My social science nose tells me that all we've been reading and viewing about recent events, which has been overwhelming no matter your point of view, is mainly if not exclusively about symptoms. We have to get behind that, or under it, or segue to something earlier, to get at causes. I'm going to try to do that here. The main causal explanation advanced in the media is that this is a consequence of patriarchy, men abusing women is part and parcel of the system. I don't want to deny that is a possible cause. But I want to entertain other explanations, because in many cases the patriarchy explanation serves more to mask things than to enlighten on these matters.
I want to claim no expertise on this subject. What I have to go on is my own experience when I was younger, with the Bob Seeger line - awkward teenage blues - a huge understatement in my case. And then I have my recent experiences teaching, where I try hard both to do Socratic dialog in class and to get widespread class participation. Yet in the last few years I have failed in this endeavor, with the majority of the class and sometimes all students present opting out of responding, instead waiting for one of their classmates to make the heroic leap and then raise their hand. With this, I hope to cobble together a plausible explanation for what is going on.
Let me begin with a few awkward personal experiences - failures, at least they seemed that way from my point of view - that beyond the moment conditioned my attitudes for many years thereafter. I am writing this now from the other end of the tunnel, married 28 years and with two adult children. It's possible to speak of those earlier situations today, even if memory has developed its own spin about what happened. I'm pretty sure that I would have been unable to talk with anyone about it at or around when these events occurred. That's not because I didn't think about it. It's because I didn't trust anyone to have such a conversation.
The first was in 7th grade. I was 11 or 12. There were parties that kids would host on Saturdays, in the afternoon or evening. At some of these the purpose of the party seemed to be for kids to pair up, boy-girl, and then make out. I was horrified by that prospect. I didn't have a girl to pair up with and when the few of us who were left over were hanging around, there really wasn't anything for us to do. Should I have asked one of the unpaired girls to be with me? I never did that. I remained uncomfortable the whole time.
Sometime later, at a different party, I had a good time with a girl there, more by accident than by anything else. The whole thing was spontaneous and unplanned. For a short time thereafter we were boyfriend and girlfriend. One afternoon a bunch of us road the bus to another girl's house so that each boy-girl pair could make out. This time I had a girlfriend so that wasn't the problem. But as we were lying on the bed I had misgivings about kissing her. It wasn't that I didn't want to do that. I was concerned about the implied message I'd be sending. Suppose we made out but then I broke it off soon thereafter. Would that be okay or not? I had no answer to that question. So we lied on the bed and perhaps expressed some tender words, but didn't do any kissing. Inadvertently, my shyness in that situation broke it off with her. The funny thing is that at a subsequent party, where we played spin the bottle, I did kiss her. By then I just wanted a kiss and didn't care about the consequences. But it was too late for that to patch things up.
Now I will fast forward to my senior year in high school, in the fall when I was 16. I went on a double-date where the other guy was my friend David and the two girls were friends as well. We went to see the French Connection. We sat in two different rows. My girl and I were right behind the other couple, with each of the guys sitting on the aisle. After the movie started I desperately wanted to hold my girl's hand. But I was having a panic attack about doing it and was simply too afraid to initiate this simple thing. I may have talked a bit to the girl during the movie. That wasn't overwhelming. Holding her hand was. I never got that far. I liked this girl quite a bit. That didn't matter about overcoming my own fear of how to handle the situation.
I could give many further incidents. I will note something else instead. I struggled with my weight in high school and college. There are probably many causes for that. One, obvious in this context, is that being overweight offers a ready-made excuse for failing at the boy-girl thing. And, related to that, eating (think ice cream or some other treat) is kind of a consolation prize when having failed. Now I want to juxtapose this with a couple other factoids. Somewhere in the junior high - high school time frame I learned that a typical boy has a sexual thought about once every eight minutes. In other words, sex is on our minds much of the time. The other is the time period in which I went to high school. The sexual revolution was by then in full swing. Seemingly, everyone was making love with everyone else.
