I read the Op-Ed piece in the NYT by Daphne Merkin titled "We say #MeToo. Privately we have misgivings" (NYT). It got me thinking. One characteristic of humans is we really have to work hard to understand historical context and time frames. We have existed in social groups for perhaps 100,000 years, and in larger complex groups for perhaps not more than 10,000 years, since the dawn of agriculture. Our current organizational structures have essentially just appeared over the course of not more than 500 years.
The relationships of men and women have undergone marked changes in recent decades and most of us within the US have little or no concept of how men and women related throughout the overwhelming majority of the course of human history. This relationship is nuanced and extraordinarily complex. Human societies have been grappling with this relationship since the dawn of human history. It cannot be boiled down to one idea or simple rules. However, the fate of humans depends upon how this relationship plays out. Men and women need to interact in a very personal, intimate, and vulnerable way or additional humans will not be made. Yes there are exceptions to this (in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination), but these are rare exceptions, not the rule and they have only been available for the equivalent of an historical blink of an eye.
The drives which motivate humans to mate are powerful and complex and have in some sense bedeviled societies for millennium. Rules were adopted with manage the risks. We look back upon many of these rules as being brutal, oppressive, and archaic, which they are given our present circumstances. We need to remember that for most of human existence, our ancestors eked out their existence in a world of terrible violence driven by scarce resources. Mixed into this were sexual drives and competition for mates. Some rules worked better than other in terms of fostering success of social groups. It is reasonable to assume that the rules which made it to near contemporary times likely fostered additional social cohesiveness and moderated internal violence.
Fast forward to the past 100 years where there has been an extraordinary revolution in terms of the roles and status of women. No longer is there a huge advantage to size and aggressiveness of men. The industrial and communication revolutions have allowed women to compete for positions of leadership and authority on the basis of merit unlike any other time in history. However, we are still left with the legacy of who we are, complex social creatures whose procreation depends upon almost incomprehensible sexual motivations. Furthermore, sexual drives are to a great degree asymmetric and manifest differently in the two sexes. I understand there are overlapping distributions.
What this translates to is despite the changing roles and incredible changes in the overt trappings of society, we are left with the fate of humans being dependent upon the same personal, vulnerable, and private interactions our ancestors had to deal with. Intimate interactions still happen in private. The paths taken by couples to embark on the journey from casually meeting to intimate encounters has no single guidebook currently. (Older societies did simply this with mates being chosen by parents. We have for the most part discarded this convention). Each individual in the market for a mate needs to somehow successfully signal and then act when they believe they receive signals back. How people signal and what are acceptable signals is context, time, culture, and individual dependent. Some people can get away with certain approaches that others cannot.
This is not a topic handled by the formal educational system, something we should likely be grateful for. However, it leads to an almost infinite myriad of strategies which people use to attract partners. Which ones have historically been acceptable or are currently acceptable or will be acceptable is obviously evolving. No matter where these mores move toward, they will always need to address the reality that what drives these relationships are not rational and when they play out it places parties in vulnerable positions in private. There is no other realm of human existence that will provide a greater challenge to laws and social mores.
There is no EASY button. Beware of the hedgehogs who sell one simple approach. Good systems will have failures.
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