Rich and Successful Men Do Not Have "Power" over Women

What MeToo culture, NIMBY, and nuclear safetyism all have in common

People argue against bosses sleeping with their subordinates on the grounds that such situations involve a “power imbalance.” Occasionally, they go a step further, and imply that some men are so rich and powerful that relationships with almost any woman can be presumed potentially abusive. Part of the hysteria about Jeffrey Epstein comes from the fact that many seem to assume that anyone that wealthy going out with a younger woman is somehow taking advantage of her, even though the more lurid accounts of what he was doing have never been substantiated.

All of this is completely backwards. While it is true that such relationships do have power imbalances, they’re clearly in favor of the woman.

Take the case of Eric Swalwell. One of the accusations that led to him dropping out of the California gubernatorial race was that he received oral sex from a staffer and “twice sexually assaulted her when she was too drunk to consent.”

Think about the state of affairs before Swalwell and his staffer hooked up. When going into any relationship, both parties understand that it might lead to hard feelings at a later point in time. Swalwell has to keep the affair a secret for the sake of his career and reputation. If he gets mad at his employee or she rejects his advances, he may fire her from a job that doesn’t pay all that well. In theory, he could perhaps wield his position to ruin her life in other ways, like trying to stop others from giving her a job. But usually powerful men don’t have the time or psychological incentive to do things like this. That’s simp behavior. Men who don’t have options are the ones most likely to become vengeful stalkers, while those with power can much more easily deal with rejection.

What about the woman’s perspective? Her leverage over Swalwell is much greater because he has a lot more to lose. We all saw what happened to his hopes of political advancement as a result of this affair and other indiscretions. Moreover, luckily for the woman, the media will believe and amplify her story regardless of the state of the relevant evidence or how she behaved at the time. It doesn’t matter if Swalwell has a hundred text messages of the staffer saying “I’m loving every moment of this. I happily give you my consent!!!” She is free to decide at any moment that she was a victim. Was a drunken hookup a memory she looks back on fondly or “sexual assault”? It’s up to her. No choice is final – she gets to change her answer whenever she wants. If they were both drunk, he might have sexually assaulted her. For Swalwell, being intoxicated compounds his crimes rather than excuses his behavior.

In fact, I was probably wrong when I just said that Swalwell can at least fire her if the relationship goes downhill. He has to be extra careful not to anger this woman. Swalwell should be expected to go out of his way to not treat her unfairly, knowing that she can destroy him at any time. This is true whether they have an affair or he simply makes a pass that is rejected. This might lead to a bias against other employees, though it is the woman who had the relationship who our society considers the real victim.

Powerful men not only have more to lose, but we’re at a point when every legal, moral, and ethical norm we have favors the woman over the man in these situations.

Jeffrey Epstein is said to have controlled women through his wealth. Yet this is just adult women making decisions about their own lives. Being with Epstein could gain his partners tangible resources, but he never took anything away from them that he himself did not provide. Epstein was arrested and is now dead, while many of his “victims” are living in luxury despite no real evidence that they were ever forced to do anything against their will.

It’s easy to say we are now “believing women.” But we’re at this point beyond believing them in terms of actual facts regarding things that have allegedly happened. We not only believe them, but also allow women to construct reality at will, with the right to have everyone accept their interpretation of events, even if it is different from their own interpretation at an earlier point in time.

And the incentives we’ve created cannot help but lead to false accusations against rich and powerful men. Let’s say that a man will, on average, pay 1% of his net worth to make a sexual harassment lawsuit or accusation of sexual assault go away, even if he did nothing wrong. For an individual worth a million dollars, that’s $10,000. That’s not much of an incentive for a woman to construct a narrative based on some kind of trauma she suffered. It probably won’t even cover the lawyer fees.

But if he’s worth a billion dollars, then 1% of his wealth is $10 million. Accusations against a famous billionaire will be amplified in the media, and maybe even get the attention of law enforcement, while for a regular millionaire there isn’t going to be much of a news hook or much incentive to criminally prosecute him without solid evidence. Of course, our billionaire would have to worry about this every time he had a romantic relationship with a woman, so it would be wrong to think of it as a one-time payment he could afford to make. If he’s a single guy who wants to date, this is going to be something he has to constantly worry about. Every billionaire may find himself surrounded by a swarm of vultures in the form of trial lawyers, journalists, and manipulative women. No one is out to get the guy from Toledo who makes $100,000 a year and likes to fool around a lot.

That’s why I have no sympathy for regular men who say MeToo has made dating hard. Bob the janitor isn’t the target! The males most impacted by MeToo are the ones most capable of attracting women in the first place. The higher you go up the socioeconomic ladder, the more dangerous it has become to have sexual relationships. Forty years ago, a rich guy could have wild parties and consort with an endless string of women without much concern about the consequences. Today, he’s playing Russian roulette, and the richer and more successful he is the more he has to worry.

There are some societies that believe that adult women are incapable of making decisions about their romantic and personal lives. Others accept the principle of individual liberty. We now have a strange hybrid system in which the woman gets the best of all worlds: she can advance her career by getting close to successful men or make money by engaging in prostitution or prostitution-adjacent behavior, and then cash in a second time as a victim at a later date.

Now here, one could argue that there is a flaw in my argument. I’m complaining that women have power over powerful men, but the reason that is the case in the first place is that we have civil rights laws and the norms of MeToo. Take that away, and we will be back to a more classic situation where the man has the power. Yet that would certainly be preferable to the current state of affairs. The power that a boss had over his secretary in the 1950s isn’t close to the leverage that a staffer has over a congressman in these situations. If the real worry is power imbalances, we have made the problem much worse. Norms against using leverage for sex already exist, and the degree to which our society financially and reputationally punishes behavior should be proportionate to the badness of an act. I see no reason to think that organic norms are not superior to trial lawyers and moral panics playing out in the media in terms of getting the right balance.

