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UN Women’s Survey Demands Rethinking Sex

A controversial explanation of why and how things got this bad.

The buzz now has come and gone, making myself quite late to read the UN Women UK’s sexual harassment study which was notoriously reported by tabloids for its finding “97% of young women have been sexually harrassed.”

The controversy was immediate, articles flooding first to express the alarming need for change in light of the shocking statistic, but were not long after followed by counter-arguments trying to dismiss the study’s findings, claiming the definition was too broad and included forms of harassment they believed to not be serious enough to be counted.

However, this article isn’t to join either side of the argument. Instead, I want to offer a totally different perspective to the study, one I’ve not seen yet given by anyone. You could say I do this in the spirit of UN Women UK’s “three stages of action”, which they say is identifying the source, solving the issue, and scaling the approach. So let’s focus on source as they have.

1. Reading the data.

Irrespective of whether or not the study’s definition was too broad and generalising, it nevertheless does capture severe cases of sexual harassment (as severe as non-consenting sexual acts according to the definition). So even if we were to take the position that the percentages are inflated by cases that don’t entail “real” sexual harassment, the study’s results can still be useful when making internal categorical comparisons.

I will be focusing my discussion on the below data, its significance having been gravely overlooked:

What should stand out to anyone, and should have been a significant point of highlight worthy of deep investigation as to why, is how it is predominantly young women who report experiencing sexual harassment, suffering it at a frequency far greater than older age groups.

However, also shown is how there is a consistent growth of frequency over time. Taking all the categories on average, the frequency of sexual harassment continues to increase with each new generation. While obviously some of these categories are likely to disproportionately effect younger women over older women (e.g. online comments, images taken and/or shared without consent), the other categories are not reliant on technology and show the same trend.

To explain this, some have argued that older generations of women lack a proper understanding of what “sexual harassment” is, that they’ve forgotten it’s happened to them, or that they self-repress.

Besides this argument being a very demeaning and invalidating suggestion that implicitly erodes the seriousness of sexual misconduct’s impact on women, it is also the requirement of a researcher to ensure that those surveyed are answering according to the definition of the survey and not according to the definition the surveyed person may have. If we were to support this argument, then we’d need to dismiss the whole survey as its method failed to achieve the academic standards necessary for its results to be considered scientifically viable.

So rather than dump the study as illegitimate, let’s instead presume the results are viable and the surveyors were prudent in doing their jobs. How are we to read this significant growth of sexual harassment’s frequency generation to generation, especially given women of an older age have had a far longer span of time within which to suffer these things as it asks if it has EVER happened, not if it has happened in some recent period of time, yet it is most frequently suffered the younger the generation is.

2. Identifying the cause.

It is clear that if we’re to account for the cause of this growth, we must look for a prevailing catalyst which is perpetuating the trend. There would need to have been some significant social change which changed men’s attitudes (noting that men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of sexual harassment) towards women and sex within the past six or seven decades that could have prompted this increase in sexual harassment.

Any person with the most slightest knowledge of history knows that we certainly did have this great change within this time period. These decades are those which most prominently shifted western society’s understanding of sex and women, with radical advancements achieved first in the “Sexual Revolution”, then proceeding from thereafter has been a continual shifting in attitudes that have been characterised today as “progressive” and “sex positive”.

Yet despite the western current of shifting public understanding and building progressive attitudes towards sex that’s liberated of notions founded upon “normative patriarchy”, sexual harassment generation to generation has continually increased.

Taking the study to be a true reflection, receiving this survey reporting that 97% of young women have suffered sexual harassment which then also reports women of older generations suffered a far lower rate of harassment should demand of us to make an urgent critical analysis of the changes that have been made in society’s attitudes that could be responsible for this horrific trend.

So what is it, you ask? I will cut straight to it: the theory of sex and gender that has been promoted by leading “feminists” and progressives — by whom I mean those high society feminists who inform policymakers and produce the theory that influences activists — is fundamentally flawed and rooted in ignorance, and is consequently responsible for the exacerbation and growth of sexual misconduct towards women from men.

