Call me woke but I view a boss making a sexual advance towards a subordinate as an inherent form of sexual blackmail. It creates a reasonable fear of consequences if one is not compliant. It is potentially very costly to be forced to look for a new job because someone does not want sex with their boss. The boss may have a lot to lose, but it is also costly to go public with an accusation and lodge a complaint. The boss knows all this.
I think he misses how things can be escalated. In this scenario the more powerful man has many ways to make the woman's life more painful. He can pass her up for promotions, give her bad work, pile on unrealistic expectations, and all at minimal risk. If he did fire her, he could do so for some trumped up reason that doesn't get much scrutiny.
Women have just two options. They quit or they go public. Going public involves lodging a complaint that can't be taken back, openly declaring that there's an issue and setting yourself on the other side of someone who's more institutionally powerful. It immediately puts you in conflict with them. Even if you win, the situation will likely be stressful and upsetting.
Women have the nuclear option, but are often reasonably afraid of using it. Especially if their boss is skillful enough to make himself hard to persecute.
Making yourself hard to persecute seems like it would be a good survival skill to teach all young people "There are more people out there in the world who will try to persecute you than will honestly try to win your love, son. Govern yourself accordingly."
Not necessarily "far right". I think Richard is happy with some aspects of sex-positive feminism. He just wants responsibility to be acknowledged both ways. I think most of the far right would say keep women out of these situations, reverse the sexual revolution, women shouldn't consent to strangers, etc.
I meant it in the sense that although he has reformed himself somewhat, he still has some embarrassingly far right-coded takes that make me question my affinity for some of his writing.
His hatred of tattoos on women makes me chuckle. His "Epstein was a nothingburger" take makes me wince. Some of his "women want rich chads and men want sexy babes - it's science!" seems ripped from a 2015 redpill forum.
Reformed in terms of what? Do you think Hanania is trying to be a normie liberal lol? He's still on the Right. These aren't far right takes nor are they unreasonable.
RH definately has gotten bitten by the liberal bug. I recognize it because It happened to me in the mid-2010's, the same kind of realizations about the Right's contradictions and chuddery. But if you spent the first 30 years of your life conservative, some of the old habits die hard. You hold on to some things still. Even I do this.
I mentioned "far right" because Hanania used to be heavy into "race science" back in the day. Heck, he even recently had an article on race science - which made me cringe a bit.
But still, he can't just unsee the stuff that he has seen. Even if there are areas of Liberalism that are fairly problematic. I've always liked his quality of being the guy who will say the things no one else will say. But the other side to that is some of his more cringey takes.
I was a low status teenager. Never dated a girl before. I worked at McDonalds.
Somehow I achieved getting a beautiful girlfriend (now wife) on nothing but my personality.
I agree that women prefer higher status men. But higher status could be something like "has lots of friends" or "gives off an edgy vibe", especially to a younger woman/teenager.
You didn't say what your status was at the time your wife started going out with you. All of us started out working retail and fast food. But you didn't land her while still working at McDonalds in the same role you had as a teenager, I bet. You had to have been promoted to shift boss at least before she noticed you. Or perhaps you owned all five of the franchises in your town and donated to the local symphony orchestra.
If she started dating you when both of you were teenagers, she must have seen some potential in you that kept her interested and believing in your future together. Edgy doesn't pay the bills or raise children.
I started to believe long ago that physical attractiveness is more important than status per se, especially in an era when women can make their own money. Will I Am would call that redpill and right-coded but I don't think you even need to be rightwing to recognize that. Dating stats tell us what women REALLY want. Working hard to attain high status makes you "attractive" to women who are ready to settle. Hanania and standard redpill theorists of the 2010s seem to suggest that's analogous to being young and hot as a woman--it's not. Women want relatively young and hot men too.
There’s no law that that will happen, and if it does, it’s little consolation to the women who get driven out along the way. Harvey Weinstein predated on actresses for years before he faced a reckoning.
Yes, little consolation. But why assume that norms wouldn’t develop fairly quickly? Or do you think CEOs/stockholders prefer sexism to profits? In any event, you seem to prize safety over improving heterosexual relationships/family formation.
Doesn't that just mean the bosses are incentivized to prey on women who are seen as less talented or otherwise more expendable as employees? I mean, I'm sure that already happens to some extent, but this sounds like a recipe to make it worse.
Prey upon? You mean hit on them/have sex with them? They can still say no. Even less talented women are required for a firm’s success. Norms will prevail.
By "prey upon" I mean make repeated unwanted advances, often with an implicit or explicit threat of terminating their employment or pursuing other forms of retaliation. If the woman likes the attention or if the boss backs off respectfully, then that's much less of a concern to me, although it's still an inherently risky situation imo.
I agree that for the most part norms prevent anything too bad from happening, but I think you're underestimating the fragility of norms. The reason these norms seem so strong is mainly that they're legally and institutionally enforced. Before there were laws against sexual harassment etc. on the books I don't think it was considered so abnormal and low status to hit on your underlings or engage in other behavior that respectable people find disgusting these days. I think modern professional class men have largely internalized decades of being disciplined and indoctrinated, and will continue to police each other and themselves even if the structures controlling them are removed, but over the years, decades, and generations, these norms are likely to become weaker and weaker unless continually reinforced. We could end up somewhere very ugly if we're not careful.
I think his point on safety ism is good. In another time people could read other people. They could tell when someone was comfortable or uncomfortable. Managing this is just a part of life. The risk in over safety-ism is that people don't find each other, since people spend most time at their jobs. But yah it can be abused but you still have to live your life. You know if you don't drive no car accident...but you know your limited.
There’s no implied quid-pro-quo dynamic in a generic friendship advance from a boss to a subordinate, in contrast to a sexual advance from that person.
Bosses are wise not to try to make friends among subordinates. In the military, fraternization between officers and enlisted/NCOs is strictly forbidden. If two friends go through ROTC and college or a service academy together and one rises faster than the other after commissioning, they shouldn't be assigned to a billet where one is in the direct chain of command over his lower-ranking friend. even if it's strictly platonic. It's lonely at the top when all of your potential friends are in the same line of work.
Not sure how much of a model the military should be for civilian employment. I'd expect different norms depending on whether there is potential criminal liability for telling your boss to take a hike. The stakes are lower for most civilian employment, so the strictures should be looser.
I mean, I think the approach should be similar as for office romances in general. The stance should be:
"Mostly (or weakly) discouraged, perhaps even frowned upon. If not explicitly banned then participants need to have eyes WIDE OPEN on the risks/downsides - not even for abuses of power but just potential awkwardness & bad blood if relationship ends. But such relationships are not necessarily/inherently abusive; whether abusive or not depends on the details. In other words, mostly more trouble than they're worth." ?
I know I know, overly long and filled with caveats -- but nuanced situations are necessarily filled with caveats!
I have friends who met through work and married while at different ranks/paygrades (though not extremely so - more like "associate analyst" vs "senior/principal analyst" etc).
I also think the story of high-powered executive who marries younger subordinate for 2nd wife and stays married to 2nd wife for much longer (and more happily) is also not unheard of ?
>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.
I don't think you really understand the complaint regular men are making. Regular men aren't complaining that they're having sexual encounters with women who then go on to extort them for money. They're complaining that MeToo has made it vastly easier for women to vindictively ruin men's reputation, including the reputation of men she's never had sex with. It's not like "Jackie" in the UVa rape hoax tried to extort a bunch of frat boys for money, and only went to Rolling Stone when they refused to cough up the dough. It's not like the woman Aziz Ansari went on a date with tried to extort him.
It might well be the case that desirable, high-status men are more impacted by MeToo than undesirable low-status men. That doesn't imply that MeToo had NO negative impact on undesirable low-status men.
The public rhetoric of MeToo also made zero effort to distinguish between powerful and ordinary men. A guy with relatively little optionality in the dating market makes for a perfect scapegoat, whether that was the initial intent of the movement in its best form or not.
To build on this, social media is part of the problem. Even if a guy doesn’t become the character of the day, a woman looking to destroy a guy’s reputation can cast a much wider net via social media than when only her friends heard about how much he sucked.
The power you're ascribing to women here seems to come down to "Women can go viral on social media and get men in trouble", but that's just obviously not true for most women. Most people cannot go viral on social media! The fact that you, a social media user, are surrounded by viral people does not imply that any particular person can easily go viral.
Going viral on social media with your accusations does give you a certain kind of social power (and also enormous harassment), but whether it's good or bad for the average woman is a moot point because most women are not going to be able to go viral.
