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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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The very fact that she said she didn’t want it (and that everyone complained) is proof that Rubiales wasn’t powerful enough for the privilege you cite. Harry Styles can likely kiss his fans just fine, and nobody cares. Rubiales is an ugly old man who works as the president of the Spanish football association, he’s a nobody.
Indeed, Harry Styles - GQ magazine man of the year - can go for the kiss. So could David Karesh, Jim Jones, and Keith Raniere. What I find compelling and relevant to these aforementioned cult leaders is not just that they built themselves sexual access to their followers but how important they found it to create community policing and punishment around any other men in the community to display affection towards the women.
Free people display affection for each other when they publicly celebrate. Controlled people enact "Dear Leader" parades and anyone who falls out of line is made an example of. Once you remove the ability of men and women to form bonds of affection, you remove their ability to resist ideology. At that point, the hierarchy of violence overrides all personal autonomy, and it will be much more than a peck on the lips, and it won't be up for debate.
Did Raniere do that? The whole thing is muddled because both major documentaries about him involve people clearly laundering their reputation and avoid their own prosecution (honestly, it might make for some fun meta-viewing to watch them side-by-side), but it seemed that prominent figures had wives he didn't split them from and it was mainly through other women and the secret cult-within-a-cult they were controlled.
I'm coming from the book, not the documentary but I think you're correct that NXVIM is the most tentative example of the ones listed. One commonality from each of the situations is that sexual policing started out soft and voluntary and then ratcheted up when the members became permanently fixed to the compound.
A counter example that might prove the point is the Rajneeshee who I think were a complete free love compound. Most members got taken financially and some did time for their spree of oddball crimes. But I'm not aware of any complaints that many women there felt consent was removed from them despite having lots of sex, highlighting the pernicious role of policing and positive role of community adoration.
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How old is he? Is this really the case of an elderly lecher?
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I looked up a photo of Luis Rubiales to see how ugly he is. Your definition of ugly must include 90% of men if it includes Rubiales.
Most women's does. (OK, it's actually 80% from that infamous OKCupid study)
Or the one with the two histograms in one place.
Women often deny the apex fallacy but then when presented with such exhibits, the goalposts shift and a common reaction is "see how hard dating is for women when men are so shitty and unattractive?" Women view at least 80%* of men as below median in attractiveness; women most affected.
*If we divide the middle bar by two, that would imply OKCupid women view roughly 86% of men as below median in attractiveness.
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I don't want to have a right to give a woman a celebratory kiss at our mutual moment of world triumph, I want women to want me to kiss them at our mutual moment of world triumph but I also want people to not try to destroy me if I fuck up and read the room wrong.
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