AFTERWORD

This book was commissioned in August 2017. In October of the same year the New Yorker and the New York Times published a series of articles detailing a long list of sexual assault allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein. In the wake of the Weinstein revelations survivors of sexual assault began to share their stories on social media under the hashtag #MeToo. This explosion of storytelling about sexual assault—which in most (but not all) cases involved a female accuser and a male culprit—sparked a vigorous transatlantic debate about sexual mores that continues to elicit comment and generate controversy. Although this book was conceived of, planned, and begun before the advent of the #MeToo era, it was largely written and researched within it and will doubtless be read by some against the background of the impassioned debates of the past few years. It is too soon to tell whether the #MeToo era is at its beginning, middle, or end. Nor can we know what its ultimate historical significance will be. Writing this book against the backdrop of blossoming scandal has been a challenge, though still an enjoyable one, but it has had the advantage of proving beyond doubt the basic contention of this book, namely that seduction narratives are very powerful things.

We began with Francis Charteris; we end with Harvey Weinstein. In between we have witnessed Casanova’s morally questionable sexual escapades, we have heard denunciations of male rapacity from Laetitia Pilkington, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Claire Clairmont, we have followed the decades-long struggle to secure legal protections for women, we have seen how sexual liberation was challenged by feminists wary of the consequences of unilaterally removing controls on male sexuality. All of this resonates in the #MeToo era. The phrase that has surfaced again and again in my mind as the disclosures and dismissals have come one after the other was uttered by Pamela Andrews, the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s classic novel of seduction: “And pray, said I, walking on, how came I to be his Property? What Right has he in me, but such as a thief may plead to stolen Goods?” Pamela’s protest has been the protest of the past few years, a protest not only at the abuse that assault survivors have endured but at the presumption and the entitlement of their abusers and assaulters. It is a summons for social and legal intervention as well as a demand for a change in norms and a reformation of male sexual manners.

All of which raises an obvious objection: what does any of this have to do with seduction? What do allegations of abuse, assault, and rape have to do with matters of love, courtship, and consensual sex? The trajectory of the #MeToo era answers its own question. Four months after the allegations against Harvey Weinstein became public, media attention alighted on a very different episode of alleged sexual misconduct. In January 2018, Babe.net published the account of a date that took place the previous September in Manhattan between a 23-year-old woman and celebrity comedian Aziz Ansari. The woman, identified under the pseudonym “Grace” (an incidental echo of the allegorical names favored for the heroines of eighteenth century seduction narratives), painted a lurid account of an innocent evening turned into an ordeal of unwanted advances ending in her weeping in an Uber on the way home. Once public, the episode became a flashpoint in the unrolling #MeToo moment. But whereas the response to the Weinstein allegations was unanimous revulsion and condemnation, the reactions to the allegation against Ansari were divided. For Grace’s partisans it was readily apparent that her story belonged in the #MeToo pantheon alongside the criminal allegations made against Weinstein and others. Yet there were a number of prominent dissenting feminist voices arguing that not only was her experience not comparable to serious charges of sexual assault, but that nothing had happened that night with Ansari that could credibly be understood as sexual impropriety. In the febrile atmosphere of the time the two sets of positions were quickly (and crudely) characterized as a conflict between those who were looking to bravely push the nascent #MeToo movement into new territory and those who were arguing that #MeToo had gone too far. What was overlooked was that these two positions conformed to the centuries-old narrative structures discussed in this book. For some, it was obvious that a continuum existed between sexual assault allegations (Weinstein) and a bad date (Ansari). For others, it was equally obvious that these episodes were incomparable. For one group, the distance between Weinstein’s accusers and Grace was only the distance between Pamela and Clarissa. For the other group, Grace and Ansari were both knowing participants in a liberalized sexual marketplace.