If you remove the possibility of social media virality from the equation, you're just left with a situation where your boss is threatening you and no one in your organization will help. This is the median sexual harassment case and without strong social structures of the kind you deride, it does not favor the harassment victim.
This whole thing feels reasoned from first principles and porn logic. I think it's fine to enjoy the sexy moments in Mad Men, but workplaces like Mad Men in real life were actually very bad and very common. They weren't fun or sexy as the show makes them look, and capitalism did nothing to stop them. This is why we built the strong social norms that we currently have.
I suppose an inherent aspect of public shaming is that people will be much more aware of misbehavior where public shaming was administered as a punishment, than equally bad misbehavior where it was not.
But the possibility of public shaming still has a degree of deterrent value.
OK, so while I agree with the idea that MeToo has gone too far in some instances, so much of this article is just plain wrong:
1. Sexual harrassment really is a big deal. My own conservative late mother was horridly sexually harrassed back in the 1970's at a government job, as were all the women who worked there. It didn't matter if you were married or not, the guys didn't care. Also, I'm older than RH and I remember guys in the 90's bragging about plans to take advantage of drunk girls at parties or whatnot - this was par for the course. It really was like this back then. The whole anti-sexual harrassment/anti-rape push of the 80's/90's/00's really did reign in a lot of horrible behavior on the part of men. You guys today just simply don't act like this as much because it just became unacceptable socially.
2. It is not true that women are attracted primarily to money and power. RH sounds like some kind of redpill type from the 2010's here. My wife and I met and started dating when I we were 17 and I worked at McDonalds. I had no money and no power. Almost every married couple I know has some version of this story. Very few are "super successful man meet super hot admiring chick." This is not "lesbianism" applied to hetreosexuality. This is completely normal. The alpha-male stock broker marrying the hot young intern is actually abnormal.
3. I also disagree that men are primarily interested in looks. Yes, looks matter - no one wants to date a 2. But so many guys I grew up with simply seemed uninterested in the hottest girls. I personally have always had very conventional taste in women. But so many guys I've known seem to openly talk about how they actually don't like it when women are more attractive, or dress sexy, or are flirtatious. And most go on to marry fairly frumpy physically unimpressive women. If all men are only interested in attractive women, then how do all these unattractive women I see everyday get boyfriends and husbands?
4. We'll just have to agree to disagree on Epstein. The case that he had sex with and trafficked minors is pretty solid. Not sure why RH is so contrarian on this point.
I agree with you that there is very, very little evidence that women are actually attracted to wealth and power, and I actually think that's the cause of the problem here. Bc many men want them to, fantasize them to, and insist they be, because *men* are primarily the ones worshipping of wealth and power. There are a buttload of extremely rich guys that women pay zero attention to. Also tons of "powerful" on various dimensions guys that women also pay zero attention to...all of those men have thousands of male admirers/fans however.
The reason these women change their story after theyre done getting the benefits...or never got the benefits they imagined...is precisely because they were NOT attracted and only doing it for said benefits, which later might seem paltry or not as expected.
Idk, the world would look really, really different if women mostly wanted rich and powerful guys. It is trivially easy for any pretty young girl to seduce an older rich guy, and virtually all of them are aware of that, and yet it hardly ever happens. If that's who they really were attracted to, it would happen constantly and nonstop bc it really is SO easy to seduce an older guy when you're young (even using the word seduce is wrong, that's how easy it is). Yet they are more often busy seducing a homeless musician or something. And complaining about older guys hitting on them. And almost never going out looking for wealthy old powerful guys, unless they are literal prostitutes and it's clear when their aim is.
I think Richard's points 1, 3, and 4 are correct...yes guys want to use wealth and power as leverage for sex. The whole reason this is a problem though, is precisely bc women are NOT as attracted to that stuff as men want and expect them to be. If they were, there would be no problem here. But there is.
I mean, everyone wants money. Everyone. Lots of people will do lots of things to get it. That's not the same as being sexually attracted to money. And the really funny thing is that online every man is bombarded by thousands of catfishes and bots trying to seduce money out of him...yet almost all of those accounts are run by men. If women were as actually attracted to wealth/power as Richard thinks, they'd be acting like the bot accounts that are men pretending to be women. Yet they don't.
I think you are really onto something here. This whole "women are attracted to money and power" belief that a lot of right wing men have is normally described as a coping mechanism for less accomplished men to explain their datelessness. And this is true, but like you also say it is actually a wish fulfillment fantasy for more accomplished men - "If I finally achieved true success I would be rewarded with a beautiful perfect woman who will fill the hole inside my heart."
It's really sad when you think about it. But what is crazy is that almost everyone, no matter how rich or poor or beautiful or ugly, just about everyone struggles with finding love. I personally remember those lonely nights as a teenage boy, crying sometimes, wishing my heart out for a (beautiful) girl that would just love me. And the fact that I accomplished this shortly before my 18th birthday with minimal effort is kind of a literal miracle in my mind - we have been married for 25+ years now.
Finding love is just really hard and elusive. And then one day, poof, there she/he is. Everyone struggles with this, even billionaires.
I don't want to go all standpoint epistemology on you, but it is a bit bizarre to see somebody who's been married for 25 years, since the age of 18, speaking with such an authoritative tone about this sort of thing.
It's a bit like an incel or some guy who's been just casually dating around for his whole adult life confidently pontiticating about the ins and outs of keeping a marraige that's been underway for decades healthy.
I do not exist in a vacuum. I am surrounded by people who struggle with marriage and dating, etc. Not sure why my relative success in marriage makes me unqualified to opine on dating matters.
I'm of the thought that successfully married people are arguably the best people to get advice from. Serial daters are not.
I think there's a basic truth that women (on average) value success more in their partners than men do. It's just "success" doesn't scale neatly along with "money" so much as correlate with it, isn't enough to make up for other deficits of character for many (maybe most) women, and still doesn't mean that the model of how a woman might value success works the way a lot of the more simplistic male models of courtship think that it does (I deposit status and resources into the female vending machine and she dispenses sex).
But the basic truth is that if you ran an experiment where you take the same guy who is attractive, well spoken, interesting, and nice and throw him out in the dating market - in one instance claiming to be a doctor and in the other claiming to be a barista, the doctor is going to get more hits. However, it's patently false that the barista is doomed.
Just funny bc my entire life I always had the clear idea in my head that doctors are all almost universally arrogant, egotistical, cheating borderline psychopaths, and I definitely would go for the barista over the doctor. However, I will admit I mostly got that idea from the many movies I watched where doctors were what I just described, and not from real life experiences. Though also, I *do* know two women with doctor exes who did things like bug their cars and all their devices and their home with tracking devices when they split, and who did actually act like what I saw in movies, so maybe there's some truth there on will to power etc.
I was thinking more along the lines that more lowbrow-but handsome type men are probably better at picking up women for sex, while highbrow-handsome guys attract women looking for relationships.
This is why you get the millionaire guys in the NY Times complaning that they can't get a date, while handsome bartenders can go home with a new woman every night if they want to.
Also, there is an aspect that if your job totally involves people, especially attractive people - like a bartender - you will probably have better social skills. If you are a finance analyst, you spend a lot of your day crunching numbers and have worse social skills.
These are ways that more money does not always mean more desirable.
"The alpha-male stock broker marrying the hot young intern is actually abnormal."
Even if it is normal, it's a sort of weird area to focus on from a macro human happiness/fertility/family formation point of view. *Most* families will be boring average status/hotness families and not billionaire/supermodel families.
A somewhat more useful argument to make is that *you* (whoever you are) almost certainly aren't as high status as you think you are and probably have somewhat inane sexual/relationship expectations from media consumption brainrot. (Or you are overly pessimistic because you understand you are average/normal and have become convinced it's impossible for anybody who isn't elite to find a partner. Another kind of brainrot).
I think this is what a lot of people need to be told at present - *you* boring, average, normal person can in fact meet another person (who will most likely be boring, average, and normal) and have a family. It's very possible.
In the '60s, a Jewish mogul who was a childhood friend of my father's wanted to marry his Puerto Rican secretary. He told his wife, "Sadie, here's a million dollars. Go home to your mother." She did.
Of course, that would be worth at least 10 million now....
I mean, yes, but the reason you remember this story is because it's a weird outlier and not something that describes most courtship. "Some rich mogul was chasing young tail" doesn't even crack the top 100 reasons that most relationships break down or the top 100 reasons most relationships form.
