Ben Shapiro Is Wrong About Sexual Harassment
On his virtue-signaling response to mounting accusations against powerful men
Ben Shapiro, a leading conservative commentator and editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, wrote a National Review column bashing “virtue signaling,” but his response to women who accuse powerful men of sexual assault does exactly that.
The “solution” he comes around to is that all people are sinful, and a more righteous view of sex is the answer to society’s problems. Unfortunately, offering up virtuous tropes fails to prudently interact with the problems in our society today — it preaches to the choir about an ideal, intangible world.
Shapiro blames feminism’s loosening of sexual morals for the myriad sexual-harassment and sexual-assault allegations against Hollywood stars, media figures, and politicians. Feminists and the left, he argues, seek to destroy all the “righteous” rules of society:
Marriage had taught men that women were property; thus, kill marriage, kill that pernicious view. Sexual taboos had taught men that women were dangerous seductresses; kill that taboo, kill that pernicious view. Chivalry had taught men that women were weak, and could therefore be exploited; kill chivalry, kill that pernicious view.
Shapiro’s oversimplifications have the effect of making the rules seem sacred and simple, and the critics of the rules indiscriminately antagonistic. In reality, marriage per se is not the target of feminist critique, but rather the patriarchal extremes that too often characterized the traditional marriage covenant. It is not femininity that is “under attack” by these groups, but rather overt sexual obsessiveness over the female form. And when feminists and leftists cast chivalry in a negative light, they have in mind misguided applications of chivalry to serve men’s egos that culminate in an unhealthy hierarchy.
Shapiro argues that feminists loosened society’s morals to the point where men are forced to be either sex-obsessed harassing pigs or holier-than-thou bastions of women’s rights, with no middle ground. But this implies men only recently started demeaning and mistreating women.
The reality? Sexual harassment has been going on for centuries, unchecked. What’s different now is that women are more readily speaking out, and those working toward the establishment of a healthier culture of respect are striving against a system of interaction that has had these problematic features for a long, long time.
Contrary to Shapiro’s simplifications, society’s waning tolerance for the abuse and harassment of women is not the result of leftists and feminists “doing away with the rules,” thereby forcing men to apologize for their gender or be damned. It is the result of women, feminist and otherwise, feeling more empowered to speak up, and large swaths of the culture agreeing something tangible must be done to combat this issue.
The subtitle of Shapiro’s article reads: “An age-old truth becomes new again: Social boundaries help keep people in line.” But who is arguing against social boundaries? As far as I can tell, no prominent feminist thinker has advocated a laissez-faire sexual free-for-all; rather, what we find is a call for a different set of social boundaries than the ones that have characterized our society for ages. If the ones we’ve erected have not staved off wanton sexual harassment and abuse, and if they have not prevented significant forms of gender inequality, then is it so curious they would seek to replace those boundaries with other ones?
If sexual assault and objectification are nothing new, then it’s hard to argue these are the result of our sexual revolution. It’s far more plausible to see them as the result of a system of interaction in which male sexual urges have been facilitated and at times encouraged by the power dynamics built into the system.
Shapiro claims that “issuing broad-based mea culpas in [sic] behalf of groups” is not enough to fix humans’ sinful nature, and that it’s therefore better to instill “virtue in individuals through prophylactic rules.” This is a process Shapiro believes is incompatible with leftist oppression politics.
The guilt-trips from progressive white men apologizing for their white male privilege can be annoying, and feel artificial at times. But to say feminism has no preventative measures for resisting vice is to conveniently ignore whole sectors of feminist theory (sectors Shapiro has criticized in the past).
Consent plays a big role in feminist and leftist sexual standards. A culture that prioritizes consent is going to strongly discourage and even disallow sexual episodes which fail to secure the non-coerced agreement of the persons involved. You can disagree that this is a boundary worth centralizing, but you can’t plausibly argue that consent is not a boundary in the first place.
