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Stop Punishing Men for Being Men

Although Betsy DeVos managed to reverse some Obama-era policy on the investigation of campus sexual assaults, the return to an actual evidentiary standard didn’t come before a lot of damage was done. Influenced by feminist hysteria—which Obama’s “dear colleague” letter only exacerbated—young women have been taught to conceive of ordinary men as sexual predators. So extreme has the attitude toward men become that now an interest in a woman may in itself be considered a form of sexual harassment. Hence the crazy #MeToo campaign, which daily sees new women coming forward to allege their victimhood, in many cases decades after the fact. It now seems commonly believed that the only criterion for determining sexual harassment was whether the language or act was wanted in advance. As many people have joked, this really means that a man had better be handsome and charming, for otherwise you are likely to be “unwanted”; or in other words, a criminal for acting on your natural sexual desire. Indeed, Casanova himself would still have to be psychic, lest he come on to a woman who is not in the mood. Now, this war on men is not only a terrible injustice to men; it is also bad for women. In her new book on infidelity, Esther Perel reports that the number of married women who report infidelity has increased by a striking 40 percent since 1990. For the more men are punished for being men, and the more women therefore try to make us like women, the more unsatisfied the fair sex becomes.

If they are really committed to fairness, and if they want what is best for both sexes, leftists should resolve to stop assuming that a mere accusation is tantamount to evidence of a crime, and to stop punishing men for being men.