No Argentus! All millionaires are successful alpha male Republican chads with the most gorgeous wives ever who respect their husbands duly and have sex with them twice a day. These divinely touched beings of men purchased their wives directly in the lobby of an upscale hotel from their fathers.
Meanwhile the few loser middle class men with wives are married to ugly fat feminists who hate sex. Everyone knows this! Literally all romantic relationships are completely transactional. No one on Earth has ever fallen in love ever. Love is a lie spread by feminists to turn all heterosexuals into lesbians.
Real men buy women for cold hard cash, just like the ultimate example of manhood, Donald Trump, who purchsed his 15 year old first wife from a Czech Intelligence officer in the 1980's.
I didn't say it resembles most courtship, and neither does sex by (alleged) intimidation. And neither resembles the reasons most courtships proceed or break up, to my knowledge.
And there's no reason to believe that he was "some rich mogul chasing young tail." I don't know how old the secretary was. He and his secretary fell in love and he bought his wife out of the marriage, probably to her delight as well as theirs. I suspect that everyone lived happily ever after.
He doesn't rate a Wikipedia page. He did rate an NYT obit. He died in his 70s and his widow is listed in the obit with a hispanic maiden name. He would have been about 50 at the time of the story.
And true confession: I told the because I thought it wa amusing. They all strike me as rather normal people, not convinced of their inherent charm or of membership in any elite. He was just a middle-class businessman who made good.
A minor is not necessarily incapable of consent to sex. The age of consent in Canada, most countries in Europe, and many states in the U.S. is 16; 14 or 15 in some places. A 16-year-old is still a minor. So sex with 17-year-olds is a nothing-burger. A massage from a single 14-year-old wearing underwear, well, maybe.....
Leslie, I'm not sure defending Epstein and Trump/Clinton having sex with 14 year olds is a good look. But it's only your permanent reputation on the internet.
I know that there has been a vibe shift but Hanania's seeming take that "pedophilia is okay actually, not sure what all these prudes are so upset about" is kind of disturbing on multiple levels, and I'm not sure that the general public is going to agree, except to the extent that some of them are...well....pedophiles.
Oh for heaven's sakes. No one has ever proved that anyone in that orbit had sex with 14 year olds, least of all President Trump. It's worse for your reputation to be alleging that named living people committed crimes than it is for mine. To prove defamation of a public figure in the US the plaintiff has to prove actual malice, not mere reckless repeating of statements that the defendant can't substantiate. There is no shortage of malice directed against Donald Trump....
It's not pedophilia anyway to have sex with a person who has gone through puberty. The term refers to taking sexual advantage of prepubescent children who can't understand what they are being manipulated into submitting to. The term for a culturally unhealthy attraction to "too-young" sexually competent people is ephebophilia. Both may be illegal according to the age of consent in that jurisdiction. But in most of the world that legal age is less than 18.
WTF? If we simply had no laws against sexual harrassment, women would be unable to participate in a workplace where straight men were around. Married women would be bribed into sex with their male bosses, and penalized for not having sex with them. Allowing men in power to have sex with female subordinates does not primarily lead to family formation. It leads to extra marital affairs.
Do you want an Islamic style world where unrelated men and women can't interact with each other because no penalty exists for men who use their status to seduce women and retaliate against those who refuse them?
Do you think the world is some kind of romantic fantasy? Pretty female students like their handsome nerdy professors and they date and live happily ever after? Dude, this is not how it is 90% of the time. Mostly it is unattractive but successful men (who are also mostly married) coercing otherwise sexually disinterested women with material favors and the threat of retaliation, which is unfair both to the female subordinate and everyone else who is being sidelined so the man in power can bribe some woman he wants with favors.
Encouraging bosses to sleep with their employees creates some pretty straightforward anti-meritocratic incentives. You should devote more thinking to this if you care about elite human capital.
“A ‘boss’ does not have power over his ‘subordinate’” is a nonsensical argument to make if you look at the terms societies adopt for these positions. Just admit you’re pro sexual harassment.
>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.
I just don't think this analysis makes a lot of psychological sense? If anything, men in power, who have experienced less rejection and have more to lose, would be much more likely to blackmail or harm someone. In fact, he might not even have to actively harm her; he could simply not promote her, not give her a bonus, etc.
I also just think Hanania's assessment of power dynamics is all wrong. In nearly every boss/subordinate relationship, the worker is looking for something from the boss: promotion, money, approval maybe. That's true even if they're trying to get that money by suing the boss, but it's especially true in the early stages of the relationship. And so long as one party is seeking something from the other, they are not in control. Just because they have a mechanism to cause harm to the other does not give them all the power. The person being mugged does not hold power over the mugger just because they can report them to the police.
Ultimately, the majority of women (70% by one statistic I read) never report sexual assault in the workplace. This must be shocking to Hanania! Don't all women just want money and status? Well in fact, most probably don't want to spent months (and tons of money) litigating and relitigating the details of their assault, or think of themselves as a passive victim, or face the inevitable disbelief and social pressure from others. They want to move on with their lives. The minority that Hanania describes who go out of their way to destroy a former partner or even make up allegations to get media attention are exactly that, a minority.
>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.
And this is a homosexual thing?! What a sad world we must have lived in before Obergefell! More seriously, though, there is no natural complimentary model of male/female relationships between male authority and female sexuality. It's a non sequitur, because Hanania has a much better and more intuitive reason why workplace relationships happen: people spend a lot of time together. No need to forceful the whole lesbianism hypothesis.
The safetyism stuff also seems like a huge non sequitur? How many people do you know who didn't get in a relationship because their employer prohibited dating their direct supervisor? The real reason people don't have kids is that having kids is expensive (and obviously a ton of other social and cultural factors, but #MeToo is at the bottom of that list).
I don't fully disagree with Hanania's analysis though. A 35 year old woman dating a 50 year old man is not automatically a victim. Nor is a graduate student dating their professor. Adults have agency, and blanket paternalism can certainly be harmful. But that doesn't excuse Epstein or mean women can't legitimately experience harm. In fact, I fear that the handful of false SA accusations are harming women most of all. When #MeToo passes, and it likely will, I worry suspicion and distrust of SA charges will only increase, and views like Hanania's will become more and more mainstream.
I think anybody who thinks bajillionaire guys don't care about rejection should go tell Donald Trump he lost the election in 2020 or Elon that he doesn't have the most popular tweets on Twitter/X without algorithm dickering.
Pretty onboard with this for the most part, despite very much being an outlier and *not* being attracted to men because of status and wealth. It's often actively off-putting.
I think somewhere you said something like "Yes, it's true that men are discriminated against, but part of being a man is not complaining about it."
I would say something like "Yes, it's true that high status men will very often use their status to treat women like interchangeable sex objects and not give a crap about them as people at all. But part of being a woman is knowing to snub dudes like this if you want something less vapid."
However, I don't really think the point about billionaires being targeted more really matters much. Yes, and supermodels and beautiful actresses have to put up with way, way more extremely distressing and bizarre attention from horny weirdos than grandma or the cashier girl at the grocery store does. (Remember that crazy guy who tried to murder Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster?) This isn't really fair, but it's a just a byproduct of being highly desirable.
*Edit* And not to sound like an "all men are pigs" feminist, but I think it's also kind of strange to emphasize the typical nature of how male/female attraction works from an evolutionary point of view and to leave off that evolution did in fact push men to use coercion and rape as part of their reproductive strategy.
This is a real tension where evolution doesn't care about individual rights and preferences. Male coercion/female choice are competing with each other here. You have to pick where you put your finger on the scale. I definitely want it more on the "female choice" side. It's a good place to resist evolution - along with not eating all the ice cream all the time or indulging lizard brain tribal zero sum thinking.
"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."
Don't you undercut yourself here by arguing how harmful MeToo norms are in the workplace? The guy making $100k in Toledo likely has a team of 4-5 employees he manages. If he's romantically interested in one of them, you seem to acknowledge that MeToo norms and employers' workplace dating policies make that relationship much less likely to happen today than in past eras.
When you say you have no sympathy for men who complain about MeToo ruining their dating life, I think you have in mind a very particular guy who whines on the internet all day that society is why he can't get laid, and it rightly disgusts you, but you're overgeneralizing that guy to be anyone who notices the same things you discuss throughout this article.