So I found myself incompetent at prelude to romance, everything that would lead up to an act, whether the act was a kiss, holding a girl's hand, or in my then unrealistic aspirations it also included nookie. This incompetence had many dimensions - not knowing what I really wanted, not knowing how to deal with the paralyzing fear that would crop up in the moment, and then having no sense whatsoever of the girl's perspective. The thing was, I knew what it meant to be competent in other areas. I definitely was not a failure across the board. But in this most important of life skills, prelude to romance, I was bottom of the barrel.
Then I made an intellectual error, projecting that the situation was quite different for most everyone else, particularly those guys who were not overweight and not too nerdy. They figured it out. They had plenty of experience and with that they got good at it. In contrast, people like me dawdled and remained incompetent at prelude to romance. Further, as we got older and they made progress while we were standing still, it actually felt like we were moving backwards. This was my (I now believe incorrect) understanding of things until quite recently.
What was my mistake? There is definitely learning by doing, but only some doing produces real learning. The type of doing that works is called deliberate practice. With deliberate practice, you try for things just outside of the current skill set. This is needed to take the next real step. But sometimes these tries end for naught. Real learning entails risk of failure as an intermediate step. So real learning can be bruising to the ego, especially when you expect to be good at the new thing from the get go.
I don't know if guys still do this, but when I was in high school there was a metaphorical baseball scorecard about how the guy did in the latest romantic encounter. It was measured by what base the guy got to. On this metric, many guys had much better early scorecards than I had, but it's quite possible that they plateaued after that and, if so, were actually not that different from me.
Now another hypothesis (guess) that explains the plateauing. People often try to make safety plays in situations where their egos might take a bruising. So they end up repeating what they did before, which produces no learning at all, rather than try something new, where they might learn from the experience. Regarding why the weekend tennis player never makes it to the professional level, this is probably enough of an explanation. However, on not being competent at prelude to romance, I think more is needed to explain the plateauing, since the rewards from getting better are much larger and are perceived as such.
The paralytic fear that I experienced while on that high school date, and on other occasions too, is quite a motivator. People who have experienced such fear more than once, in situations that others would consider ordinary and not threatening, have a very powerful motivation to encourage them to avoid a repeat of such circumstances. Now I have another hypothesis to advance, one that makes sense to me. The shy person and the bully face very similar situations. But they manage the situations quite differently. The shy person opts for avoidance. The bully opts for control. Juxtapose this with the type of intellectual error I made. Assume others make the same error as well. It would be much easier to simply chill out on incompetence at prelude to romance if the perception was that many others were likewise struggling with this. When the perception, however, is that others are full steam ahead, then this incompetence has the makings of a personal crisis. It's with this mindset that the person looks for a safety play.
Now let's bring authority into the mix. I'm no expert here, but I do have more relevant personal experience to tap into as a professor and as a campus administrator. Undergraduate students perceive the relationship between them and their instructor as vertical. The students tend to be deferential to authority. This is true even as other organizations break down hierarchical relationships in favor of flatter structures with more equality among members. There have been things written that argue the perception of the professor as authority depends on the gender of the instructor. Perhaps that is true. If so, it fits into the story being told here.
Vertical relationships are inherently trust relationships. The subordinate trusts that the superior will act in accord with what is best for the organization as a whole. Trust relationships of this sort create a reputation for the superior. Preserving the good reputation then serves as motive for the superior to indeed act in a way that is best for the organization. Yet it is possible that the superior instead 'cashes in' on the reputation. I actually teach about this in my class on the economics of organizations. We look for ways where the cashing in won't happen, whether ethos or incentive. Neither of these are perfect. Cashing in sometimes happens. And if the perception is that you can cash in but go undetected, then the behavior will persist. The incentive argument against cashing in definitely includes the likelihood of being caught as part of the incentive.
