Dwain Northey (Gen X)

There is a deeply strange contradiction in the way modern society talks about women. We like to congratulate ourselves for being civilized, enlightened, technologically advanced, and supposedly more evolved than the barbarians who came before us. We have smartphones that can translate languages in real time, artificial intelligence that can write poetry, rockets that can land themselves, and medical technology that can keep a human heart beating outside the body.

And yet, apparently, we are still struggling with the revolutionary concept that women are human beings rather than merchandise.

Every so often, another story comes along and reminds us just how badly we have failed that particular class.

We hear about allegations of sexual assault involving college students. We hear about young women whose accounts are questioned, minimized, dissected, or somehow turned into debates about what they were wearing, how much they had been drinking, why they went somewhere, or why they trusted the people around them. And now, in Arizona, we have allegations involving a political candidate who says she was sexually assaulted while putting up campaign signs.

Because apparently even democracy can’t put up a yard sign without somebody deciding a woman’s body is an invitation.

The details of individual allegations have to be handled carefully. Allegations are not convictions, and accusations deserve due process. But there is a much larger issue underneath these individual cases, and that issue doesn’t require a courtroom verdict to recognize.

We have a cultural problem.

And it isn’t new.

Human beings have been objectifying women for as long as we’ve had enough civilization to document our bad behavior. Prostitution is ancient. Paintings and sculptures have depicted women as objects of sexual beauty for thousands of years. Then came the modern industrialization of it: pin-up girls, Hollywood, men’s magazines, Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, strip clubs, advertising campaigns that discovered somewhere along the way that selling everything from automobiles to beer became easier if you put a nearly naked woman next to it.

We somehow managed to turn half the human population into a marketing strategy.

And before somebody jumps in with, “But women can choose to pose nude or work in a strip club,” yes. Of course they can.

That’s not the point.

There is nothing inherently wrong with consensual sexuality between adults. There is nothing inherently wrong with someone deciding to be a dancer, model, actor, sex worker, or anything else involving their own body. Agency matters. Consent matters. Choice matters.

The problem is what happens when a culture becomes so accustomed to seeing women as sexual objects that some people begin confusing being sexually attracted to someone with having some kind of entitlement to them.

Those are radically different things.

And this is where rape enters the conversation.

Rape isn’t fundamentally about sex.

It’s about power, control, domination, humiliation and the destruction of another person’s autonomy.

The sexual component is the weapon.

That’s an important distinction because we’ve spent centuries pretending that rape happens because men simply “can’t control themselves.” That’s nonsense. Men manage to control themselves when the consequences are serious enough. They can walk past attractive women every day without attacking them. They can experience sexual attraction without committing a violent crime.

Rape isn’t some biological inevitability.

It’s a choice.

And that brings us back to the culture.

I once knew a young woman who worked as a dancer while she was in college. She had a wonderfully blunt explanation for the existence of strip clubs.

Her assessment was essentially:

“The only reason strip clubs exist is because men are stupid.”

I wasn’t a parishioner at the Church of Strip Clubs then, and I haven’t exactly become a regular member of the congregation since. But I understood her point.

There is something objectively bizarre about paying another human being to stand on a stage and pretend to be sexually interested in you.

And apparently we’re willing to spend an astonishing amount of money proving that we’re willing to do it.

But again, the dancer isn’t necessarily the problem. She’s doing a job. The customer is making a voluntary transaction. Everyone knows the rules.

The more disturbing question is why our culture has spent thousands of years teaching men to view women through the lens of sexual availability in the first place.

We inherited patriarchy before we inherited electricity.

For most of human history, women were denied property rights, political power, education, economic independence, reproductive autonomy and control over their own lives. Their value was frequently measured through their usefulness as wives, mothers, caretakers or sexual partners.

We have made enormous progress since then.

But cultural programming doesn’t disappear just because somebody passes a law.

We can put a woman in Congress and still have people commenting on her body.

We can elect women to the highest offices in the country and still debate whether they’re attractive enough.

We can put women in boardrooms, laboratories, military cockpits and courtrooms and still have some idiot believe that “no” is merely the beginning of negotiations.

That’s the absurdity.

We are supposedly the dominant species on this planet.

We have altered rivers, split atoms, sequenced genomes, walked on the Moon and built a machine capable of generating an essay about how ridiculous human beings are.

And somewhere along the way, humanity apparently decided:

“Yes, but let’s still argue about whether women deserve bodily autonomy.”

Seriously?

This is our evolutionary achievement?

We have gone from caves to quantum computing and somehow dragged the same primitive impulse with us the entire way.

Maybe it’s time to grow up.

Women aren’t objects.

They aren’t trophies.

They aren’t advertisements.

They aren’t prizes for being nice to a man.

They aren’t responsible for preventing somebody else from assaulting them.

And they certainly don’t surrender ownership of their bodies because they wore something revealing, drank too much, went to a party, danced for money, flirted with somebody, changed their mind, or simply happened to exist in the same physical space as another human being.

Consent isn’t complicated.

Yes means yes. No means no. And everything else requires stopping.

That’s not radical feminism.

That’s not political correctness.

That’s not some terrifying attack on masculinity.

That’s kindergarten-level human decency.

Perhaps the real measure of whether we’ve become a civilized species isn’t whether we can build a computer smarter than ourselves.

Maybe it’s whether we can finally look at another human being and understand the simplest concept imaginable:

You belong to you.

What a revolutionary idea.

After thousands of years, perhaps we’re finally ready to catch up with it.