Asking Or Harassing? Secuder/Seducee Scenario Caught In Middle Of Gender War
M. was in high school when she got a summer job in a local beach resort. There, her young innocent beauty aroused the desires of some of the resort’s guests, worldly European and South American businessmen who found it easy to seduce her and just as easy to abandon her. That summer, the underage M. was tossed from bed to bed of older partners who sought nothing more than the pleasure of her tender flesh.
Sexual abuse? That’s not how M. tells it. For I have lied. M. was a he, not a she, and his seducers were the wives of the aforementioned businessmen, attractive women in their early 30s whose beds M. shared enthusiastically while hubbies were away making money. Today, the 50-year-old M. recalls that summer as a teenage boy’s paradise.
No, M. wasn’t me (alas!). Just a contemporary who, like me, grew up with the notions that a promiscuous girl was a slut while a promiscuous boy was a stud, notions that may be more alive than ever today. For though there are cases of charges against females who put the make on males, it is the Victorian vile-male-seducer/helpless-female-virgin scenario that has appeared time and again, particularly on college campuses, those notorious arenas of political correctness.
A number of feminist writers have pointed out that the fever of sexual harassment accusations that occur on campuses and in workplaces contradicts the very principles of strong womanhood that feminism stands for. At another level, if there are no sexual come-ons, there’s no sex. Sometimes those come-ons are clumsy and even crass because people are clumsy and even crass. But somebody has to make a move. Otherwise, we might as well join the Shakers and vibrate in front of one another in states of spiritual ecstasy, then go back chastely to our separate dormitories.
Still, the seducer/seducee scenario dies hard, probably because it has been ancestrally programmed to protect woman-the-childbearer. When women choose to be more and/or other than that, the scenario becomes as irrelevant as it was for my friend in his cabana-boy job. Sexual harassment is quite real, and maybe it takes a certain amount of overkill to scare the machismo out of harassers. But overkill has its dangers, and some women, I believe, would still like to take prisoners home with them.
Perhaps there are ways out of the corner our gender wars paint us into, especially if we look for models elsewhere. S., a French academic of impressive feminist credentials (no gender tricks here: S. is a woman), could not understand her American “sisters.” She was escorting one of the latter through Paris once when, after a visit to the post office, the Americaine complained about how a postal worker was shamelessly flirting with them and - treason! - the Francaise was flirting back. “Who does he think he is?” the American asked.
“Who he is,” S. answered, “is a man stuck in a boring job who’s making the time pass more agreeably by flirting with two women he’ll never see again. I responded because I enjoyed it.”
It was this same French feminist who recalls how in her university years she joined the Paris student rebellion of May ‘68. She and her French “sisters” all went to the barricades to battle the establishment wearing regulation jeans and Che Guevara T-shirts, but underneath they all put on their best lingerie. “After all,” she says with an attitude as revealing as the sheerest French lace, “you never know.”