I'm reminded of Hayden Panettiere's recent claim that she was "trafficked" when, as a legal adult, she was given the opportunity to sleep with a prominent actor. Despite the fact that he was completely passive, and she was able to decline the opportunity without suffering any negative repercussions whatsoever.
Regardless if that’s your opinion, she literally just passed away and likely hasn’t even been buried yet. Maybe a little respect until she’s been laid to rest?
Interviewer: "I just want to clarify, when someone in power makes someone who is subordinate feel that they have to engage in sexual activities for the sake of their job or the sake of their academic career, that is what angers so many people right now."
Trimble: "The step in that syllogism where I part company is the younger — or whatever — person feeling they 'have to,' and let me say again that a young attractive female has a lot of power, where older, less attractive men are concerned. And I never felt I had to, to keep my jobs. When I was involved with a guy, it was because I liked him. My taste may not always have been very good — that’s another issue."
Just to add something. I have a good friend who was an art director at a major ad agency during the mad-man era. She said "Yes, some women did that, but it never really helped them get ahead." My friend never did, but she was sometimes suspected of having an affair with her boss; but really, her success was due to her own talent.
As Virginia said elsewhere in the interview, if it gets to the point where other people are unfairly affected, things change. Such as a university professor who passes a failing student (or gives an A to a B student) if the student sleeps with him. I know of such a case and find it disgusting, especially since the professor got off with a warning, which may have just lead him to be more discrete.
But I also know a woman who had an affair for years with her undergraduate mentor that was purely consensual. She was very smart and he was helpful to her throughout her career, even when she went on to graduate school elsewhere, took a job, etc. He was everything a mentor should be; the affair was incidental to her success. Virginia, in another interview, says that she had an affair with her graduate mentor the whole time they worked together, and she is the one who became famous whereas few outside the field have heard of him.
Good for Trimble she never felt she had to keep her job. Just imagine how most heterosexual men would feel if they had a coveted job they intended to stay in, and a male boss made it clear they wanted a blow job.
An excellent scenario for looking at this issue; thanks.
I've certainly had such jobs (but no boss who demanded such a thing). If I had such a boss, I'd have had absolutely zero problem saying "fuck, no", and would have instantly complained to his superior.
I don't think I'm an outlier here - I think most straight men would do the same.
So...why can't women do that? I think you're making Richard's point for him.
I think I would immediately try to create a paper trail of some kind to protect myself. But I still think you are being a bit dismissive. Sexual demand could take the form of escalating jokes or comments. Not all these things occur in offices with a supportive hierarchy or complaint structure in place. Sometimes bosses’ bosses do nothing. And a report I read long ago said that the group experiencing the most rampant sexual harassment were workers in restaurant and bars. What do you do when your immediate boss can simply lie and fire you at will?
That stat (about bars) seems plausible, but I bet it's hiding a bit of the sausage-making. The vast bulk of harassment a bar/restaurant worker is likely to receive will come from customers - not bosses. And my understanding is the more overtly the establishment is about ogling (cabarets, Hooters, etc.), the more likely there is to be a formal mechanism to "toss the bum out" if he causes too much of a problem.
Maybe I'm an outlier on this, but I wouldn't dream of a paper trail - those are useful for lawyers and bureaucracy and IMHO those never are winning moves. An adversarial relationship with the entity you work for every day is not a win for either side.
The alternatives are to laugh it off ("ya, sure, fuck you") or quit. I'd take either of those rather than start down a path of litigation. No job is worth so much more than the next job without an asshole boss.
Added: Another way to think about this - why is THIS job so much better than the next-best job without such an asshole boss? Usually it's not, so you just quit. But suppose it's a lot better - why? Maybe because it pays better or something, and the boss is using that as leverage for his blowjobs. OK - then just face the fact that the job is part being a waiter at the bar, part prostitution. What's wrong with that? If you don't want to be a prostitute but still want to get paid the premium for being a prostitute, that's kind of unreasonable. Either decide you're willing to sell your body (because that's what this high-pay job requires) or get another job that doesn't require that.
*Most* people I think do have that much optionality. Very few people live in a situation where there's literally only one employer.
Of course there are exceptions. Some people live in places where there are NO employers. We don't have laws making employers show up. At our company we have a few people we hired more or less as "charity cases" - people who couldn't get a job anywhere else but we hired out of pity (we don't pay them much and try to find them something useful to do). Those people probably would have a very hard time getting another job, but is it our duty to find them work they like at wages they're happy with?
These are separate problems from this stuff - people who live in such situations are vulnerable to all kinds of things (what happens if that one employer goes out of business, or leaves, or...whatever?)
I think it has to be assumed that when two adults of legal age decide to engage in sex, it is permissible. Rape is a horrible crime, but that isn't rape, even if it is transactional. And as Virginia said, "a young attractive female has a lot of power, where older, less attractive men are concerned". The problem with #metoo isn't listening to women. It is believing them unconditionally.
There’s a lot addressed in this essay. I want to focus on the work place aspect of it, not the propensity of some women to be wh*res and some men to pay for them, which is a different thing:
Many businesses, organizations, and political action committees actually enforce anti-dating clauses in their contracts. Whether manager/subordinate or equal colleagues. Their fellow team members can actually report people dating, and then they get brought into HR. So it isn’t just the two in the relationship that could harm eachother, coworkers who have something against EITHER of them can get involved and cause problems.
I’ve only dated/been in a relationship at work once: He was my manager, but we were the same age, and were teamed up to strategize and increase production rate in a certain area. We were only lovey-dovey after work, not on the clock, and yet we were still reported.
Upper management made it clear that one of us had to go. I had every incentive to accuse him of something, but didn’t. I broke up with him because he didn’t stand up for us. He had asked me out and pursued me, but wouldn’t take responsibility for it. He ended up asking out another colleague the following year and they eloped within that same year.
People are going to meet and fall in love at work, why on earth there’s a Human Resources minefield surrounding that is beyond me.
If the argument of the piece was that things are more two-sided than they seem these days and we should stop talking about all women who sleep with superiors as victims, then this would make a lot more sense but as usual this is a large overclaim.
>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.
This is just tossed off as if it's self-evident. What if you're not a vengeful stalker but realize you're going to have to face shame and lawsuits so you make it clear she'll have her life ruined, or she doesn't have the guts to go through with a suit, or similar. Like is the claim that this doesn't happen and women who sleep with superiors never feel like they have power over them today based on this a priori logic?
The safetyism argument, particularly as applied to nuclear power and NIMBYism, is a stretch. There are always tradeoffs. A half of century ago, a group of older conservatives from a small fishing village I live in publicly objected to a proposal to add Harbor to its name since it would bring more attention to the village. I hardly fault them for thinking teleologically, meaning caring about where things are going and yes that includes more traffic, lanes, policing, parking lots, and destruction of the pace and vistas that they helped to create and/or maintain. So while I agree with Richards concern regarding "natural norms" and power differentials as a threat to relationships, I am not a big fan of the "ism" talk which flattens the reasonable assessments of trade offs into a negative called safetyism. Good for clicks, not for making sense.
Mandatory sexual harassment laws shouldn’t exist for private employers. If you don’t like how your boss talks, work somewhere else. If somebody physically touches you that’s battery and you can go to the police. Extreme and outrageous verbal comments are already covered by IIED torts. There’s no need to restrict how other people want to run their workplace.
It’s remarkable how awful civil rights law has made the workplace. This isn’t even mentioning disparate impact or other delusional anti-discrimination laws. Thanks for being one of the few people who cares more about freedom than equality.
Call me woke but I view a boss making a sexual advance towards a subordinate as an inherent form of sexual blackmail. It creates a reasonable fear of consequences if one is not compliant. It is potentially very costly to be forced to look for a new job because someone does not want sex with their boss. The boss may have a lot to lose, but it is also costly to go public with an accusation and lodge a complaint. The boss knows all this.
I think he misses how things can be escalated. In this scenario the more powerful man has many ways to make the woman's life more painful. He can pass her up for promotions, give her bad work, pile on unrealistic expectations, and all at minimal risk. If he did fire her, he could do so for some trumped up reason that doesn't get much scrutiny.
Women have just two options. They quit or they go public. Going public involves lodging a complaint that can't be taken back, openly declaring that there's an issue and setting yourself on the other side of someone who's more institutionally powerful. It immediately puts you in conflict with them. Even if you win, the situation will likely be stressful and upsetting.
Women have the nuclear option, but are often reasonably afraid of using it. Especially if their boss is skillful enough to make himself hard to persecute.
