It is necessary that men be held to account for their actions. That means that they can be allowed to do what makes babies only if they are willing and able to take full responsibility for rearing the said babies; it means that any other sexual pleasure they enjoy must occur with the free and informed consent of any and all women involved; it means that they understand that "reasonable" is a word that has to be defined by women and "emotional, illogical, irresponsible" are words that, in reality, presuppose the masculine gender; it means that when human beings want to be in control of our lives, we don't even hold eye contact with other human beings, and when we want to interact with other human beings, we surrender at least half of all control of what goes on during those interactions to the other human beings, and we accept that we are hard-wired to feel that this shared control and interaction are fun.
Yup. That's right, guys. If at any time you feel that you are in control of a situation, you should be at home alone. If you are on a date, trying to be in control of anything outside of your own skin is abusive, as is losing control of what's going on inside your skin.
Men could always try to change the actual record on this...I don't see how it's possible to judge a situation objectively without being able to think about it in two successive weeks, in two different states of hormone balance, and see what, if anything, changes. I think the lack of a hormone cycle in early adult life prevents the male brain from developing the capacity for objective thought. "Testosterone-poisoned" may sound harsh but, although some men are intelligent, the fact is that men don't develop much ability to separate their emotions from their thoughts. They have relatively few emotional moods, so what they think is logical and reasonable is their emotionality. This has historically been how men have been able to "reason" their way into war. Too bad for them. Even when people try to change their physical sex, there is a half of humankind that have stronger arms, and there is a half of humankind that, if not universally more intelligent, are at least consistently more able to reason themselves away from violent reactions. That is the half of humankind we can reasonably describe as being rational. "Let's discuss the matter reasonably" means "Anyone with testosterone in their blood waits to be told what is reasonable by someone who's learned to judge between estrogen and progesterone moods." (The minority of women who have testosterone in their blood already know this.)
It would be pleasant if holding men to account for their actions could be done without an assumption that, if a man has any money, he must have had an abusive relationship with some woman somewhere.
Sadly, although I'm inclined to suspect that the accusations against Bill Cosby were politically motivated while the accusations against Neil Gaiman are more about money, the historical reality has been that economic inequality did use to inject an abusive quality into all heterosexual relationships. If you were able to earn money because you were hired for a better job because the company didn't want to be responsible for a woman walking to and from the commuter train, there was in fact something abusive about your relationships with any and all of the people who were not hired for that job. "Not my fault"? That's what abusers always say, and tends to be understood to mean that it was. "Certainly seemed consensual, at the time, when she was calling me on my cell phone and heavy-breathing 'I want you now'," is plausible but non-consensually ending a relationship is also abusive, especially if the end of the relationship has something to do with a child. A man who did not take advantage of an abusive situation to have abusive relationships with women has been the Partner for Life of one wife who is not complaining. Of course the male culture of our youth taught men that, if they were becoming the Partner for Life of one wife who would never have a serious complaint, they were being cheated out of their share of "fun." Well...if you had fun participating in a culture that was abusive, that does not generate a lot of sympathy. Life is just full of trade-offs.
Some men today have taken the effort to make amends for the sins of their past, when society was positively encouraging them to sin. I used to know an older man who had some money and said he wanted to acknowledge all of his natural children before he died. In the Vietnam War years, when he was in the States he used to go into a local bar, play his guitar, sing sad songs about being in the Army, and be invited to spend the night with some sentimental young woman. In those years young women always wanted "The Pill" for birth control, although it was new and untested and had some horrible side effects for some users, but it did not actually work for all of them. After the war ended and the man settled down with one wife, he'd had several children, and acknowledged a few more in the neighborhood, but his obituary was quite shocking. He claimed, and left bequests to, about a dozen additional children besides the dozen people knew about. Only five of the children he claimed had ever used his family name. He claimed a child in California, a few on islands... I think it might be helpful if more survivors of the so-called "sexual revolution" did as much toward making amends as that man did.
I will say, though, that women should search their hearts before thinking "Well, it was an open-ended relationship, which were all inherently oppressive and abusive, and he's got money now, and I need some money." You knew men who did worse things than that. What about the company that thought it was acceptable to allow rapists to be on the street? The dating game as it was played in the 1980s and 1990s was set up to be all about what guys wanted with no real benefits for girls, but let's face it, if only because the social penalties for being mistaken for a lesbian used to be so much worse, we did play the game. Some of us had the confidence to set up rules that worked for us. Some of us took matters into our own hands to restore reason to scenes of male emotionality, stayed in the friendzone until men wanted to commit to being husbands and fathers, and stayed married once we were married. Some of us took the emotional risk and said, "No baby-making before marriage and I didn't say I was in any hurry to marry anybody," laughed at the boys who bolted, and waited confidently for men who wanted marriage. Some of us wore flat shoes and showed our real unpainted faces to the world, even in the 1980s, to tell the world "I'm not looking for an abusive, exploitative relationship." If you didn't, why didn't you? If you consented to an inherently abusive relationship, if you paid for pills that are 98% effective while you were at the age where that 2% failure rate occurs, is the person to whom you heavy-breathed "I want you now" really the person from the 1980s you need to be going after now? Are you sure going after the abusive bank and the exploitative utility companies and the oppressive insurance companies, who are gouging you for money now, wouldn't be more satisfying?
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