Speaking Man to Woman: Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Perhaps the women in the Indian state of Manipur have the right idea.

Described in a recent dispatch as “big-boned and muscular,” the women have formed “temperance patrols” in an effort to dissuade their male relatives from drinking excessively.

The movement began in the mid-1970s in response to rising alcoholism, which the women said was destroying the family fabric. When the women, who carry paraffin torches and position themselves on street corners, spot a drunk, they descend on the man and tie him, naked, to a donkey and parade him through the streets until he promises not to drink again.

“Anyone caught by the patrols never wants a repeat experience,” a government official was quoted as saying.

Do we need to call in the Meira Paibi from Manipur to stop sexual harassment in America?

Or can civilized people in a supposedly civilized society root out the problem?

For those of us who think we’re guided by moderate philosophical impulses, the picture already looks bleak. Male/female relations are taking on the same pitched-battle motif of race relations in America: Discrimination begets redress of grievances, which begets demand for preferential treatment, which begets majority backlash, which begets slowdown in rooting out all traces of discrimination.

We’re coming up on 40 years since the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed school segregation. We’re coming up on 30 years since Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Does anyone out there think we’ve achieved racial harmony?

Part of the reason we haven’t is that we’ve got good-willed people afraid to speak their minds on the most important subjects of the day, for fear of violating the political correctness of the moment.

Discrimination against blacks has been so pervasive and historically indefensible that, in their societal guilt, whites now tippy-toe around the question of whether it’s appropriate to condemn a black rapper from writing about killing cops.

The argument of “should we or shouldn’t we” may make for good TV talk shows or spicy magazine covers, but does anyone think it’s advancing the quest for a non-discriminatory society? Do you really think the country will move forward on civil rights by turning the subject over to Ice-T on one hand and Dan Quayle on the other, each with his own cynical agenda?

Male/female relations are heading down the same depressing tubes as race relations. The popularized shorthand for the subject has become “sexual harassment,” bringing to the discussion the same attendant fireworks that “discrimination” brought to discussions about black/white relations.

First off, no good man that I know or would want to know condones sexual misconduct toward women, whether on a city street, one’s living room, a military base or in the office. Women think we men “don’t get it,” but the good men do get it and they don’t find it amusing.

To that end, decades if not centuries of male misconduct or outright criminality toward women is finally being identified and prosecuted, much as racial discrimination has been attacked.

But in the zeal to right past wrongs, we’re doing, as George Bush might say, the “polarizing thing.”

Again, an analogy with race may be helpful. If racial harmony is the goal, isn’t it nuts to criticize a David Duke (which we should do with all available vigor), but then endlessly ponder whether to condemn a rap song by a black artist that encourages cop-killing?

Many men see that same sort of social distortion occurring in the battle of the sexes. They watch programs like a recent ABC “town hall” meeting on sexual assaults and hear a woman say that she has to consider every man in the audience a potential assailant. Do women understand how utterly offensive that is? Do they, in fact, get it?

If men are, as they should be, among the first to say that any man guilty of assault or sexual misconduct should pay the price, why is it so hard for some women to concede that not all charges of misconduct are valid? Why can they not impute evil intentions to other women?

Part of the reason, of course, is that everyone knows men have gotten away with murder for years. Women know it, but we men know it too. The good men out there aren’t gloating over that fact; it’s just that we can’t do anything about it.

We can only do something about what’s happening now. Yes, we understand how hard it is to prove many cases and we’re aware of the web that a male superior can weave around a female employee, but the antidote to that isn’t to nail every accused man in sight to the wall without a hearing.

When men are automatically assumed guilty in any sexual harassment situation--that is, if society rules out the possibility a woman could bring a false charge--it sounds all too much like the argument that blacks technically can’t be racists. In other words, the presumption of virtue goes to the least powerful.

Simply put, men are tired of getting beaten over the head with presumptions of guilt, just because we’re men. The all-too-common result is that instead of joining a cause that they believe in on a fundamental human-rights level--namely, ending harassment of women--men just avoid the hassle by sitting it out.

Do we want the equivalents of Dan Quayle and Ice-T monopolizing the discussion about workplace harassment?

I hope not.

My plaintive cry here has nothing to do with rationalizing brutish male behavior. It has to do with where the question of male/female relations will be five or 10 years from now. It has to do with whether your son or daughter will have a healthy relationship with the opposite sex or see either a potential assailant or a potential false accuser.

I hope when we look back from that vantage point, we don’t find that we surrendered the subject to the male chauvinist pigs and the male-bashers.

I hope we don’t find that, as with race relations 30 years after the Civil Rights Act, we’re still just inching toward progress because the well-intentioned people couldn’t take the shrillness of the discussion.

If we are, we’ll have provided the 1990s with good talk-show ratings and a few more bestsellers, but all at the expense of a better society.