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But women do have massively less agency than men. They're called the meme gender for a reason and that goes both ways. There is a reason that for all 5,000 years of recorded history men have led and women, with very rare exceptions, followed- that's just the way it shakes out. Again, that goes both ways- insisting on women's empowerment is usually dumb, but so is counting on women's agency to get anything done.
Making plans on the basis of 'women will have agency to change cultural morality' is a bad plan. Particularly around sexual norms; do you think women are initiating these encounters at a rate that even cracks the high single digits?
That's even ignoring that open and liberal sexual norms aren't particularly what women want anyways. They're something that's mostly desired by men, for biological reasons.
This is an inherently hazardous activity and my sympathy for such men is limited. If they get it wrong they deserve to pay the price because there's a high chance of getting it wrong and that seems generally foreseeable and known.
And
One can recognize the need for some sort of line to draw without thinking that every particular line is obvious rather than arbitrary. Almost nobody thinks that an adult should be allowed to have sex with a 13 year old. On the other hand, having sex with a 17 year old doesn’t seem any different from having sex with an 18 year old. But having sex with a 16 year old doesn’t seem different from having sex with a 17 year old and having sex with a 15 year old doesn’t seem different from having sex with a 16 year old and having sex with a 14 year old…
At some point ‘if a=b and b=c then a=c’ breaks down. This point is necessarily arbitrary, but it does exist, so the important thing is to find a common point to draw the line.
I don't know if men in our society would have a problem with having more responsibility than women, provided that women admitted this. If the messaging was "men need to protect women because men are stronger and have more agency", that might be acceptable. It was acceptable for almost all of recorded history. That's the tradcon way.
The problem is that feminist messaging refuses to say this. Instead they say that women are just as capable as men, except for the fact that men are holding them down, and therefore it's men's responsibility to help women, in order to apologize and make women more powerful. It villainizes all men, most of whom have never wanted to hurt women and have always wanted to protect them.
FWIW, I'm not a tradcon, I probably think something in the middle. But mostly, I think women are strong, and need to embrace this and take responsibility, and actually act as such, and stop blaming men for their problems. How does that look for rape situations? Dunno, maybe they should start carrying around guns so if they find themselves in compromising situations, they have the actual firepower to overcome the man's brute strength. But that's for more of the violent rape situation. For the "I'm too drunk for my decisions to matter", I think the solution is for women to actually take responsibility. And I think that feminism's focus on victim-based empowerment isn't helping them.
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Okay fine, again, I’d be very happy with a return to traditional sexual morality, in which a man is guilty of criminal seduction if he has sex with a woman before getting to know her family and asking her father for permission to marry her. However, that world is very far away from the world we live in now. You are, for practical purposes, proposing a world in which women have exactly the same degree of recognized agency as they do right now in every single aspect of life except for sex. (If not, how do we get from here to a world in which women lose all of this agency they’ve accrued?) This is obviously insane and unsustainable, and I hope you would understand why so many men would vociferously object.
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