Making yourself hard to persecute seems like it would be a good survival skill to teach all young people "There are more people out there in the world who will try to persecute you than will honestly try to win your love, son. Govern yourself accordingly."
I think RH's old far-right impulses are coming out here.
Not necessarily "far right". I think Richard is happy with some aspects of sex-positive feminism. He just wants responsibility to be acknowledged both ways. I think most of the far right would say keep women out of these situations, reverse the sexual revolution, women shouldn't consent to strangers, etc.
I meant it in the sense that although he has reformed himself somewhat, he still has some embarrassingly far right-coded takes that make me question my affinity for some of his writing.
His hatred of tattoos on women makes me chuckle. His "Epstein was a nothingburger" take makes me wince. Some of his "women want rich chads and men want sexy babes - it's science!" seems ripped from a 2015 redpill forum.
Reformed in terms of what? Do you think Hanania is trying to be a normie liberal lol? He's still on the Right. These aren't far right takes nor are they unreasonable.
RH definately has gotten bitten by the liberal bug. I recognize it because It happened to me in the mid-2010's, the same kind of realizations about the Right's contradictions and chuddery. But if you spent the first 30 years of your life conservative, some of the old habits die hard. You hold on to some things still. Even I do this.
I mentioned "far right" because Hanania used to be heavy into "race science" back in the day. Heck, he even recently had an article on race science - which made me cringe a bit.
But still, he can't just unsee the stuff that he has seen. Even if there are areas of Liberalism that are fairly problematic. I've always liked his quality of being the guy who will say the things no one else will say. But the other side to that is some of his more cringey takes.
Women like high status men, ever tried asking out one while being low status?
I was a low status teenager. Never dated a girl before. I worked at McDonalds.
Somehow I achieved getting a beautiful girlfriend (now wife) on nothing but my personality.
I agree that women prefer higher status men. But higher status could be something like "has lots of friends" or "gives off an edgy vibe", especially to a younger woman/teenager.
You didn't say what your status was at the time your wife started going out with you. All of us started out working retail and fast food. But you didn't land her while still working at McDonalds in the same role you had as a teenager, I bet. You had to have been promoted to shift boss at least before she noticed you. Or perhaps you owned all five of the franchises in your town and donated to the local symphony orchestra.
If she started dating you when both of you were teenagers, she must have seen some potential in you that kept her interested and believing in your future together. Edgy doesn't pay the bills or raise children.
But they don’t like *every* high status man. This attitude can quickly descend into a sense of entitlement that leads to abuse.
I started to believe long ago that physical attractiveness is more important than status per se, especially in an era when women can make their own money. Will I Am would call that redpill and right-coded but I don't think you even need to be rightwing to recognize that. Dating stats tell us what women REALLY want. Working hard to attain high status makes you "attractive" to women who are ready to settle. Hanania and standard redpill theorists of the 2010s seem to suggest that's analogous to being young and hot as a woman--it's not. Women want relatively young and hot men too.
Fair
I know. I love it! Go Richard!
RH addresses this point: bosses who cause talented women to depart or feel uncomfortable will get chewed out or fired.
There’s no law that that will happen, and if it does, it’s little consolation to the women who get driven out along the way. Harvey Weinstein predated on actresses for years before he faced a reckoning.
Yes, little consolation. But why assume that norms wouldn’t develop fairly quickly? Or do you think CEOs/stockholders prefer sexism to profits? In any event, you seem to prize safety over improving heterosexual relationships/family formation.
Re: Weinstein: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-meaning-of-harvey-weinstein/
Doesn't that just mean the bosses are incentivized to prey on women who are seen as less talented or otherwise more expendable as employees? I mean, I'm sure that already happens to some extent, but this sounds like a recipe to make it worse.
Prey upon? You mean hit on them/have sex with them? They can still say no. Even less talented women are required for a firm’s success. Norms will prevail.
By "prey upon" I mean make repeated unwanted advances, often with an implicit or explicit threat of terminating their employment or pursuing other forms of retaliation. If the woman likes the attention or if the boss backs off respectfully, then that's much less of a concern to me, although it's still an inherently risky situation imo.
I agree that for the most part norms prevent anything too bad from happening, but I think you're underestimating the fragility of norms. The reason these norms seem so strong is mainly that they're legally and institutionally enforced. Before there were laws against sexual harassment etc. on the books I don't think it was considered so abnormal and low status to hit on your underlings or engage in other behavior that respectable people find disgusting these days. I think modern professional class men have largely internalized decades of being disciplined and indoctrinated, and will continue to police each other and themselves even if the structures controlling them are removed, but over the years, decades, and generations, these norms are likely to become weaker and weaker unless continually reinforced. We could end up somewhere very ugly if we're not careful.
I think his point on safety ism is good. In another time people could read other people. They could tell when someone was comfortable or uncomfortable. Managing this is just a part of life. The risk in over safety-ism is that people don't find each other, since people spend most time at their jobs. But yah it can be abused but you still have to live your life. You know if you don't drive no car accident...but you know your limited.
As RH mentioned, a boss making a friendship advance toward a subordinate causes the same concerns for the subordinate.
This is not to me a plausible part of his argument.
There’s no implied quid-pro-quo dynamic in a generic friendship advance from a boss to a subordinate, in contrast to a sexual advance from that person.
Bosses are wise not to try to make friends among subordinates. In the military, fraternization between officers and enlisted/NCOs is strictly forbidden. If two friends go through ROTC and college or a service academy together and one rises faster than the other after commissioning, they shouldn't be assigned to a billet where one is in the direct chain of command over his lower-ranking friend. even if it's strictly platonic. It's lonely at the top when all of your potential friends are in the same line of work.
Not sure how much of a model the military should be for civilian employment. I'd expect different norms depending on whether there is potential criminal liability for telling your boss to take a hike. The stakes are lower for most civilian employment, so the strictures should be looser.
I mean, I think the approach should be similar as for office romances in general. The stance should be:
"Mostly (or weakly) discouraged, perhaps even frowned upon. If not explicitly banned then participants need to have eyes WIDE OPEN on the risks/downsides - not even for abuses of power but just potential awkwardness & bad blood if relationship ends. But such relationships are not necessarily/inherently abusive; whether abusive or not depends on the details. In other words, mostly more trouble than they're worth." ?
I know I know, overly long and filled with caveats -- but nuanced situations are necessarily filled with caveats!
I have friends who met through work and married while at different ranks/paygrades (though not extremely so - more like "associate analyst" vs "senior/principal analyst" etc).
I also think the story of high-powered executive who marries younger subordinate for 2nd wife and stays married to 2nd wife for much longer (and more happily) is also not unheard of ?
>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.
I don't think you really understand the complaint regular men are making. Regular men aren't complaining that they're having sexual encounters with women who then go on to extort them for money. They're complaining that MeToo has made it vastly easier for women to vindictively ruin men's reputation, including the reputation of men she's never had sex with. It's not like "Jackie" in the UVa rape hoax tried to extort a bunch of frat boys for money, and only went to Rolling Stone when they refused to cough up the dough. It's not like the woman Aziz Ansari went on a date with tried to extort him.
It might well be the case that desirable, high-status men are more impacted by MeToo than undesirable low-status men. That doesn't imply that MeToo had NO negative impact on undesirable low-status men.
The public rhetoric of MeToo also made zero effort to distinguish between powerful and ordinary men. A guy with relatively little optionality in the dating market makes for a perfect scapegoat, whether that was the initial intent of the movement in its best form or not.
To build on this, social media is part of the problem. Even if a guy doesn’t become the character of the day, a woman looking to destroy a guy’s reputation can cast a much wider net via social media than when only her friends heard about how much he sucked.
For regular guys it's much more likely to be "Are We Dating the Same Guy" facebook groups.
The power you're ascribing to women here seems to come down to "Women can go viral on social media and get men in trouble", but that's just obviously not true for most women. Most people cannot go viral on social media! The fact that you, a social media user, are surrounded by viral people does not imply that any particular person can easily go viral.
Going viral on social media with your accusations does give you a certain kind of social power (and also enormous harassment), but whether it's good or bad for the average woman is a moot point because most women are not going to be able to go viral.
If you remove the possibility of social media virality from the equation, you're just left with a situation where your boss is threatening you and no one in your organization will help. This is the median sexual harassment case and without strong social structures of the kind you deride, it does not favor the harassment victim.