“But how can you blame feminists who are activists against sexual misconduct for causing sexual misconduct? Men’s sexual misconduct can hardly be blamed on feminists as men should know better. Feminism is just trying to provide answers to a problem that is really men’s problem to fix.”

Sure, a fair point, we shouldn’t think feminists are morally culpable here (at least the feminists with authentic intentions), but nonetheless the theory they promote and is then culturally permeated by institutions and policymakers is still to blame. If the recourse from this point is to then deflect responsibility for the problem back onto men again, then fine- this article is written to fulfil what you’ve asked for, the beginning to an answer by providing the ‘why’:

1. Developments of sex theory that begun in the sexual revolution and have continued since lack an understanding of the male psyche, making sex theory ignorant to male instinct and produces ideas which only aggravate the identified problem.
2. The traditional way of managing relations between men and women was not ideal and I certainly don’t promote a return to the oft idealised “1950s family”. Women are surely owed more than just two measly answers of either requiring they accept a role of submission to restrictive traditions or suffer the abuses of a “liberated” male sexuality. Nonetheless, as we observe from this study that male sexual behaviour was BETTER prior to changes in their attitudes towards women and sex, there is severe demand for redress.
3. Yet there is no interest in changing this within feminism because it would undermine its liberal and materialism-lite dialectical foundations. Feminism would need to first admit humans have intrinsic and mostly unconscious behavioural tendencies, that human males and females are not psychologically equivalent, that a person’s sexuality can be informed by mere consequence of what biological sex they are, and simply that men and women are very different and experience life in very different ways.
4. As it stands, feminism presumes — as materialists have — that the behaviours, norms, and attitudes of a person are solely informed by the sociocultural environment they are in. It is believed that you can change them through education and alterations to their social environment, hence why “teach men not to rape” was a serious and popular proposal for awhile, but more specifically also their many awareness campaigns intended to “teach” men proper sexual conduct. Yet feminism also has a double discipline of presuming morality to be universal while also denying that universality: they say men are responsible for their behaviour and so can be expected to behave correctly when sexually “liberated” because what is appropriate is known to them, but they also say we need to cultivate a sociocultural environment that rectifies bad male behaviour through awareness and education. Trying to believe these two things at once and using them as a basis for policy is simply incoherent and is the root of why problems have gotten worse.

Albeit this is brief, it addresses the core reasons belying the problems women suffer today which have only gotten worse the more we implement the solutions offered. This is because, as I first premised, feminism simply does not address the reality of sex and the sexes.

When we want to reduce sexual harassment, improve sexual relations, and build common respect, we need to do so through addressing the REAL human. So long we continue to cloud ourselves with fictional theory and pretend it to be true, we will never fix this issue and it will proceed to get worse, just as it has been over the past several decades.

We do this first by recognising that what has been named “gender essentialism” is in the general sense true, that intrinsic to a biological male is certain behaviours and mannerisms which cannot be erased, and ignorance to this gives rise to critical error.

3. The controversial ‘how’ of ‘why’.

As I had first stated, my intention with this article was to provide an analysis of source and to establish the ‘why’, so I won’t be extending my remarks towards a solution- perhaps I will do this in a future article. But the below 11 points gives the beginning of an answer, one I hope will be taken seriously by those who care and read by those who need to read it.

Discourse regarding sexual harassment, sexual assault, and all the other evils women suffer urgently needs to stop being an inaccessible game of politics and ideology. It can be due to no less than a hatred of women and love for the political clout harvested from exploitation of their pain that the question has been so voraciously guarded by the dogmatic gatekeepers who allow there be only one kind of discussion and only one kind of solution.

But enough remarks from my frustration, the below 11 points are my ‘hows’. They will be controversial for some, but for us to understand, we must dig beneath the Freudian superego which has us thrust our beliefs upon the world to cover up any ugly reality. It is only by knowing the ugly that you can know to make the beautiful.

