal Review, Acculturated, PopMatters, The Hedgehog Review, Mercatornet, The Montreal Review, The Fortnightly Review, New English Review, Culture Wars and nthposition.
He makes occasional, unscheduled appearances on Twitter (https://twitter.com/Zoobahtov).