This whole thing feels reasoned from first principles and porn logic. I think it's fine to enjoy the sexy moments in Mad Men, but workplaces like Mad Men in real life were actually very bad and very common. They weren't fun or sexy as the show makes them look, and capitalism did nothing to stop them. This is why we built the strong social norms that we currently have.
I suppose an inherent aspect of public shaming is that people will be much more aware of misbehavior where public shaming was administered as a punishment, than equally bad misbehavior where it was not.
But the possibility of public shaming still has a degree of deterrent value.
OK, so while I agree with the idea that MeToo has gone too far in some instances, so much of this article is just plain wrong:
1. Sexual harrassment really is a big deal. My own conservative late mother was horridly sexually harrassed back in the 1970's at a government job, as were all the women who worked there. It didn't matter if you were married or not, the guys didn't care. Also, I'm older than RH and I remember guys in the 90's bragging about plans to take advantage of drunk girls at parties or whatnot - this was par for the course. It really was like this back then. The whole anti-sexual harrassment/anti-rape push of the 80's/90's/00's really did reign in a lot of horrible behavior on the part of men. You guys today just simply don't act like this as much because it just became unacceptable socially.
2. It is not true that women are attracted primarily to money and power. RH sounds like some kind of redpill type from the 2010's here. My wife and I met and started dating when I we were 17 and I worked at McDonalds. I had no money and no power. Almost every married couple I know has some version of this story. Very few are "super successful man meet super hot admiring chick." This is not "lesbianism" applied to hetreosexuality. This is completely normal. The alpha-male stock broker marrying the hot young intern is actually abnormal.
3. I also disagree that men are primarily interested in looks. Yes, looks matter - no one wants to date a 2. But so many guys I grew up with simply seemed uninterested in the hottest girls. I personally have always had very conventional taste in women. But so many guys I've known seem to openly talk about how they actually don't like it when women are more attractive, or dress sexy, or are flirtatious. And most go on to marry fairly frumpy physically unimpressive women. If all men are only interested in attractive women, then how do all these unattractive women I see everyday get boyfriends and husbands?
4. We'll just have to agree to disagree on Epstein. The case that he had sex with and trafficked minors is pretty solid. Not sure why RH is so contrarian on this point.
I agree with you that there is very, very little evidence that women are actually attracted to wealth and power, and I actually think that's the cause of the problem here. Bc many men want them to, fantasize them to, and insist they be, because *men* are primarily the ones worshipping of wealth and power. There are a buttload of extremely rich guys that women pay zero attention to. Also tons of "powerful" on various dimensions guys that women also pay zero attention to...all of those men have thousands of male admirers/fans however.
The reason these women change their story after theyre done getting the benefits...or never got the benefits they imagined...is precisely because they were NOT attracted and only doing it for said benefits, which later might seem paltry or not as expected.
Idk, the world would look really, really different if women mostly wanted rich and powerful guys. It is trivially easy for any pretty young girl to seduce an older rich guy, and virtually all of them are aware of that, and yet it hardly ever happens. If that's who they really were attracted to, it would happen constantly and nonstop bc it really is SO easy to seduce an older guy when you're young (even using the word seduce is wrong, that's how easy it is). Yet they are more often busy seducing a homeless musician or something. And complaining about older guys hitting on them. And almost never going out looking for wealthy old powerful guys, unless they are literal prostitutes and it's clear when their aim is.
I think Richard's points 1, 3, and 4 are correct...yes guys want to use wealth and power as leverage for sex. The whole reason this is a problem though, is precisely bc women are NOT as attracted to that stuff as men want and expect them to be. If they were, there would be no problem here. But there is.
I mean, everyone wants money. Everyone. Lots of people will do lots of things to get it. That's not the same as being sexually attracted to money. And the really funny thing is that online every man is bombarded by thousands of catfishes and bots trying to seduce money out of him...yet almost all of those accounts are run by men. If women were as actually attracted to wealth/power as Richard thinks, they'd be acting like the bot accounts that are men pretending to be women. Yet they don't.
I think you are really onto something here. This whole "women are attracted to money and power" belief that a lot of right wing men have is normally described as a coping mechanism for less accomplished men to explain their datelessness. And this is true, but like you also say it is actually a wish fulfillment fantasy for more accomplished men - "If I finally achieved true success I would be rewarded with a beautiful perfect woman who will fill the hole inside my heart."
It's really sad when you think about it. But what is crazy is that almost everyone, no matter how rich or poor or beautiful or ugly, just about everyone struggles with finding love. I personally remember those lonely nights as a teenage boy, crying sometimes, wishing my heart out for a (beautiful) girl that would just love me. And the fact that I accomplished this shortly before my 18th birthday with minimal effort is kind of a literal miracle in my mind - we have been married for 25+ years now.
Finding love is just really hard and elusive. And then one day, poof, there she/he is. Everyone struggles with this, even billionaires.
I don't want to go all standpoint epistemology on you, but it is a bit bizarre to see somebody who's been married for 25 years, since the age of 18, speaking with such an authoritative tone about this sort of thing.
It's a bit like an incel or some guy who's been just casually dating around for his whole adult life confidently pontiticating about the ins and outs of keeping a marraige that's been underway for decades healthy.
I do not exist in a vacuum. I am surrounded by people who struggle with marriage and dating, etc. Not sure why my relative success in marriage makes me unqualified to opine on dating matters.
I'm of the thought that successfully married people are arguably the best people to get advice from. Serial daters are not.
I think there's a basic truth that women (on average) value success more in their partners than men do. It's just "success" doesn't scale neatly along with "money" so much as correlate with it, isn't enough to make up for other deficits of character for many (maybe most) women, and still doesn't mean that the model of how a woman might value success works the way a lot of the more simplistic male models of courtship think that it does (I deposit status and resources into the female vending machine and she dispenses sex).
But the basic truth is that if you ran an experiment where you take the same guy who is attractive, well spoken, interesting, and nice and throw him out in the dating market - in one instance claiming to be a doctor and in the other claiming to be a barista, the doctor is going to get more hits. However, it's patently false that the barista is doomed.
Just funny bc my entire life I always had the clear idea in my head that doctors are all almost universally arrogant, egotistical, cheating borderline psychopaths, and I definitely would go for the barista over the doctor. However, I will admit I mostly got that idea from the many movies I watched where doctors were what I just described, and not from real life experiences. Though also, I *do* know two women with doctor exes who did things like bug their cars and all their devices and their home with tracking devices when they split, and who did actually act like what I saw in movies, so maybe there's some truth there on will to power etc.
The barista would probably get laid more. Whereas the doctor would attract more women interested in marriage.
Yeah, because the doctor is on-call all the time.
I was thinking more along the lines that more lowbrow-but handsome type men are probably better at picking up women for sex, while highbrow-handsome guys attract women looking for relationships.
This is why you get the millionaire guys in the NY Times complaning that they can't get a date, while handsome bartenders can go home with a new woman every night if they want to.
Also, there is an aspect that if your job totally involves people, especially attractive people - like a bartender - you will probably have better social skills. If you are a finance analyst, you spend a lot of your day crunching numbers and have worse social skills.
These are ways that more money does not always mean more desirable.
One way a powerful man can control his subordinate is by making her stay late at work and talking her ear off while she wants to go home.
Can verify!
OK, this is fully 100% accurate and I am sad to report that sometimes....I am that man!
"The alpha-male stock broker marrying the hot young intern is actually abnormal."
Even if it is normal, it's a sort of weird area to focus on from a macro human happiness/fertility/family formation point of view. *Most* families will be boring average status/hotness families and not billionaire/supermodel families.
A somewhat more useful argument to make is that *you* (whoever you are) almost certainly aren't as high status as you think you are and probably have somewhat inane sexual/relationship expectations from media consumption brainrot. (Or you are overly pessimistic because you understand you are average/normal and have become convinced it's impossible for anybody who isn't elite to find a partner. Another kind of brainrot).
I think this is what a lot of people need to be told at present - *you* boring, average, normal person can in fact meet another person (who will most likely be boring, average, and normal) and have a family. It's very possible.
In the '60s, a Jewish mogul who was a childhood friend of my father's wanted to marry his Puerto Rican secretary. He told his wife, "Sadie, here's a million dollars. Go home to your mother." She did.
Of course, that would be worth at least 10 million now....
I mean, yes, but the reason you remember this story is because it's a weird outlier and not something that describes most courtship. "Some rich mogul was chasing young tail" doesn't even crack the top 100 reasons that most relationships break down or the top 100 reasons most relationships form.