Now I want to switch to my experience as an administrator. What might be exhilarating in the work early on eventually starts to seem like a burden. This is especially true under two different circumstances. One is that you take a lot of criticism/flak for making decisions that you feel are right but that remain controversial. You didn't sign up for the job to take such criticism and you start to look for compensations that continue to make it worthwhile to do overall. The other is that you plateau in your learning from doing the work and look for other reasons than the work itself for continuing to do it. Compensations of various sorts might then offer these other reasons. In my own case, I definitely felt I was plateauing a year or so before I retired. I recall that at staff meetings I would monopolize the conversation more than was really good for the group, just because I could do that based on my position. It's a simple example to illustrate the point.
There is still one more point that is needed to give this story some bite. With this one I have no experience, so I'm having a harder time trying to explain it. It is that non-consensual sex is nonetheless perceived as reward by the person committing rape. What is the origin of that perception? Does it stem from incompetence at the prelude to romance or from something else? Admittedly, this is the part of the story where patriarchy might creep back in, even as I've been trying to construct an alternative to that explanation. Alternatively, it might be a confounding of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, where guys get so caught up in how many times they've reached home plate that it becomes their entire focus. Then the pleasure of the moment becomes subsidiary, perhaps even entirely lost.
* * * * *
With #MeToo we have reached the possibility of punishing rape after the fact, outside of the legal system, via embarrassment of the perpetrator by exposing multiple such acts, with that possibly leading to other painful consequences, such as loss of job. This does not preclude subsequent legal penalties being imposed, but the legal penalties may be less important than the public embarrassment in the overall scheme. Fundamentally from an economics perspective, this is a deterrence approach. Deterrence can be effective. Yet most of us subscribe to the view that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Deterrence may not always be a very good preventative, either because the person the prevention is aimed at is immature (e.g., young male drivers are known to be high risk for automobile accidents quite apart from the consequences on future car insurance premiums) or because the person rationally believes he can get away with it, which the powerful might still believe in spite of #MeToo.
The purpose of doing a causal analysis is to look for other ways to prevent misogyny and rape, methods that would take effect before the fact. While I meant my analysis as broad strokes only, and even with that it may be that the approach is wrongheaded so something entirely different is needed, I did want to conclude with posing a question that assumes the approach is not too far off the mark. Is there anything that might be done during the teenage years, also during the early twenties, in other words for high school and college students, that might combat their feelings of incompetence at prelude to romance and might help them understand that they are not alone in having these feelings?
I definitely do not have a full program to offer here. I only have a few errant thoughts. Back around 1990, I was teaching an undergraduate class where several of the kids were taking ballroom dancing (perhaps to fulfill a physical education requirement, but of that I'm less sure). It seems to me that a class in ballroom dancing, one that would get the shy kids to take it, is the sort of thing that might work.
More recently, I attended a workshop on campus about effective use of clickers in high enrollment courses. One of the presenters was the instructor for a Gen Ed course on Human Sexuality, taught in the Department of Kinesiology and Community Health. They did anonymous surveys in that class, where the student's identity remained hidden, asking about some pretty personal questions about the student's own sexual practices. As you might imagine, there was intense interest in the results those surveys produced and the anonymity was a key feature to get large if not universal participation. That made it seem possible for students to get accurate information about their peers in this domain, though whether that could be done earlier, in high school, and done online rather than with clickers, I leave for others to determine. Further, we'd need to determine whether students would be as interested in information about those prelude acts as they seem to be about the sex itself. That would have to be investigated.
I want to note one thing that seemingly cuts in the wrong direction. Some part of being competent at prelude to romance has to entail being competent at face to face conversation, including the type where romance is not part of it at all. Yet we know that younger people get less practice at this now because they are on their electronic devices so frequently. (The nervousness that I talked about above is likely absent when the communication is mediated by an electronic device.) I, for one, believe that young people should get much more practice of their schmooze skills with part of the goal that they learn to like the experience. Yet how to do that effectively is something we are all struggling with.
Once in a while I ask myself whether in some social domain, race relations for example, are we better off today than we were 50 years ago? Now the question I'm asking is what can we do now so we are better off 50 years from now? I hope others start to ask the same question.
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