If gender roles aren’t nearly as pernicious as we’ve been taught, what else have we summarily abandoned that wasn’t so bad after all?
A particularly entertaining genre of center-left journalism involves youngish reporters discovering eternal truths to which conservatives have long adhered and marveling over them as though the revelation was their own. What makes them enjoyable is that these reporters often tackle their subjects with anthropological detachment as though they exist outside the covenants they’re documenting.
An item in the New York Times last week in which reporter Santul Nerkar takes his readers on a wild safari into the untamed wilderness of New York City’s dating scene illustrates this phenomenon. In that primordial landscape, the ancient superstitions continue to thrive. Among them are conventional gender roles.
Nerkar described what he unearthed amid a recent “debate” with his partner over the age-old question, “Who should pay for dates?” What followed could best be mistaken for a deliberate effort to purge unenlightened readers from his audience so that whatever smaller remnant remained would be wholly dedicated to the modern progressive project:
My date, a 27-year-old woman I matched with on Hinge, said gender equality didn’t mean men and women should pay the same when they went out. Women, she said, earn less than men in the workplace, spend more time getting ready for outings and pay more for reproductive care.
Despite the framework in which conventional gender roles exist to support the full flourishing of a sexless consciousness, Nerkar was not convinced. “When the date ended, we split the bill,” he confessed. But the author was sufficiently intrigued, and he soon embarked on a journey of self-discovery. In his interviews on the subject, Nerkar discovered that not only do men pick up the tab more often than women, but there is “an expectation that they should.” Wonderous!
Throughout his expedition, the reporter encountered subjects who claimed their adherence to age-old tradition was, in fact, a response to what they perceived to be modern social inequities. He spoke with psychologists who warned that this “harmless artifact” can be a precursor to more menacing forms of sexism. Some objects of his study describe the ritual act of gift-giving as a pair-bonding experience, much like mutual grooming for lice.
Nerkar’s Charles Marlow act was reminiscent of the rediscovery of conventional gender roles to which the bleeding edge of progressive activism, Teen Vogue, committed itself as the MeToo era subsided. By the publication of my last book, The Rise of the New Puritans: Fighting Back Against Progressives’ War on Fun, it had become clear that (sometimes written) contractual obligations establishing consent standards between prospective sexual partners suck all the fun and spontaneity from the act of coupling:
“Some students do practice affirmative consent, but many others use a range of social cues to make sense of whether or not a sexual encounter was consensual or nonconsensual,” they observed. Of course, no one wants to be thought of as “the pleasure police,” but that was a consequence of what amounted to an intimidation campaign.
Teen Vogue found that affirmative consent standards hadn’t changed the “implicit framework” in which “men are the ones who move the sexual ball down to the field, and women are the blockers.” But fear and confusion have made men more reluctant to perform their traditional gender role. “For most heterosexual men, the fear of doing consent wrong and unintentionally assaulting someone is deeply held and part of their everyday experience of sex,” the outlet conceded.
Perhaps these reawakenings need to be dressed up in the language of social science to prevent their readers from drawing undesirable conclusions about how intuitive these breakthroughs really are. If conventional gender dynamics aren’t a construct at all but a byproduct of evolutionary biology, our resistance to them is an extension of civilization itself. But all that camouflage doesn’t do much to distract from the big conclusion readers of dispatches like Nerkar’s likely reach on their own: the sacrifice of the old ways that worked always comes at an unexpectedly high cost. The corollary to that conclusion is just as natural: if gender roles aren’t nearly as pernicious as we’ve been taught, what else have we summarily abandoned that wasn’t so bad after all?