No Argentus! All millionaires are successful alpha male Republican chads with the most gorgeous wives ever who respect their husbands duly and have sex with them twice a day. These divinely touched beings of men purchased their wives directly in the lobby of an upscale hotel from their fathers.
Meanwhile the few loser middle class men with wives are married to ugly fat feminists who hate sex. Everyone knows this! Literally all romantic relationships are completely transactional. No one on Earth has ever fallen in love ever. Love is a lie spread by feminists to turn all heterosexuals into lesbians.
Real men buy women for cold hard cash, just like the ultimate example of manhood, Donald Trump, who purchsed his 15 year old first wife from a Czech Intelligence officer in the 1980's.
I didn't say it resembles most courtship, and neither does sex by (alleged) intimidation. And neither resembles the reasons most courtships proceed or break up, to my knowledge.
And there's no reason to believe that he was "some rich mogul chasing young tail." I don't know how old the secretary was. He and his secretary fell in love and he bought his wife out of the marriage, probably to her delight as well as theirs. I suspect that everyone lived happily ever after.
He doesn't rate a Wikipedia page. He did rate an NYT obit. He died in his 70s and his widow is listed in the obit with a hispanic maiden name. He would have been about 50 at the time of the story.
And true confession: I told the because I thought it wa amusing. They all strike me as rather normal people, not convinced of their inherent charm or of membership in any elite. He was just a middle-class businessman who made good.
I think I tend to alternate back and forth between the two types of brainrot you describe
Yes, it would depend on which type of brainrot was currently more likely to get you nooky in the situation. Would for me, anyway.
A minor is not necessarily incapable of consent to sex. The age of consent in Canada, most countries in Europe, and many states in the U.S. is 16; 14 or 15 in some places. A 16-year-old is still a minor. So sex with 17-year-olds is a nothing-burger. A massage from a single 14-year-old wearing underwear, well, maybe.....
Leslie, I'm not sure defending Epstein and Trump/Clinton having sex with 14 year olds is a good look. But it's only your permanent reputation on the internet.
I know that there has been a vibe shift but Hanania's seeming take that "pedophilia is okay actually, not sure what all these prudes are so upset about" is kind of disturbing on multiple levels, and I'm not sure that the general public is going to agree, except to the extent that some of them are...well....pedophiles.
Oh for heaven's sakes. No one has ever proved that anyone in that orbit had sex with 14 year olds, least of all President Trump. It's worse for your reputation to be alleging that named living people committed crimes than it is for mine. To prove defamation of a public figure in the US the plaintiff has to prove actual malice, not mere reckless repeating of statements that the defendant can't substantiate. There is no shortage of malice directed against Donald Trump....
It's not pedophilia anyway to have sex with a person who has gone through puberty. The term refers to taking sexual advantage of prepubescent children who can't understand what they are being manipulated into submitting to. The term for a culturally unhealthy attraction to "too-young" sexually competent people is ephebophilia. Both may be illegal according to the age of consent in that jurisdiction. But in most of the world that legal age is less than 18.
Oh yes! Lord Trump would never rape a young teenager! And if he did then she liked it! And if she didn't she had it coming!
Oddly familiar justification for that dirtbag.
WTF? If we simply had no laws against sexual harrassment, women would be unable to participate in a workplace where straight men were around. Married women would be bribed into sex with their male bosses, and penalized for not having sex with them. Allowing men in power to have sex with female subordinates does not primarily lead to family formation. It leads to extra marital affairs.
Do you want an Islamic style world where unrelated men and women can't interact with each other because no penalty exists for men who use their status to seduce women and retaliate against those who refuse them?
Do you think the world is some kind of romantic fantasy? Pretty female students like their handsome nerdy professors and they date and live happily ever after? Dude, this is not how it is 90% of the time. Mostly it is unattractive but successful men (who are also mostly married) coercing otherwise sexually disinterested women with material favors and the threat of retaliation, which is unfair both to the female subordinate and everyone else who is being sidelined so the man in power can bribe some woman he wants with favors.
>If we simply had no laws against sexual harrassment, women would be unable to participate in a workplace where straight men were around.
I think that is the point, yes.
Encouraging bosses to sleep with their employees creates some pretty straightforward anti-meritocratic incentives. You should devote more thinking to this if you care about elite human capital.
“A ‘boss’ does not have power over his ‘subordinate’” is a nonsensical argument to make if you look at the terms societies adopt for these positions. Just admit you’re pro sexual harassment.
"why can't i harrass you sometimes?"
https://youtu.be/qSPOlTmJnFo?si=VtM5pAFUoseulzvh
>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.
I just don't think this analysis makes a lot of psychological sense? If anything, men in power, who have experienced less rejection and have more to lose, would be much more likely to blackmail or harm someone. In fact, he might not even have to actively harm her; he could simply not promote her, not give her a bonus, etc.
I also just think Hanania's assessment of power dynamics is all wrong. In nearly every boss/subordinate relationship, the worker is looking for something from the boss: promotion, money, approval maybe. That's true even if they're trying to get that money by suing the boss, but it's especially true in the early stages of the relationship. And so long as one party is seeking something from the other, they are not in control. Just because they have a mechanism to cause harm to the other does not give them all the power. The person being mugged does not hold power over the mugger just because they can report them to the police.
Ultimately, the majority of women (70% by one statistic I read) never report sexual assault in the workplace. This must be shocking to Hanania! Don't all women just want money and status? Well in fact, most probably don't want to spent months (and tons of money) litigating and relitigating the details of their assault, or think of themselves as a passive victim, or face the inevitable disbelief and social pressure from others. They want to move on with their lives. The minority that Hanania describes who go out of their way to destroy a former partner or even make up allegations to get media attention are exactly that, a minority.
>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.
And this is a homosexual thing?! What a sad world we must have lived in before Obergefell! More seriously, though, there is no natural complimentary model of male/female relationships between male authority and female sexuality. It's a non sequitur, because Hanania has a much better and more intuitive reason why workplace relationships happen: people spend a lot of time together. No need to forceful the whole lesbianism hypothesis.
The safetyism stuff also seems like a huge non sequitur? How many people do you know who didn't get in a relationship because their employer prohibited dating their direct supervisor? The real reason people don't have kids is that having kids is expensive (and obviously a ton of other social and cultural factors, but #MeToo is at the bottom of that list).
I don't fully disagree with Hanania's analysis though. A 35 year old woman dating a 50 year old man is not automatically a victim. Nor is a graduate student dating their professor. Adults have agency, and blanket paternalism can certainly be harmful. But that doesn't excuse Epstein or mean women can't legitimately experience harm. In fact, I fear that the handful of false SA accusations are harming women most of all. When #MeToo passes, and it likely will, I worry suspicion and distrust of SA charges will only increase, and views like Hanania's will become more and more mainstream.
I think anybody who thinks bajillionaire guys don't care about rejection should go tell Donald Trump he lost the election in 2020 or Elon that he doesn't have the most popular tweets on Twitter/X without algorithm dickering.
Pretty onboard with this for the most part, despite very much being an outlier and *not* being attracted to men because of status and wealth. It's often actively off-putting.
I think somewhere you said something like "Yes, it's true that men are discriminated against, but part of being a man is not complaining about it."
I would say something like "Yes, it's true that high status men will very often use their status to treat women like interchangeable sex objects and not give a crap about them as people at all. But part of being a woman is knowing to snub dudes like this if you want something less vapid."
However, I don't really think the point about billionaires being targeted more really matters much. Yes, and supermodels and beautiful actresses have to put up with way, way more extremely distressing and bizarre attention from horny weirdos than grandma or the cashier girl at the grocery store does. (Remember that crazy guy who tried to murder Ronald Reagan to impress Jodie Foster?) This isn't really fair, but it's a just a byproduct of being highly desirable.
*Edit* And not to sound like an "all men are pigs" feminist, but I think it's also kind of strange to emphasize the typical nature of how male/female attraction works from an evolutionary point of view and to leave off that evolution did in fact push men to use coercion and rape as part of their reproductive strategy.
This is a real tension where evolution doesn't care about individual rights and preferences. Male coercion/female choice are competing with each other here. You have to pick where you put your finger on the scale. I definitely want it more on the "female choice" side. It's a good place to resist evolution - along with not eating all the ice cream all the time or indulging lizard brain tribal zero sum thinking.
"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."
