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I never heard of no ‘don’t screw the babysitter’ rule. Babysitters will fuck parents and employees will fuck employees. All the effect of these laws, the ‘real’ sexual harassment laws as you term them, is to ‘multiply crime’. It gives women a legal joker they can play when they feel like it, way down the line. Like here.
I have an old school understanding of rape: victim screams no, immediately goes to the police. All the rest, the sordid relationships, the misunderstandings, the regrets, the quid pro quos, I don’t want to hear. Not any of my or the state’s business.
I just think women are people, and they have the capacity to say no, even when saying yes is the most comfortable path.
I think I may have learned it in the same kind of place I learned "don't use double negatives to express a single negative meaning in formal writing". It was one of the paradigmatic examples of behaviour which, whether or not legal (the minimum age to babysit in those days was about 13 and the age of consent was 16), was beneath contempt in the society I grew up in.
Compared to the previous system that actually works, there is a lot more space for licit sex. So it is only "multiplying crime" relative to a baseline which essentially nobody wants. If we are talking about explicit government prohibition here, and your argument is that historically quid pro quo workplace sexual harassment is the type of behaviour which, while socially unacceptable, is outside the proper scope of government coercion, it is worth noting that government regulations affecting both employer-employee relationships and illicit sex were old hat by the time Hammurabi got down to writing them down.
The old school understanding of rape related to the subset of illicit sex where the man was wholly guilty and the woman wholly innocent, not to the boundary between licit and illicit sex. (The old school understanding formed at a time when the vast majority of sex was illicit, and most illicit sex was considered to reflect shared fault between both participants.) There has never been a society where the rules were "anything goes except rape strictu senso" and I would eat my hat if there ever was.
So if you are dangerous or powerful enough that someone would reasonably want time to think things over before calling the police on you, you can rape with impunity and it doesn't count? In the instant cases (both "Caroline" and Pavlovich) the woman would have been unemployed and homeless within 24 hours of calling the police on Gaiman - that is something you need to make plans for, and making those plans can take weeks.
The snarky response to this is that sometimes we decide we need to limit the ability to push the cost of saying "no" repeatedly onto the people saying "no", and that the same argument you are making implies that the laws against spam and telemarketing are illegitimate.
The serious response is that if you are a physical threat to someone (and almost all men are to almost all women in a one-on-one situation), or otherwise in a position to hurt them (let's say your wife, who will predictably take your side in a dispute, is their boss and landlord) it is really easy to make saying "no" difficult. When Luca Brasi asks you if you are going to sign the contract, he shouldn't need to say that "no" implies that your brains will be on the contract instead - under normal circumstances the threat is implicit, and forcing Luca to make it explicit is going to take a zero off the already-below-market price the Corleone organisation is offering you to release Jonny Fontane from his record deal. The same is true in more mundane contexts. If your boss says "Can you run down to Fatbucks and fetch me a coffee-flavoured double sugar-water with extra lard?" then you might be able to give an excuse, but a simple "no" is what Sir Humphrey would call a brave career move. Is it different when your boss asks you "Will you kneel down under the desk and blow me?" How confident in your answer are you, given that the political tradition who thinks we should be libertarian about this also thinks that people who are fired for not blowing the boss should be allowed to starve if they can't find another job quickly enough?
Gaiman had set up an environment where saying no was not just difficult - it was almost maximally dangerous. To say a woman should be able to say "no" is to say that a woman should be able to make a high-stakes judgement call about whether saying "no" will end badly for her - Pavlovich wasn't in a situation where saying "no" at the wrong time could get her killed (although you imply that you have no problem with deliberately creating and taking advantage of such situations) but apart from that the full range of bad outcomes were on the table - physical pain, unemployment, homelessness, community ostracism.
The "solve-for-the-equilibrium" response is to note that people remove themselves from situations where they repeatedly have to say "no" under unpleasant circumstances. Tourists stop going to cities which are full of unpleasant panhandlers. People stop using online services which are full of spam. Women stop going to the bars and clubs where they are pestered by men they don't want. The equilibrium in societies where quid pro quo sexual harassment is a normal incident of being a woman in the workplace is that women with options stop working outside the home.
This is a slippery slope all the way to "all hetero sex is rape". Would you bite that bullet? ISTM that there needs to be a pretty large bias against second-guessing the judgment of individual women if their claim to fully equal members of society is to hold any value.
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I don’t think any historical system can be said to ‘actually work’, but especially not the chimera of incoherent nonsense embodying our sexual mores these last years. And even if the old ones did, technological advances like the pill have made them obsolete.
I don’t propose my strict rape standard as some glorious RETVRN point, it’s just the best, most legible standard, gender-neutral, as liberal as it gets and in line with the rest of (less emotionally and religiously charged) jurisprudence.
I feel like you’re trying to sneak in ‘underage’ into your draconian ‘babysitter rule’ from earlier. I was thinking, schwarzenegger.
Most of what they considered illicit sex (between two unmarried adults, between men, with vestal virgins, etc) has rightly been declared licit, because sex is of little consequence in the modern world. So its ongoing criminalization in eg the workplace, is a pure loss (while being quietly tolerated as long as the woman feels like it, which is also harmful to the rule of law).
But what some ancients considered illicit-innocent-women-sex is an actually decent, generalizable standard for illicit sex. The rest is yesterday’s garbage.
I find that a far-fetched scenario, no one needs weeks. But even if the women were ready to flee, were they going to starve on the street? Again, I expect people to show just a little bit of courage, instead of warping the justice system to accommodate them.
I don’t fear luca brasi. The state protects me from luca brasi’s superior force (which is a gun btw) , like it protects women from mine (and I don’t even have a gun). Equality before the law works. Let’s not make up arcane rules about -if citizen A is heavier/smarter/more famous than citizen B, give B retroactive consent-cancelling power on all his contracts.
No? I don’t get your point here. People fetch their boss’ coffee, and do other tasks they feel queasy about for the paycheck, all the time. This doesn’t give them the legal right to attack their boss five years later.
And in societies where fetch me coffee is a normal incident, people with options stop working outside the home, because working sucks.
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