This polarity in feminist responses to the #MeToo movement is often described as generational. An older group of feminists associated with the activism, ambitions, and experiences of the sixties, seventies, and eighties is held in uniform and imaginary opposition to a new cohort of millennial feminists shaped by a separate set of circumstances and sharpened by new intellectual influences. This mothers and daughters narrative holds an obvious appeal. By declaring that things were that way then and they will be this way now we can take comfort in the idea that progress is being made. The history of seduction suggests otherwise. The contemporary divide closely mirrors the divide between the flappers and the women of the WCTU. It is the same fissure that we observed within Mary Wollstonecraft’s thought. It recalls the literary differences between Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding in Georgian London. It is a divide which is larger than #MeToo and predates modern feminism. It is a question grounded in classic Enlightenment debates over the nature of the mind—whether we are moved more by reason or by the passions, whether we are rational agents or creatures vulnerable to error, deceit, and suasion—that have found expression in seduction narratives since the birth of modernity. Zooming out from individual episodes, we can see that the broad outlines of contemporary debates map on to older discussions described in the earlier chapters of this book. This is because the heart of the matter is an irresolvable conflict over first principles. We can allow that progress can occur on a material basis—women are clearly better off in 2020 than they were in 1700—while accepting that progress in manners and mores is altogether harder to observe or even to agree upon. Even the briefest survey of recent history confirms this. It is important to remember that the decade that preceded the #MeToo movement was one that saw The Game author Neil Strauss welcomed on late night talk shows and feted at the Oxford Union, his mentor Mystery given his own reality TV show, The Pickup Artist, on VH1, Fifty Shades of Grey become the standout publishing phenomenon of the 21st century, and films like Hitch, Wedding Crashers, and Crazy Stupid Love become pop culture touchstones. The point is that sexual culture can change very quickly. And there is no reason why it might not change again.

In the meantime, we have to contend with the present. And the present is scathing of the permissive sexual culture of their parents’ and grandparents’ generation. One area where this is apparent is in the renewed interest in using legal and bureaucratic devices to shape sexual behavior. In the sixties and seventies sexual discipline was fought against by student radicals and activist judges. On campuses on both sides of the Atlantic, female students fought successfully to dismantle systems of sexual control that they regarded as patronizing and coercive. In America, the once formidable body of seduction law (discussed in Chapter 5) was torn down as courts ruled that they no longer reflected prevailing cultural norms. “The woman of today is not the woman of yesteryear,” concluded the judges presiding over Breece v. Jett, a seduction suit heard in a Missouri courtroom in 1977:

She has a new-found freedom. The modern adult woman is sophisticated and mature. The former notion that women belong to the weaker sex has long been abandoned. The modern woman is not easily “beguiled” and does not easily fall to the “wiles” of man. Women desire and should be held to a reasonable responsibility.¹

This position meets with suspicion in the #MeToo era, in part because some of the more egregious accused have sought to defend themselves by reference to the carefree mores of a bygone era. “I came of age in the 60s and 70s,” Harvey Weinstein pleaded in a statement made in response to the allegations against him, “when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different. That was the culture then.” Of course, Weinstein is not the representative figure of the ethos of sexual liberation. But that he believed he could retreat into a Mad Men-esque popular conception of that era as an explanation for his behavior is indicative of the ambiguous legacy of the Sexual Revolution. What was once regarded as a period of carefree sexual adventuring is now subjected to revisionist scrutiny. One area where this is apparent is in the discussion surrounding the existence or otherwise of the so-called “sex recession.” When in 2019 the Economist posited that the decline in sexual activity could be attributed to “economics, technology, and female empowerment” congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shot back that “if you think your ‘celibacy’ is due to ‘female empowerment,’ maybe it’s because far too many people relied on the disempowerment + silence of women to not be ‘celibate’ in the first place.” A few weeks earlier, a Guardian writer reflecting on the connections between her memories of 1960s California and the contemporary discussion of the “sex recession” concluded that “in the 60s, rampant misogyny was dressed up as emancipated ‘permissiveness’” and that the current decline in sexual activity might be a good thing for women. Such sentiments have deep wells in feminist thought. They recall the unforgettable slogan of Christabel Pankhurst—“Votes For Women and Chastity For Men”—and the concern expressed by the respondents to the Hite Report about the brutal experience of liberation for women on the frontline of sexual reality. It is not surprising that 2019 also saw the rehabilitation of Andrea Dworkin, the most unforgiving critic of the sexual culture of her youth. Indeed, it was feminist activists who fought for laws like those the judges in Breece v. Jett challenged. Yet these oppositions conceal a common purpose. First wave feminists were champions of a “Single Standard” of sexual morality that would replace the more famous “Double Standard.” The search for such a single standard is implied by the judges’ decision in Breece v. Jett (“Women desire and should be held to a reasonable responsibility.”) to deny the plaintiff protection under (in their view) an archaic law. Whether an equality of sexual experience is best assured through the creation of law or through the reduction of law is a question that the experience of the twentieth century has clearly been unable to answer. The better question for those who might turn to law to combat the abuses of the twenty-first century is whether it is possible to design a body of law to protect women without recourse to infantilizing narratives about female agency that ultimately serve to restrict their liberties rather than expand them.²

