When the #MeToo movement broke, there were lots and lots of articles by male writers demanding to know how they could approach women without being immediately tagged as harassers, predators, or creepy pervs. How, they asked, could they talk to women?
I would've thought that by a certain age, any male would've seen that the obvious answer was...politeness and courtesy. Not so very hard a thing, is it? I understand that the point of these essays was to pretend to naivety, to pretend to a kind of haplessness and terrified cluelessness.
Now I will note that there are changes in the social air. Still...if you're, say, forty-five years old and writing of those essays, how did you manage to carry on flirtations and seductions for the last thirty years? You made it through the Eighties, the Nineties, and the Noughts. Didn't you adapt to changes over all that time? I have a hard time imagining anyone still sidling up to a lovely girl in a bar and asking what her sign is. Or ordering her a Harvey Wallbanger.
Learning new rituals is always hard. That much is true. But, again--- if you're forty or forty-five now, you've gone through shifts in wardrobe and looks, you've gone through shifts in what counts in assigning social value. Grunge to metrosexual to lumbersexual and beyond--- you made it through that. Surely you can do a bit of research in the right magazines and master new habits. It can't be that hard.
My own thought is that where the post-#MeToo essays weren't being deliberately disingenuous, they did have a small bit of actual unease. My own thought is that the writers were feeling guilt not so much for any actual moments of manipulation or coercion in their pasts, but rather for the fact that what they were trying to do in talking to women was initiate a seduction. They were feeling guilt over male desire.
Many of the responses by female writers were quite clear. Women, they responded, weren't demanding that interactions with men be totally sexless. Women, they wrote, liked sex too. In the right setting and at the right moment, they'd be as interested in initiating a flirtation or seduction as a man. What they wanted, the response essays argued, was honesty and recognition that women were people with rights, value, agency. All of which is very true. And perfectly obvious.
And yet...and yet...as a gentleman of a certain age, I can sympathize with that. Male desire as such is suspect these days, and no matter how polite and courteous an approach is, there's something like guilt. I don't know how to articulate it exactly, but there's a certain amount of guilt attached these days to making an approach at all. Be very clear here--- there's a clear set of social obligations about behavior. Respect for the person you're approaching--- always and ever that.
I'm not sure at all where the guilt comes from. Is it guilt that I see every social interaction with an attractive woman as having some subtext of at least pro forma flirtation? Is it guilt that I'd be...imposing...sex by someone who looks like me on an attractive woman? Is it that in some way I feel guilty for wanting sex at all? Is it that I've accepted some social idea that all male desire is wrong?
This is all something to consider. I'll continue to believe that basic courtesy and respect are requirements for being out in society at all, let alone for trying to spark a flirtation. But I will have to think about my own feelings of guilt and what prompts them.
