Lynn has been reading John Stuart Mill, and applying him to the question of whether there is such a thing as a right to rule out potential romantic partners for lame and shallow reasons. This is maybe a sign that I should read Mill myself — all I recall is some mostly-forgotten college text — but this reminds me of why I keep getting tangled in knots whenever I start thinking about rights outside of the legal context.
Lynn opens with Mill’s definition of a right:
When we call anything a person’s right, we mean that he has a valid claim on society to protect him in the possession of it, either by the force of law, or by that of education or opinion. … If we desire to prove that anything does not belong to him by right, we think this done as soon as it is admitted that society ought not to take measures for securing it to him, but should leave it to change, or to his own exertions.
I assume that “change” there is supposed to be “chance.” But either way, here’s Lynn’s conclusion regarding sexual prejudices:
…though people, in my take, absolutely have the right to categorically exclude other people from their dating pool, they don’t have any particular right to have said excluded people feel warm and fuzzy about them, or continue to be their friends, buddies, and confidants, cheering them on when their love lives go well, and sympathizing with them when their love lives don’t go so well. … So, if Judith Warner’s friends should prefer to exclusively pursue hot, young babes, and if they should pursue said hot, young babes without either feeling entitled to more attention than the hot, young babes are willing to give them or actively insulting the women their own age that they don’t want to date, they have a right to be left alone in any mutual relationships they form.
One thing that strikes me about this is that Lynn specifies that the excluded people have a right not to support this behavior. But surely everyone else has that right too. If a man’s male friend disapproves of his chasing hot, young babes, he has a right not to be the wingman, doesn’t he? And if enough people voluntarily withdraw from a man’s life for this reason, they are effectively shunning him. I suppose Lynn is drawing a contrast here between leaving them alone and actively sabotaging the relationship somehow, but I don’t know if there’d be a more effective means of doing that than a mass defriending.
Of course, shunning isn’t as effective as it used to be, since many times people can just go out and find a new set of friends. This may be why, as Lynn points out, many people nowadays seem to think of rights entirely in terms of laws. But still, social norms do have power, so what is a person who finds himself generally despised, but saying, “I have a right!” actually claiming?
Let’s look at the particular argument that drew in Lynn, which was a debate between Hugo Schwyzer and a blogger named Miguel about male sexual entitlement. Miguel is arguing for, essentially, equal rights for men who are usually sexually discriminated against. “It follows from this that “women,” at least in theory, have an obligation to keep an open mind about having sexual relations with men who stand at different levels in the unspoken social hierarchy – that is, men who may be shy and not comport with traditional notions of masculinity – even if no individual woman ever has the obligation to reciprocate my sexual interest.”
To some extent, I follow his thinking here. Social taboos have previously ruled out certain people from sexual relations — because they’re disabled, or the wrong race, or some such thing — who are now generally accepted, and now, though they still might have difficulties, they are able to find partners. What if people got over their simplistic prejudices about age, looks, swagger, or whatever, and gave the low men a shot?
To some extent, bringing Mill into this is confusing matters because equal rights and male entitlement are two different things. Apart from maybe a few hippie communes, I don’t think there’s been a time in history when all men felt entitled to sex with all women. Rather, the sense of entitlement came from attaining some benchmark — high social class, wealth, victory in battle, or something like that. Or something less spectacular like taking a wedding vow, which up until quite recently was assumed to entitle you to sex. The point is that these weren’t human rights, but rights acquired by some particular actions or circumstances. The new feminist idea that underlies this argument, I think, is the concept that nobody ever owes anyone sex for any reason. The only good reason to have sex is desire.
Indeed, Miguel isn’t talking just about the right to perform the physical act with a member of the opposite sex. If that were the case, then we’d be debating whether prostitution should be legal (and, if we’re being really egalitarian, subsidized!), since that would be a much more efficient means of distributing sex to the sexless. I can only assume that what he wants is a greater equality of desire, or more specifically, an equality of being desired. That’s a cause most women can probably sympathize with, since, contrary to popular male belief, women can also go through droughts of feeling truly desired. But the thing about equality is that it has a way of making all people seem the same, when being desired is about feeling special. This seems to get us to the Lake Wobegon syndrome — everyone wants to be above average! But most people seem to manage to be special to at least a few people, even though they live in the fat part of the bell curve.
It’s getting really late, and I don’t have a good conclusion to this. But those are my thoughts. Good night!
I suppose Lynn is drawing a contrast here between leaving them alone and actively sabotaging the relationship somehow, but I don’t know if there’d be a more effective means of doing that than a mass defriending.
The difference between leaving them alone and actively sabotaging the relationship would be part of what I’m talking about, but the other part is whether the wingman is morally obligated to drop the guy. If the guy’s merely a shallow pursuer of hot, young babes, who wants someone way hotter and younger than himself, and can’t look past the occasional wrinkle or gray hair (though he himself has his fair share of those), the wingman’s under no moral obligation to stop being his wingman just because his friend is shallow. He may choose no longer to be friends with the guy, but there’s no must involved.
