This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

There is a need for thoughtful, psychohistorical, psychosocial—and ideally immanent—critique of the #MeToo “movement.” One such critique is mentioned in the introductory paragraphs of David Lotto’s essay, “A Male Perspective on Sex and Power in the Age of #MeToo.” Here, Lotto references the 2018 open letter pub-

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lished in Le Monde, signed by Catherine Deneuve and 99 other prominent French women. This letter, with which I cannot wholly agree, offers at least one incisive objection: that #MeToo is organized around identification with victims and risks effacing women’s agencies and subjective potentialities when faced with sexual or gender-based crime.

Unfortunately, I am not persuaded that Lotto’s essay is an example of a thoughtful, psychohistorical, and psychosocial critique. Neither am I persuaded that there is such a thing as “a male perspective” on #MeToo (or on any subject), nor that, if it did exist, it would represent a helpful addition to this discourse. With all due respect to Dr. Lotto, I was dismayed to find in his essay antiquated notions, unfounded assertions, conflations of sex, gender, and sexual orientation, and misunderstandings of the nature of power and of sexual and gender-based crime. Despite this, the heart of my criticism is that his essay is beset by misguided and ad hoc hypotheses while failing to engage in substantive psychohistorical analysis.

First, Lotto adopts a perspective that is nearly identical to that which he attributes to perpetrators of sexual and gender-based crimes (e.g., harassment, battery, rape, and more). Lotto presents his arguments from the point-of-view of a sexual essentialist who conflates sex, gender, femininity/masculinity, and even heterosexuality—regularly substituting these terms and concepts for one another—who insists upon categorical differences between males and females, and who claims that women possess something called “female sexual power.”

According to Lotto, “female sexual power” gives (all?) females disproportionate control over all (hetero)sexual interactions. Females are always “in control of the sexual encounter—if it occurs or not, with who [sic], when, where, and how.” What is more, this power allows females “to influence men in the service of getting them to do what [females] want them to do.” Although “female sexual power” comes at the cost of an exaggerated “sexual ambivalence,” Lotto supports his thesis of women’s incontestable power in the “sexual economy” with a surprising reference to the sex industry, where, Lotto writes, “there is power in being able to command a high price for one’s services.” Of course, in most countries, the sex industry remains unregulated and dangerous, and in some but not all cases, an occupation of last resort.

The degree to which Lotto misunderstands power in relation

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to sex and gender does not stop there. Lotto extends his putative “female sexual power” from the bedroom and brothel to the workplace, the court of law, and the court of public opinion. He argues that women hold “an enormous amount of very real power in the workplace,” leading to “a power imbalance” in favor of the woman who is able “to get [a man] fired, publicly humiliate him, and possibly totally destroy his career.” Worse, Lotto compares this “power imbalance” to the power of white women in the centuries of American slavery and Jim Crow, when a mere accusation that a black man “was expressing sexual interest in” a white woman sufficed to see that man lynched. The degree to which Lotto misses the point here—that the power, in such moments, belonged not to women but to white persons—is shocking.

Second, when Lotto begins his section, “Why do they do it?”, he turns to a cursory psychological profile of sexual and gender-based offenders, where he offers as an analogy a group known as “involuntary celibates” or “incels.” For Lotto, the sexual or gender-based criminal’s “demand” for sex is not satisfied by the inadequate “supply” of sex women have made available to him. This Lotto believes because he is assured that (all?) men “have a greater desire for sex than women (a conclusion supported by a great deal of empirical evidence).” Thus, men are “dependent on women for sex” and “at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to negotiating the parameters of sex.”

Of course, the “great deal of empirical evidence” to which Lotto refers is not cited and, should one take the time to look carefully into this area of research, one would find that such myths have come under serious scrutiny and have, in most cases, been overturned (Terri D. Conley, Amy C. Moors, Jes L. Matsick, Ali Ziegler, and Brandon Valentine, “Women, Men, and the Bedroom: Methodological and Conceptual Insights that Narrow, Reframe, and Eliminate Gender Differences in Sexuality,” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20 [5], 2011, 296-300).