1. The male experience of sex is entirely different to the female experience of sex, nor is the male experience of the female the same in manner as the female experience of the male. In casual sex with someone for the first time, obviously assuming the man has no moral or experiential reasons to avoid sex, men most often have sex for nothing but as a means of getting off that is more enjoyable than masturbating alone. Nothing necessitates that they think the woman they’re with is attractive, or that they might speak with them again or would like to see them in the future, or that they’re interesting, or anything. There may be incidents where they think these things, but these never lead them to wanting sex. They will merely have sex because it’s available and generally only don’t in the extreme of a woman being very unattractive.
2. Continued casual sex with one person after first encounter will be foremostly due to her willingness to have sex. Men can in some cases continue to have casual sex with a single woman indefinitely without ever actually developing any feeling of attachment or care towards a woman. They might not even like them or think they’re particularly attractive either for the entire time, it would simply be because she makes herself available to him.
3. Because the average man is instinctually drawn towards sex just for the mere sake of having sex, sex for men when isolated from a genuine relationship has no connection to a woman as an authentic person; instead, this sex makes her to him merely a body with which he has sex. He will not feel automatically obliged to her or responsible towards her simply because they had sex. She is merely more real than masturbating to porn.
4. Prior to the sexual revolution, it was the social norm that men could not have sex with women without first wanting to oblige her with privileges, like honouring her wishes and boundaries, giving her respect, helping her how he can, and so on. Men who had sex without this intent were immoral, shameful, and brought disrepute upon themselves. The same shame was brought down upon women who had the inverse of this expectation, that she should not offer herself to men who were not going to fulfil these obligations. This was the essence of the established norm.
5. Because it would seem to not be a common ability among the bulk of people to appreciate why they should follow certain rules that are not self-evidently necessary, there was and is a widespread ignorance to why these norms existed. I’m not saying norms can’t be challenged, but when they’re challenged, it should be done with awareness of why they came to be norms to begin with so that when they are replaced with new ones, the introduced norm is an improvement and doesn’t lose the good done by the previous norm.
6. Owing to this ignorance, when the norms which existed to remedy problems inherent to human sexual relations within civilised societies were replaced, not only did the new norm fail to address the underlying problems, but it has also exacerbated them by encouraging the very dynamic which generates the problem.
7. Feminism encouraged and continues to encourage that women should feel shameless in their sex lives. A culture has been produced that it’s a form of women’s liberation from patriarchal norms for women to have frivolous casual sex, developing a line of thought that her doing so builds independence and character as a freestanding individual. However, for women to have this, norms placed on men had to also be removed.
8. With men incidentally “repatriated” of their social expectations which attempted to ensure that his sex was always in connection to a conscious cherishing of a woman’s personhood, the general male experience of women began to radically shift. The increased access to sex with women was accompanied by an increasing sexualisation of culture, which importantly formed images of women that tantalised the male’s base sex impulse, in turn encouraging him to depersonalise her and to value her firstly as something with which he has sex.
9. Sex relations since the sexual revolution have only gotten progressively worse with time. The sexualisation of culture is nearing its maximum as an inescapable constant, flaunting the bodies of women constantly through popular mediums and advertising, alongside the dramatic uptake of pornography with the Internet giving easy access. It has become essentially an expectation that if you’re young you would be sexually active, facilitated to an even greater degree now by apps like Tinder.
10. The end result of this, which we can see by the progressive worsening of the situation, is society’s curation of a sexual atmosphere which not only permits but proactively encourages men to view women in the lowest manner possible. It is not enough for a feminist approach of merely insisting we simply “teach” men to view women differently, it is a result of their instincts. You can only prevent men from doing this through social traditions which restrain his worst habits.
11. As culture encourages the conversion of women from persons into sex objects in the eye of men, it is an inevitability that those men with lower inhibitions will begin to feel more audacious in their sexual advance against women. Cinema and pornography especially has cultivated an idea that women are always “hungry” for sexual advances and their discomfort or refusal is merely part of the “game”. It is hard to near impossible to reprogram these men when their whole world perpetuates ideas of women as universally sexually promiscuous. Their idea that women exist as mere sexual objects is only fortified with the volumes of casual sex available to him and other men.

As it stands, there is currently no solution proposed by any group that would help to remedy these problems due to pervading ignorance to them. I do not support the solution given by those opposing feminism, that a “return to tradition”, as it’s often lauded, could validly address these problems. These ideas have become so permeated and current within the public mind that in all likelihood we will require a far more radical and novel approach if we hope to rectify and normalise sex relations.