The bizarre moments in our political and cultural lives are sometimes the best windows into currents of thought underlying our explicit beliefs, currents that are so deep that we often don’t even recognize them as our own.
Which is worse: sexual harassment or a long term affair?
Consider, for example, the reactions of conservatives to Herman Cain’s alleged sexual misconduct. Two weeks ago, when Herman Cain was charged with sexually harassing multiple women, conservative ran to his defense. They claimed that sexual harassment is an overblown phenomenon and attacked the credibility of the women who accused him. And yet last week, when a woman came forth to say that she had a long term affair with Cain, most conservatives criticized him and said that his candidacy was or should be over.
One would think that sexual harassment—that is using material inducements and physical pressure to induce a woman to have sex with you—was a far more damaging charge than a consensual affair. Yet the conservative reaction was exactly the opposite.
It is possible that the stronger reaction to the second charge against Cain is just the result of the accumulation of evidence that Cain has some issues with women. But the striking difference in tone in how conservatives responded to the two different charges against Cain suggests something deeper is at work.
We can’t get at the deeper ideas that account for this bizarre phenomenon unless we recognize that the differences between liberals and conservatives on sexual matters—women’s rights, abortion, homosexuality, and sexual harassment—are not just the product of superficial disagreements that rest mainly on which passages in the Hebrew Bible we take seriously and which we think we can ignore. (As liberals often point out, the conservatives who quote Leviticus 18:22 condemning male homosexuality don’t feel bound by the prohibition on eating shellfish in Leviticus 11:10.) Rather these differences are rooted in very different conceptions of the nature of sexuality.
The conservative view of sexuality
We can summarize the complicated set of ideas that underlie conservative views in this way: Sexual desire, especially in men, is a dangerous force. It is a potentially overpowering, anarchic desire. It is fundamentally promiscuous and does not naturally lead men to form romantic relationships or families. Indeed, in men sexual desire aims not just at physical pleasure but at the conquest and domination of women. And that desire must be constrained if we are to have stable families in which children can be raised well. For most of our history, women have provided that constraint. By denying men access to their bodies outside of marriage, women have tamed male sexuality and directed in socially beneficial ways. For some men, even that restraint is not sufficient. And so we allow other outlets for the sexual desires of men, pornography and prostitution, that are lesser threat to families and minimally disruptive to the social fabric..
If this is how you think about sexuality, then the conservative agenda makes perfect sense. Anything that encourages or allows men to have sex outside of marriage undermines the only institution that can tame men and preserve the family. This includes the acceptance of promiscuity and men and women living together as well as contraception and abortion, which make these practices acceptable by reducing their risks to women. Homosexuality is also dangerous because it provides a non-marital outlet for male homosexuality. (Not a few conservatives have pointed out with trepidation out that sex with men likely to be more pleasurable to men than sex with women because male sexual partners share the same anarchic desires and know the bodies of men better than a woman do.) While prostitution and pornography must be tolerated as outlets for some men, they have to be kept disreputable and hidden away so as not to inflame the desires of other men.
How conservatives understand sexual harassment
Now if this is how you look at sexuality, it’s hard not to think that that the changes in our sexual lives over the last fifty years are a profound threat to our civilization. And the seemingly bizarre double reaction to the allegations against Herman Cain makes perfect sense. When conservatives say that sexual harassment doesn’t exist or that the extent of it is vastly overstated they are not really saying that powerful men don’t use threats or promises of preferment or physical force to secure sex with women. Rather, they are saying that this is how men are; that anyone who thinks that rules against this behavior will stop it is foolish; that women should know this and not put themselves in situations where men will be men; and that if they don’t, women deserve the blame. And when conservatives try to undermine the credibility of women who charge men with sexual harassment the point is not really to call into question the story they tell. Rather it is to remind us that women fall into two categories, those one marries and those one uses for sex and that the women making these charges fall into the second category. Cain’s new effort to redeem himself from the charges against him, a new website called Women for Herman Cain. It has become the political equivalent of mud wrestling, a place for the “good women” among his supporters to trash the “bad women” attacking him.
That Cain’s wife dismissed the harassment charges against him by saying his actions were out of character is, thus meaningless. Men like Cain always treat their wives with respect. That’s one reason they seek to dominate other women sexually.
It’s not hard, then, to understand why conservatives were so quick to dismiss the sexual harassment charges against Cain. It’s a little more difficult to understand why they were so quick to call him to account for his long term affair with Ginger White. Partly that’s because it is harder to simply write off a long consensual affair as a man being a man. The effort to discredit White, though, looks like an attempt to paint her as one more tramp like the others. But the fundamental reason for treating the White affair differently is that, to the conservative mind, a long term affair is a far more serious threat to marriage than a series of flings. While the statute of limitations on his sins may have passed, as Newt Gingrich’s star rises, we will see conservatives raise questions about his practice of trading his wives in for younger models.
The progressive task
It’s not easy to find a contemporary conservative writer who has spelled this line of thought about sexuality as I have. Indeed, I suspect that many conservative writers could not do so. But these deeper ideas, originating two millennia ago mainly mainly among the Father of the Church, underlie not just the conservative reaction to Cain’s troubles but so many of our contemporary debates. However strange they sound to the contemporary liberal ear, it’s worth making these ideas explicit and calling them into account, and not just to combat conservative views about sexual issues.
The bigger issue is this: conservatives are, of course, not entirely wrong about the sexual desires of men and how men behave. Men rape, assault, harass, and dismiss women every day. In doing so they are acting out a dominator mode of sexuality that is even more deeply rooted in our civilization than the conservative critique of it. The Christian writers who devised the conservative ideas presented above were largely reacting to Greek and Roman ideas that justified dominator sexuality.
So our task is not just to understand the conservative view of male sexuality but, first, to say that is a product not of our nature but of our cultural and institutional inheritance and second, to continue the task of freeing ourselves of that inheritance by acting and teaching our children differently. That’s the path to bringing us all to a liberated, egalitarian view of sexuality in which we are free to follow our own path, and in which the sexuality of both men and women be part of the desire to love, not dominate, our partners.