According to Lotto, men who harass, assault, or brutalize women hold “resentment and anger at being at a disadvantage in the arena of sexual power.” They have suffered narcissistic injuries from having been rejected by women and regard harassment and assault as means “to get revenge.” But, of course, “incels” represent an extraordinarily small minority of the population and are disproportionately young and disenfranchised males, quite unlike the powerful men who coerce or violate less powerful, and often

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younger, women.

While Lotto’s analogy between sexual predators and incels is not based upon evidence and is inapt with respect to the type of sexual offender at whom #MeToo is directed, it is true that the degree of hateful and misogynistic rhetoric on “incel” websites is alarming. Equally alarming, however, is Lotto’s claim, which flies in the face of most respectable theories of power since philosopher Michel Foucault. Females, he writes, “wield” their secret power in “private,” making it not only mysterious but impossible to confront, whereas “the power of the patriarchy is public, in the open” and even “strengthened by being public.” What Lotto has to say about females and their private power is, in itself, demeaning to women and would not be at all out of place on an “incel” message board. He claims that “female sexual power,” which comprises “the world of clothes, fashion, high heels, makeup, beauty enhancement” and more, consists of “making oneself desirable to the male gaze,” and is aimed primarily at attaining “[hetero]sexual attractiveness.”

Third, no one takes seriously the notion that sexual aggressors are motivated by a dearth of sexual contact. As is well-known in the case of rape, to the extent that we can understand or generalize about motivating factors, what drives rapists is not sexual desire but, rather, sadistic, violent impulses to dominate, mixed with profound hatred of women (see Tiffany D. Russell and Alan R. King, “Anxious, Hostile, and Sadistic: Maternal Attachment and Everyday Sadism Predict Hostile Masculine Beliefs and Male Sexual Violence,” Personality and Individual Differences, 99, 2016, 340-45; Gordon C. Nagayama Hall and Richard Hirschman, “Toward a Theory of Sexual Aggression: A Quadripartite Model,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 59 [5], 1991, 662-69). Rather than sexual desire or sexual frustration, personality researchers have found that the so-called “dark triad”—psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism—predicts sexual harassment and the lack of empathy with victims that accompany such behavior (Gayle Brewer, Minna Lyons, Alexander Perry, and Freya O’Brien, “Dark Triad Traits and Perceptions of Sexual Harassment,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2019).

What is more, whereas Lotto finds aggressors’ anger to be aimed at the mysterious “power” of women, recent studies have demonstrated rather that sexual aggressors mobilize what might be called a “disciplinary power” against women who violate norms of femininity. Such women are more likely to be victims of sexual

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aggression than those who typify traditional (antiquated) feminine gender roles (see Jennifer L. Berdahl, “The Sexual Harassment of Uppity Women,” Journal of Applied Psychology, 92 [2], 2007, 425-37).

Finally, modern criminologists, and specifically those who study sexual and gender-based offenses, frequently do not consider individual offender’s “motivation” at all, but examine “non-motivational causes of crime such as the criminal’s childhood, his personality, his peers, his alcoholism, and—at the societal level—demographic and economic trends as well as policing and sentencing policies” (David P. Bryden and Maren M. Grier, “The Search for Rapist’s ‘Real’ Motives,” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 101 [1], 2011, 172). When socio-organizational structures in which individuals are embedded communicate to them, tacitly or explicitly, that they will not be punished for their actions, sexual and gender-based victimizers—or, one might say, most victimizers—are victimizers of opportunity.

To engage in psychoanalytic research without considering the developmental trajectories of perpetrators and the factors that may have led them to develop sadistic orientations toward women, presuming, contrary to evidence, that sexual aggression is a response to present-day sexual “deficits,” is surprising. To engage in psychohistorical research without assessing the organizational, cultural, and political forces that facilitate sexual misconduct is equally surprising. To assert that such arguments constitute the “male perspective,” however, is reductive and unhelpful in the extreme. Doing so offers little to understand the #MeToo movement while suggesting that “a male perspective” is uninformed, sexually-essentialist, misogynistic, and disinterested in the psychosocial dynamics at work in sexual and gender-based crimes and their remedies.

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