I don’t think that any of the outrage about high-status men having sex with lower-status women is about “power imbalances” at all. This is simply the language we reach for in order to cover up deeper emotional drives. There are a few facts about heterosexuality that make us uncomfortable. They are:

1. Men are attracted to women primarily for their beauty

2. Women are attracted to men on account of them having money and power

3. Men will try to translate power and money into sexual relationships

4. Women will use their physical attractiveness and ability to provide sex in order to get money, status, or proximity to powerful men

We hate these facts, because we as a society now demonize heterosexuality itself and need to think of women as both passive victims and just as capable and emotionally stable as men. As I’ve previously written, lesbian attraction is increasingly held up as the normative ideal.

The culture of lesbianization involves taking the female-female model of romance and, through cultural pressure and sometimes legal persecution, forcing it onto heterosexuals. The only true kind of romantic attachment is said to be based not on “superficial” characteristics like looks, money, or status. Rather, people should only be attracted to others based on things that are “real,” namely intelligence, personality, personal compatibility, and loyalty.

The problem is that heterosexual attraction doesn’t work like this. Men like youth and beauty; women like status, money, and power. We build friendships based on common interests and personality compatibility. But romantic attraction operates according to a different module in the brain, although there is of course some overlap. Often a woman will like a man precisely because he has a lot of money, has had worldly success, or even because he is in a position of authority over her. There are good evolutionary explanations of this, and the relationships that are formed on such grounds are not any less real or valuable than others. Men will, in contrast, like women because they’re young and attractive. Heterosexual attraction depends on complementarity and difference.

MeToo culture can be defined as a movement that is based on a distaste for the way heterosexual attraction works, which as a result leads to a moral panic toward disfavored relationships that puts complete blame on men by denying women any agency in romantic affairs.

Yet, despite all of this, workplace romances continue to happen, and men continue to hit on women in ways that they might later regret.

To me, this is deeply inspirational. It’s like a society that bans homosexuality or interracial relationships, but love still finds a way. Today, our society hates heterosexuality itself – at least when it’s not modeled on lesbian norms of attraction. Yet, despite what we are told by the media, legal system, and wider culture, there are still millions of relationships involving a man and his subordinate at work, or a rich man and a poor woman who has nothing to offer him but her physical attractiveness.

But a society doesn’t need interracial relationships or homosexuality to function. It does need heterosexuality, and so even if the level of oppression is lower, it seems to me that our new ideas about sex are at least comparable in their harms to the bigotries of the past.

Often, her boss is the exact person a woman should be having sex with. Take the situation of a professor having a relationship with a TA or graduate student. In that case, the woman is getting an advanced degree in a subject because she has a deep enough interest in the topic to devote her life to it. Who would be more interesting and compelling as a sexual partner than a man who she spends a great deal of time with and has already distinguished himself in the field? This is how Megan McArdle’s parents met, and she’s one of the best columnists in the country, so I’m glad she exists.

Workplace romances happen because people naturally develop romantic feelings toward those they spend time with. This will be especially true when there is a shared goal or mutual interest that both parties are passionate about, and the man is simply better at it than the woman.

Can accepting such relationships cause complications? Sure. The subordinate individual might benefit from favoritism, and women might feel pressured to engage in relationships they don’t otherwise want. But who cares? Why are we hyperparanoid about the idea that someone might be uncomfortable at work and not at all paranoid that people might never form relationships or have families?

This is the problem with safetyism in all areas of life. We guard against things that might directly go wrong, and ignore the consequences that result from building laws and norms around avoiding worst-case scenarios, creating problems much more serious than the ones we were originally worried about.

With nuclear power, we regulate while obsessing over tiny risks of catastrophes that aren’t even all that deadly when they happen, and handicap a clean and potentially affordable source of energy. We worry about extra traffic or literal endangered rats even if it means that housing becomes unaffordable. And when it comes to sex, we remain ever vigilant about people engaging in relationships that might involve an alleged power dynamic while being relatively indifferent to plummeting rates of coupling and catastrophically low birth rates. This is in addition to costs in terms of the way that MeToo culture infantilizes women and infringes on individual liberty.

Many seem to believe that without MeToo culture and strong laws against sexual harassment, every boss would be able to create a harem and women would be constantly victimized in the workplace. But there will always be financial incentives and norms against firms treating their workers poorly. An incompetent manager who constantly makes highly talented women working for him uncomfortable will be told to cut it out or be fired, and corporations always try to avoid bad press. And, again, there are norms against bad behavior, in the workplace as much as anywhere else. Market forces and the current state of the wider culture are enough to stop the worst-case scenarios here, and better mechanisms for encouraging good behavior than trial lawyers and narratives about women always being victims.

Arguments for norms against dating in the workplace can be similarly applied to friendships. Couldn’t a subordinate feel pressured to hang out with his boss, and if the two become close, might there not be concerns about fairness or undue leverage? In such cases, we accept that mixing work and friendship can cause complications, but, rightly in my view, consider banning people from becoming friends with those they work with both authoritarian and costly in terms of lost opportunities. Companies can of course have whatever policies they want, without government deciding on a one-size-fits-all set of standards for all institutions.

It is true that allowing romantic relationships in the office creates more complications than platonic friendships. But the potential losses from bans and strong norms against dating at work – lovers, sex, marriage, and children, all important things in life – are also higher. The taboos and legal restrictions on romantic relationships with so-called “power imbalances” are another sign of the extent to which safety and the precautionary principle are getting in the way of human flourishing.