Strictly speaking, the search for legal solutions predates #MeToo. As we saw in the case of Julien Blanc (discussed in Chapter 7), under pressure from activists some nations have used immigration laws to prevent the entry or expedite the departure of those deemed guilty of sexual misconduct. Another, more popular, legal arena has been consent law. In Chapter 5 we saw how American seduction laws had their origins in foundational campaigns, spearheaded by Frances Willard, to increase the age of sexual consent. Under the Obama administration, activists operating with the rhetorical support of the White House and the bureaucratic support of the Department of Education, sought to change the definition of consent with an end to combatting the widely discussed epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses. Rather than increase the age of consent, recent campaigns have sought to change the standard of consent from “No Means No” to “Yes Means Yes.” This shift has been portrayed as one broadly in line with the spirit of sexual liberation—hence the emphasis on “enthusiastic consent” between willing and presumably joyful partners—but the tenor of the campaign has sometimes recalled the fearful language of the WCTU. Writing in support of California’s recently passed “Yes Means Yes” law in 2014, left-wing pundit Ezra Klein argued that the American left should support the new law not because it was a good law but because it was a bad one. “If the Yes Means Yes law is taken even remotely seriously,” Klein wrote,

It will settle like a cold winter on college campuses, throwing everyday sexual practice into doubt and creating a haze of fear and confusion over what counts as consent. This is the case against it, and also the case for it.³

In 2014 Klein welcomed the attempt “to change, through brute legislative force, the most private and intimate of adult acts.” Post-2017 many people expected courts to prosecute sexual assault cases energetically. The legal realities suggest that the justice many seek will not come from the courts. The California law praised by Klein only covered the postsecondary schools⁴ that were the recipient of state money for student financial aid. Jeannie Suk Gersen, a law professor at Harvard University, has cautioned that many of the legal cases sprouting as a result of #MeToo allegations “will not end in legal vindication” because

The alleged behavior doesn’t match legal definitions, or because of statutes of limitations, or insufficient evidence, or questionable witnesses, or police misconduct, or prosecutorial overreach, or doubtful juries—in short, for all the reasons that cases can fall apart when subjected to scrutiny in court.⁵

Extensive legal innovation is unlikely. We are not going to see contemporary equivalents of the old state seduction laws or the federal Mann Act emerge as a response to #MeToo. However, this does not mean that action is not going to be taken in response to outrage of recent years—simply that it will take a different form. Elsewhere, Jeannie Suk Gersen has chronicled the rise of what she and her co-author Jacob Gersen describe as “the Sex Bureaucracy,” a cohort of administrators in American universities whose job it is to regulate sexual conduct on campus and promulgate guidelines for sexual interactions between students. The origins of the sex bureaucracy lie in the 1970s. In 1972 the United States Congress passed Title IX, a federal civil rights law intended to combat gender discrimination in higher education. Title IX has had several consequences, among them the creation of a caste of university employees tasked with ensuring that their institutions do not violate Title IX requirements in their handling (or mishandling) of sexual assault allegations on campus. In the hands of university administrators, who are themselves under pressure to ensure compliance with the most expansive readings of the law, Title IX has morphed into a wide-ranging attempt to police sexual activity on American campuses. There are several historical ironies in play here. The first is that the pressure to create stronger codes of sexual conduct are coming from below, from the student body, rather than from above. As Laura Kipnis has observed: “A previous generation of student activists fought against the in loco parentis policies of universities; today’s students are fighting to extend them.” The second is that students at American universities now abide by codes of conduct closer in spirit to the seduction legislation that governed the private lives of their great grandparents and great-great grandparents than to the permissive sexual culture of their grandparents and parents. Noting that universities now “regulate conduct traditionally in the domain of morals regulation,” Gersen and Suk Gersen go on to write that university consent guidelines “are how-to’s for sexual arousal, proposition, and seduction—not just consent or agreement to have sex.” The final irony is that these sexual regulations, although originating in federal law, are far more severe than any legal statute on the books at a state or federal level. Consequently, for four years while at college, typically between the ages of eighteen to twenty-two, the American undergraduate will be held to a codified standard of behavior far more stringent than any they will face once they leave campus upon graduation.⁶