Suppose, on the other hand, we have, not a shallow pursuer of happily mutual relationships with hot, young babes, but a predatory pursuer of not at all mutual relationships with hot, young babes. Mr. Predator stays fully within the legal boundaries. He picks, perhaps, hot, young babes who are particularly naive and unassertive (but still of legal age), and he tests them by getting them to do small things they visibly don’t want to do, as a prelude to pushing them for sex they clearly don’t want (but, because he’s working by picking women who don’t assert themselves well, don’t offer enough resistance to that any court would find him guilty of rape). Or he always goes for the drunkest hot, young babes in the room, and presses them to drink more than they actually want to (again, women who haven’t learned to assert their boundaries are his natural prey), but he doesn’t quite pick women drunk enough that a court would find them incapable of consent. Or, if he does find a hot, young babe who is actually genuinely willing, just plain sex isn’t enough for him; he has to find a variety of sex she’s not happy with, and manipulate her into exactly that variety of sex. He then boasts, to his wingman, about the stuff he’s gotten these women to do, in ways that makes it clear that he knows they didn’t want to do it, is proud of himself for putting one over on them, and looks down on them for giving in.
At this point, it’s no longer a matter where the wingman may drop his friend; if the wingman is a decent guy, he must stop being the guy’s wingman. Because, though the guy who was merely shallow didn’t cross any boundary that society is obliged to take measures to secure, the guy who’s actively predatory did, and the fact that he cleverly stayed within the legal boundary shouldn’t mean he gets a pass when it comes to informal social sanctions, once it’s clear what he’s doing, and clear that the hot, young babes he’s picked aren’t actually willing participants and that he knows damn well they aren’t happy campers.
Comment by Lynn Gazis-Sax — January 26, 2011 @ 2:02 pm
I guess what I’m having trouble with here is lining all that up with Mill’s definition of a right, at least from your quote. It sounds like a right is what society is *actively obliged* to secure for you, whereas not having a right means it can do nothing — “leave it to chance, or to his own exertions.” Which does fit the way the law acts towards rights: the state is obliged to intervene if you rights are violated, but when it comes to non-rights it can do nothing or forbid you from doing it, as it chooses. On the other hand, you seem to be saying that you can perfectly well respect someone’s right by doing nothing, whereas deciding they don’t have a right triggers an obligation to interfere (even if just by cutting someone off). I can’t imagine that if someone did try to interfere with a middle-aged man chasing hot young babes — say, his mother — his friends would feel obliged to jump in and secure his right to do it, unless the other party resorted to illegal means. It sounds like what you’re really talking about here are the rights of the women in question — if the man violates them, people must interfere, but there’s no rights violation in just hitting on them. Unless I’m totally misreading Mill, which is also possible.
Comment by Camassia — January 26, 2011 @ 2:53 pm
It sounds like what you’re really talking about here are the rights of the women in question — if the man violates them, people must interfere, but there’s no rights violation in just hitting on them.
Yes, that’s what I was thinking. I guess if I think in terms of the rights of the men in question, I’d have to place the boundary of the rights violation at the point where it’s not just individual friends dropping the shallow guy because they decide they don’t like shallow guys (he doesn’t have a right to any particular person’s friendship), but someone trying to get people in general to defriend him (when he himself hasn’t been violating anyone’s rights, just picking the women he hits on by shallow criteria). Or otherwise actively interfering with him. If a mass defriending happens by chance, because individual people don’t like him, then society isn’t actively obliged to do anything about it, and can “leave it to chance, or to his own exertions,” since he doesn’t have a right to actually be friends with anyone particular who doesn’t like him, but if people were actively trying to get him sent to Coventry, then that would no longer be a matter of “chance, or his own exertions.”
Comment by Lynn Gazis-Sax — January 27, 2011 @ 1:26 am
I see the distinction you’re making, but I’m still not totally sold on the idea that a mass defriending could happen by “chance”, unless none of them knows any of the others. Say you’ve got your hypothetical “Judith,” whose friends “George” casually tells her he’d never data women his own age. Judith goes and confides in two of her girlfriends how upset she was by this, and how she won’t be friends with George any more, and they decide they don’t like him much either. And the two girlfriends’ husbands notice their coldness towards George, and they figure since they’re married to middle-aged women themselves they don’t really agree with him, so they also start to become estranged from George. And then this one buddy of George’s who’s been angling for a job at one of the husbands’ firm notices the anti-George faction forming, and decides he’d rather spend time with them than with George. And then a mutual friend of George and Judith is upset that the old gang is splitting apart, so he goes to George and says, “Dude, your dating policy is really upsetting people. Can’t you just try seeing a woman your own age?” And then he goes to Judith and says, “Can’t you cut George a little slack?”
Now, technically the last guy is the only one directly interfering with the “rights” of George and Judith, but I have trouble seeing him as the transgressor here. Once George and Judith fell out, their friends felt a need to take sides, even though nobody said, “Hey, let’s gang up on George and make him date older women!” That’s why, when we’re talking about informal social norms instead of laws, I have trouble drawing a sharp distinction between what “society” does and what individuals do. And unconscious social norms can be at least as powerful as those overtly held up as such.
Comment by Camassia — January 27, 2011 @ 6:24 pm