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Notes -
Fake Outrage for a Fake Crisis
In one of the most annoyingly misguided media crusades in recent memory, the soccer world (read: Reddit, PMC, sports media, and virtue-signaling athletes who are delighted to be out of the Sauronic Eye for once) has fixed its laser gaze on Luis Rubiales, head of the Spanish FA (the top soccer organization in Spain; representing all club and national teams in the country). His crime, for which he is demanded to give up everything he now has and ever had, was a kiss.
After the Spanish National Team won the Women's World Cup last week, a traditional trophy presentation was held. In his jubilation, Rubiales kissed player Jenni Hermoso, just as thousands of soccer personnel have done thousands of times in moments of great triumph. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath, Hermoso laughed it off on camera as a passing awkward moment. In the days following that recording, I assume Hermoso has come to see that one moment of blasé honesty as a crucial tactical mistake (not that it matters; the original video of her has yet to make an appearance in any of the numerous "j'accuse" incendiary articles).
What Hermoso failed to realize in that moment (but has very much seized upon since) is that she had been granted the gift of victimhood. Not just as a woman, not just as a woman at the hand of a man, but as a woman footballer (one of the venerated subclasses, as elaborated upon in one of my past comments) at the hands of T H E P A T R I A R C H Y.
This one meaningless moment flashed overnight into an international dogpile, with consequences as wild as Rubiales' mother enduring a hunger strike. Unfortunately, Rubiales is experiencing firsthand that racism is not the only demand in excess of its supply, and that even a hint of raw meat, especially in the entirely invented space of "women's sports" "inequality," will be devoured, even if it was just shoe leather all along.
Good thing our POTUS would never do such a thing...But I jest.
To get some context, displays of affection from a powerful male to a female is an incredibly important social status signal that woman crave. For the man it displays he is powerful enough to be permitted to make this display, and for the women it is an honor to be chosen for this role. From puberty onwards, women make most (?) of their rituals about this very act; most boy band concerts, Ricky Martin (and yes R Kelly) will select a girl from the audience to be ritually (and hopefully tastefully) wooed by the singers and dancers.
All that being said, the Foucalt-ian left can never leave a win-win social tradition be, especially if there is some power to be extracted from subverting it. Dictating who can and can't give displays of affection is of course of the most basic elements of creating social power, something found in almost every cult, and every chimp pack. And now in probably every womens sports for some time.
Anyways to get to my black-ish pill: you'll never win back the right to give a woman a celebratory kiss at your mutual moment of world triumph via LessWrong style debate. Only by being socially recognized as the one who decides who can and can't make these display of affections, can you regain that pleasantry. Traditional society forfeited this power without realizing it when they adopted "who cares what two adults do". Someone always cares, and someone always gets to decide.
There is no level of status at which any man becomes attractive to every woman. The phenomenon in which high-status men sometimes get away with sexual harassment or assault was never win-win to begin with. Your comment doesn't even consider the possibility that sexual attention from a powerful man might at times be deeply unpleasant in itself, and that refusal is important for personal reasons rather than some kind of elaborate power play.
Boy band audiences, particularly those in the front row, can usually be assumed to be fans. That makes them a special case. Even then, it would be possible to go too far, I think.
The important question is what concrete harm something like that does - and how that trades off against other interests people have. One such interest is 'exuberant celebration of a sports win'. If a random guy walked up to me and kissed me on the lips - I'd take issue with it. But if a (male, say I'm also male) friend of mine did that right after we won the biggest sports event of the year - I'd personally, without finding it to be worth doing myself, understand the spirit of it and not mind too much. From the perspective of popular sports, winning is massive, it's what you've spent your entire life working towards, and a grand celebration is worth doing! Gonna link the socialist fraternal kiss again. Obviously the m/f dynamic changes that a bit, but how much? Feminism/#MeToo have brought with them a deep intuition that that what happened here is very wrong, as opposed to just 'somewhat wrong', and others who don't hold that intuition are objecting to the apparently disproportionate response - so one should ask, which intuition is accurate? What specifically happens with such a kiss, what cultural ideas and instincts cause the harm, and is it important enough that 'winning the BIG GAME' can't make a brief exception? (not rhetorical, I think that's the thing worth discussing here)
In my eyes, it's not just or even mainly the disproportionate response that needs to be opposed, but the gendered nature of it. Feminism has severely inflamed people's existing bias towards disproportionately punishing men for behaviors that they refuse to similarly permit society to punish women for.
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"Display of affection" not sexual assault! If the jumbotron at stadiums starts zooming in on a man and woman and instead of saying "kiss?" says "sexual assault?" it seems things have gone too far. In fact, even if there is "full consent" and you go for a really long sexy kiss on the jumbotron, the crowd will boo. A peck on the lips is neither a step too far nor should it be taken further: a perfect social ritual as it stands.
But perhaps we should improve society somewhat, and remove this burden of a sometimes deeply unpleasant experience? I'll expand below in reply to 2rafa how this kind of thinking is a clever trap that promises increased personal empowerment but actually ends in the opposite.
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