Whatever Shapiro or anyone else thinks of their merits, aren’t feminist theories of rape culture, and arguments that parents to teach their boys not to rape, evidence that feminists understand there are internal inclinations to do wrong? Feminists won’t acknowledge they’re offering a theory of mankind’s inherent “sinfulness,” but the point is they have recognized deep-seated attractions toward behavior that results in the mistreatment of others.
So when Shapiro writes that, “The Left, in its refusal to acknowledge the inherent flaws in humanity, decided to do away with the rules,” he seems to be ignoring what the left actually believes: humanity is plagued by inherent flaws, yet what those flaws are, or what factors cause them, is different than what the right has believed. In many instances — such as our current moment — the left recognizes these inherent flaws, but finds society’s current set of rules and boundaries ineffective, and the right’s proposals unpersuasive, when it comes to how we must address these problems.
Shapiro claims male misbehavior has been championed as delightful for decades. Is he talking about non-consensual behavior (cat-calling, sexual harassment, rape, etc.), or behavior that does not line up with his system of morals (sex outside of marriage, hookup culture, etc.)?
If it’s the former, he’s wrong: feminists have been fighting male misbehavior for decades. If it’s the latter, Shapiro is correct, but it doesn’t help his argument, because sexual harassment and assault predate those cultural changes.
Proposing a solution, Shapiro writes:
Only a proactive reinstitution of checks and balances in society will help. And that will require recognizing that human nature isn’t entirely malleable and that protecting women means requiring positive manhood, not wishful thinking.
Pushing for positive masculinity is a big part of some currents in feminism. Plenty of focus has been directed toward what feminists call toxic masculinity. If the solutions on offer can seem like models of emasculated masculinity, then it should be noted they need not look this way. It should be possible to promote positive manhood while disinclining men toward misbehavior.
Has the loosening of sexual standards destroyed us? Has the enlargement of socially acceptable sexual practices led us to this point? Ross Douthat and others have argued for a long time that our sexual revolution has had socially destructive effects. Yet it’s a quite different thesis to argue that changes in sexual habits and practices have negatively impacted the sociological resilience of families than to argue that a cultural refusal to codify the Mike Pence rule has led to nonstop sexual abuse.
Feminism is not solely about tearing down fences. It is in the business of replacing those fences with fences of its own making. Critique feminism’s alternative boundaries all you want. Plenty of us do. But Shapiro makes it sound like feminism is in the business of creating sexual anarchy.
Have women been freed of the male gaze? Are they safer now? Are they more comfortable in the workplace? Or, as we’re now finding out, are the wages of destroying boundaries on human behavior not freedom, but anarchy — and, for too many women, oppression by voracious men?
No, women have not been “freed” of the male gaze. But men are being pressured not to act out on that gaze without consent. How is that a bad thing?
Are women safer and more comfortable? Yes, because of the women before them who exposed workplace indecency, leading to anti-harassment laws that give women a measure of recourse. None of this is anarchy, and to say that women have brought more harassment upon themselves by daring to push societal boundaries of acceptable female behavior requires rejecting the most basic notions of equality.
While Shapiro’s call to view sex less trivially is a noble one, it also stops short of tangibly engaging with societal issues. It is one thing to disagree with feminist and leftist ideologies, but blaming feminism for men harassing women in the workplace is not a reasonable conclusion.
This does not amount to believing the left is perfectly happy to coexist alongside a Christian sexual ethic; it’s undeniable that feminism and leftism have on many occasions sharply criticized what the right sees as its wholesome traditions. A week ago, the Catholic leftist Elizabeth Bruenig was savaged by fellow leftists on Twitter for daring to dissent from a full affirmation of abortion rights.
Yet are we to think the left’s rejection of the right’s wholesome traditions is the reason why we have sexual misbehavior? Fawning readers will be happy to lay the blame at the left’s door. But the thing with Shapiro is that if you’re someone who thinks reality is a tad more complicated than he lets on, the solutions he offers won’t be very convincing.