That may be changing. #MeToo arose out of allegations about sexual impropriety in the workplace. Inevitably, there has been pressure on corporations—especially those caught up in #MeToo allegations—to introduce new policies designed to tackle sexual harassment and misconduct in their offices. Just as in the university system, these new policies have been created, codified, and promulgated by a sex bureaucracy operating extra-legally but with considerable power over the lives of the employees they oversee. The content of these new policies varies. At the extreme, employers have introduced rules that forbid employees to hug, make eye contact for five-seconds or longer, or to ask for one another’s phone numbers. What is striking about these new guidelines is that they are grounded in the assumption that their subjects (adult employees with advanced degrees) are either intensely psychologically vulnerable or lustful predators and then proceed to assume that all the potential human interactions that arise within the workplace environment can be rationally managed by bureaucratic fiat. This is not to deny that systematic and widespread predation has not been uncovered, much less that it should not be taken extremely seriously. It is simply to observe that there is a paradox present in the overarching narrative—a paradox that recalls the centuries old Enlightenment debate as to whether we are rational or passionate beings.⁷

Support for a more vigorous response to #MeToo allegations and the environments that gave rise to them cuts across political divides. There are those on the left, the right, and in the center, who will find merit in the existence and the activities of the sex bureaucracy. There will also be those who look for the introduction of new legal measures to combat sexual assault in their societies. Ultimately, individuals will have to decide for themselves what legal and bureaucratic innovations—if any—are called for in response to #MeToo. But those who do seek the empowerment of courts and bureaucracies will have to reckon with the long history of racialized policy-making in the realm of sexual conduct. And there are already signs of a renewal of the kind of racial-sexual fears described in chapters 5 and 6 of this book.

In Europe, nationalist populist political parties have used sexual assault allegations against members of immigrant communities to advance their electoral agendas. In Sweden, a country at the forefront of progressive legislation on matters like consent, assault, and harassment, this has led to peculiar dynamics. In 2013, activists successfully sought changes to how the authorities recorded and handled sexual crimes. This led, as had been expected, to a rise in the number of reported sexual crimes. The Swedish Democrats (a nationalist populist party) then claimed that this rise in sexual criminality was due to the influx of immigrants and asylum-seekers during the same period. Their share of the vote rose from five percent in 2010 to seventeen and a half percent in 2018. The Swedish establishment is understandably eager to play down this issue but are caught between campaigning pressure from the activist left for more robust sexual offense laws and the willingness of the populist right to take advantage of the statistical trends that result from the introduction of those same laws. Moreover, because the authorities do not collect racial data in connection with reported sexual offenses there is no way of establishing the truth.⁸

The same risks are present in America. It is an axiom of anti-racist thought and scholarship that systemic racism finds expression in bad law.⁹ As discussed in chapter 5, this was true in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries where loosely worded seduction statutes were used as vehicles for racial persecution. It is not hard to see how the sex bureaucracy might well replicate the racial wrongs of the past. This is not a matter of intentions but of consequences. One need not believe that individual university administrators are racist to recognize that the system they preside over might facilitate racist outcomes. The reality is that it already does. Gersen and Suk Gersen write that the sex bureaucracy’s real-world functioning “creates a significant risk of precriminalizing minority men.” Their concerns have been echoed by civil rights activists.¹⁰ In America, as in Sweden, advocacy is complicated by the nature of the systems in place. The quasi-legal processes set up to rule on cases of sexual assault on American college campuses are notoriously opaque. Ezra Klein may have welcomed the “haze of fear and confusion” generated by “terrible law” but that haze has settled, perhaps predictably, on vulnerable minority students. Similarly, although there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of racial bias at work in the Title IX–mandated sexual regime on American campuses, because they do not report racial data there is no way of knowing the facts. When racial data has been released it has confirmed the worst fears of those skeptical of the workings of the sex bureaucracy. In 2014, Colgate University, a private liberal arts college in upstate New York, made public the relevant data for the academic year of 2013/14. It revealed that although black male students were 4.2 percent of the student body they were accused of 50 percent of the sexual offenses reported to the university.¹¹