Don't you undercut yourself here by arguing how harmful MeToo norms are in the workplace? The guy making $100k in Toledo likely has a team of 4-5 employees he manages. If he's romantically interested in one of them, you seem to acknowledge that MeToo norms and employers' workplace dating policies make that relationship much less likely to happen today than in past eras.
When you say you have no sympathy for men who complain about MeToo ruining their dating life, I think you have in mind a very particular guy who whines on the internet all day that society is why he can't get laid, and it rightly disgusts you, but you're overgeneralizing that guy to be anyone who notices the same things you discuss throughout this article.
I'm reminded of Hayden Panettiere's recent claim that she was "trafficked" when, as a legal adult, she was given the opportunity to sleep with a prominent actor. Despite the fact that he was completely passive, and she was able to decline the opportunity without suffering any negative repercussions whatsoever.
Regardless if that’s your opinion, she literally just passed away and likely hasn’t even been buried yet. Maybe a little respect until she’s been laid to rest?
She was a celebrity and this is the comments of a blog, not her dad's living room. Maybe lay off the pearl-clutching.
It’s still distasteful. And the yacht thing doesn’t sound like it was voluntarily, unless you’re referring to something else?
The yacht thing did not even involve anything, voluntary or involuntary
You would appreciate this article by astronomer Virginia Trimble:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/virginia-trimble-has-seen-the-stars-20191111/
Excerpt:
Interviewer: "I just want to clarify, when someone in power makes someone who is subordinate feel that they have to engage in sexual activities for the sake of their job or the sake of their academic career, that is what angers so many people right now."
Trimble: "The step in that syllogism where I part company is the younger — or whatever — person feeling they 'have to,' and let me say again that a young attractive female has a lot of power, where older, less attractive men are concerned. And I never felt I had to, to keep my jobs. When I was involved with a guy, it was because I liked him. My taste may not always have been very good — that’s another issue."
Just to add something. I have a good friend who was an art director at a major ad agency during the mad-man era. She said "Yes, some women did that, but it never really helped them get ahead." My friend never did, but she was sometimes suspected of having an affair with her boss; but really, her success was due to her own talent.
As Virginia said elsewhere in the interview, if it gets to the point where other people are unfairly affected, things change. Such as a university professor who passes a failing student (or gives an A to a B student) if the student sleeps with him. I know of such a case and find it disgusting, especially since the professor got off with a warning, which may have just lead him to be more discrete.
But I also know a woman who had an affair for years with her undergraduate mentor that was purely consensual. She was very smart and he was helpful to her throughout her career, even when she went on to graduate school elsewhere, took a job, etc. He was everything a mentor should be; the affair was incidental to her success. Virginia, in another interview, says that she had an affair with her graduate mentor the whole time they worked together, and she is the one who became famous whereas few outside the field have heard of him.
Good for Trimble she never felt she had to keep her job. Just imagine how most heterosexual men would feel if they had a coveted job they intended to stay in, and a male boss made it clear they wanted a blow job.
An excellent scenario for looking at this issue; thanks.
I've certainly had such jobs (but no boss who demanded such a thing). If I had such a boss, I'd have had absolutely zero problem saying "fuck, no", and would have instantly complained to his superior.
I don't think I'm an outlier here - I think most straight men would do the same.
So...why can't women do that? I think you're making Richard's point for him.
I think I would immediately try to create a paper trail of some kind to protect myself. But I still think you are being a bit dismissive. Sexual demand could take the form of escalating jokes or comments. Not all these things occur in offices with a supportive hierarchy or complaint structure in place. Sometimes bosses’ bosses do nothing. And a report I read long ago said that the group experiencing the most rampant sexual harassment were workers in restaurant and bars. What do you do when your immediate boss can simply lie and fire you at will?
That stat (about bars) seems plausible, but I bet it's hiding a bit of the sausage-making. The vast bulk of harassment a bar/restaurant worker is likely to receive will come from customers - not bosses. And my understanding is the more overtly the establishment is about ogling (cabarets, Hooters, etc.), the more likely there is to be a formal mechanism to "toss the bum out" if he causes too much of a problem.
Maybe I'm an outlier on this, but I wouldn't dream of a paper trail - those are useful for lawyers and bureaucracy and IMHO those never are winning moves. An adversarial relationship with the entity you work for every day is not a win for either side.
The alternatives are to laugh it off ("ya, sure, fuck you") or quit. I'd take either of those rather than start down a path of litigation. No job is worth so much more than the next job without an asshole boss.
Added: Another way to think about this - why is THIS job so much better than the next-best job without such an asshole boss? Usually it's not, so you just quit. But suppose it's a lot better - why? Maybe because it pays better or something, and the boss is using that as leverage for his blowjobs. OK - then just face the fact that the job is part being a waiter at the bar, part prostitution. What's wrong with that? If you don't want to be a prostitute but still want to get paid the premium for being a prostitute, that's kind of unreasonable. Either decide you're willing to sell your body (because that's what this high-pay job requires) or get another job that doesn't require that.
You assume there is a next job. Most people don't have that much optionality.
*Most* people I think do have that much optionality. Very few people live in a situation where there's literally only one employer.
Of course there are exceptions. Some people live in places where there are NO employers. We don't have laws making employers show up. At our company we have a few people we hired more or less as "charity cases" - people who couldn't get a job anywhere else but we hired out of pity (we don't pay them much and try to find them something useful to do). Those people probably would have a very hard time getting another job, but is it our duty to find them work they like at wages they're happy with?
These are separate problems from this stuff - people who live in such situations are vulnerable to all kinds of things (what happens if that one employer goes out of business, or leaves, or...whatever?)
I think it has to be assumed that when two adults of legal age decide to engage in sex, it is permissible. Rape is a horrible crime, but that isn't rape, even if it is transactional. And as Virginia said, "a young attractive female has a lot of power, where older, less attractive men are concerned". The problem with #metoo isn't listening to women. It is believing them unconditionally.
There’s a lot addressed in this essay. I want to focus on the work place aspect of it, not the propensity of some women to be wh*res and some men to pay for them, which is a different thing:
Many businesses, organizations, and political action committees actually enforce anti-dating clauses in their contracts. Whether manager/subordinate or equal colleagues. Their fellow team members can actually report people dating, and then they get brought into HR. So it isn’t just the two in the relationship that could harm eachother, coworkers who have something against EITHER of them can get involved and cause problems.
I’ve only dated/been in a relationship at work once: He was my manager, but we were the same age, and were teamed up to strategize and increase production rate in a certain area. We were only lovey-dovey after work, not on the clock, and yet we were still reported.
Upper management made it clear that one of us had to go. I had every incentive to accuse him of something, but didn’t. I broke up with him because he didn’t stand up for us. He had asked me out and pursued me, but wouldn’t take responsibility for it. He ended up asking out another colleague the following year and they eloped within that same year.
People are going to meet and fall in love at work, why on earth there’s a Human Resources minefield surrounding that is beyond me.
If the argument of the piece was that things are more two-sided than they seem these days and we should stop talking about all women who sleep with superiors as victims, then this would make a lot more sense but as usual this is a large overclaim.
>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.
This is just tossed off as if it's self-evident. What if you're not a vengeful stalker but realize you're going to have to face shame and lawsuits so you make it clear she'll have her life ruined, or she doesn't have the guts to go through with a suit, or similar. Like is the claim that this doesn't happen and women who sleep with superiors never feel like they have power over them today based on this a priori logic?
The safetyism argument, particularly as applied to nuclear power and NIMBYism, is a stretch. There are always tradeoffs. A half of century ago, a group of older conservatives from a small fishing village I live in publicly objected to a proposal to add Harbor to its name since it would bring more attention to the village. I hardly fault them for thinking teleologically, meaning caring about where things are going and yes that includes more traffic, lanes, policing, parking lots, and destruction of the pace and vistas that they helped to create and/or maintain. So while I agree with Richards concern regarding "natural norms" and power differentials as a threat to relationships, I am not a big fan of the "ism" talk which flattens the reasonable assessments of trade offs into a negative called safetyism. Good for clicks, not for making sense.
Mandatory sexual harassment laws shouldn’t exist for private employers. If you don’t like how your boss talks, work somewhere else. If somebody physically touches you that’s battery and you can go to the police. Extreme and outrageous verbal comments are already covered by IIED torts. There’s no need to restrict how other people want to run their workplace.
It’s remarkable how awful civil rights law has made the workplace. This isn’t even mentioning disparate impact or other delusional anti-discrimination laws. Thanks for being one of the few people who cares more about freedom than equality.