There are no easy solutions. There are limits, also, to how useful history is as a guide to how to navigate the present. Much about the present has no clear antecedent. Likewise, much about the past no longer applies. When the seduction narrative was born in the eighteenth century, certain things were taken for granted. First, there was a thriving sentimental culture that valorized rich emotional experiences. To be passionate and sensible (in the eighteenth-century meaning of the word) were signs of sophistication and refinement—even of fashion. There were plenty of satires of the culture of sensibility and there was plenty of poor behavior despite of its existence. Still, when we read the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft or Mary Shelley, highly intelligent women who were capable of writing unselfconsciously, lyrically, and at length about their emotional lives, we are getting a glimpse of a portion of the emotional spectrum that is no longer visible to us. This matters because it was self-evident to many Georgians that morality arose out of humans’ emotional experiences, not from their reasoning faculties. It was Adam Smith—no swooning ingénue he—who declared it “altogether absurd and unintelligible to suppose that the first perceptions of right and wrong can be derived from Reason.” Instead it was “immediate sense and feeling,” refined into sentiments, that provided the foundations for morality. #MeToo is many things, but it is surely evidence of a major breakdown in the capacity to empathize, to relate, to feel. We should not, however, hold out too much hope for the renewal of sentimental culture in an age where the median number of characters in a Tinder message sent from a man to a woman is twelve.¹²

Another aspect of eighteenth century living we have lost is the culture of sociability, civility, and conviviality. Mostly for want of alternatives our ancestors spent a great deal of time together in clubs, balls, coffee shops, taverns, churches, recitals, public gardens, readings, ridottos, carnivals, religious processions, gambling houses, the theatre, the opera, the public square. Time spent mingling in public or semi-public spaces was considered vital for fostering goodwill between strangers, polishing manners, and learning how to interact with others. Humans still need this kind of training in social life. Increasingly, we are not getting it. Social scientist Robert Putnam has chronicled in fact what Michel Houellebecq has portrayed in fiction, that we are living isolated, atomized existences, sundered from any kind of larger community. American psychologist Jean Twenge has documented how among the generation raised by smartphones and tablets instances of depression, loneliness, and suicidal tendencies are steadily climbing. This generation will likely know no other romantic experiences other than those mediated by online and mobile dating platforms financially incentivized against their lasting happiness. Absent of change, these desocialized individuals will be essentially illiterate when it comes to reading the kind of subtle, non-verbal cues that abound in courtship scenarios.

If it is mere accident that #MeToo took root amid the wreckage of our social and emotional existences then it is still an informative coincidence. For without a countervailing culture of sentiment mediated by a lively and generous civil society we are left with only a commercial logic to understand human relations. Many commentators have made the connection between #MeToo and the rampant economic inequality at large in Western societies. In the twenty-first century (as it was in the eighteenth) this material disparity has been dramatized by the spectacle of a precariously employed woman at the mercy of a wealthy, powerful, and rapacious male boss. The power of this scenario persists for good reason—as has been abundantly document in the last few years. But it is not the whole truth. One of the underreported stories that has run parallel to the #MeToo era is that we are living in what economist Claudia Goldin has called the “last chapter” of the “grand convergence” in male and female economic outcomes. The same year that saw the Weinstein revelations make global headlines, women in the West overtook men among a number of vital metrics including law school, medical school, and undergraduate admissions.

The trend lines still point toward economic equality. Rather than seeing these facts in opposition to one another, or worse in denial of one another, we might see that they are divergent expressions of the same phenomenon. We are living in a liberal-capitalist monoculture which has brought economic progress on paper while coarsening our social existence. It is understandable why some would react to the logic of the commodification of desire with the logic of brute legislative and bureaucratic force. While tempting, this would not solve the underlying crisis. What we need is a return to equilibrium. Mary Wollstonecraft, like many eighteenth-century thinkers, recognized we needed a balance between logic and sentiment. “The impulse of the senses, passions, if you will,” she wrote, “and the conclusions of reason, draw men together.” She felt the injustice wrought in her own time by “the fragility, the instability, of reason, and the wild luxuriancy of noxious passions” while also recognizing that permitting an infantilizing sentimental culture to attempt a bureaucratic takeover of our desires would be a disaster, too. We would do well to remember her dictum that “freedom, even uncertain freedom — is dear.” Likewise, those who would tame the chaos of human desire with bureaucratic logic would do well to remember the words of that other great Georgian, Alexander Pope, in his Essay On Man:

Alas what wonder! Man’s superior part

Uncheck’d may rise, and climb from art to art;

But when his own great work is but begun,

What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone.