Insidious Male Dominance and the Hope of #MeToo

One could understand a knee-jerk negative reaction to David Lotto’s short commentary on “A Male Perspective on Sex and Power in the Age of #MeToo.” Claims of blaming the victim, reinforcing alienation and pathological accommodation immediately come to mind. That Lotto’s piece is controversial, especially given the current cultural zeitgeist, would be an understatement. Yet David is a respected colleague and deserves a serious examination of his basic arguments, and criticism, when due.

In my clinical work with couples, heterosexual or not, one of the primary factors assessed is power; how is it expressed, shared, delegated, and used to achieve basic emotional needs. Ultimately, the question becomes not one of whether there is an issue of power within the relational dynamic, but whether it defines interactions and the relationship itself, which for couples attending treatment tends to be common. In these cases, the tendency to objectify the self, the other, and relational space becomes evident. Yet the objects of power (finances, access to children, sex, household chores, etc.) are often symbolic for more central needs for security, love, respect, and agency, among others. If we, for a moment, take David’s argument as true, that women are in control of the sexual encounter in most instances, resulting in men experiencing a power imbalance and “narcissistic wounds” when their advances are rebuffed, fueling resentment and aggressive sexual advances in the form of revenge, a premise that remains unproven in his work, then should we not question the context in which women may be seeking a sense of security, agency, etc., through the sexual act?

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Western history is replete with attempts to dominate every aspect of women’s lives, including their bodies and sexuality. Cherry picking cases like Queens Elizabeth I (the “Virgin Queen”), Victoria, Cleopatra, or other female rulers throughout history, as was done during our Forum meeting on the topic, does not do justice to the typical experiences of women throughout history nor the gender-based expectations that these specific women experienced despite their immense power. We could fill countless volumes documenting male dominance in Western history to date whereas women’s lives, bodies, and sexuality have been overtly controlled through physical as well as ideological means, i.e. patriarchy. The point being, the context of male dominance in the larger cultural sphere can’t be ignored when assessing the reality of perceived power achieved through the sexual act. What’s more, should we not contextualize male “narcissistic wounds,” “toxic masculinity,” or the socialization of masculinity in general? The question comes to mind: is it really power that is experienced by women in their choice to engage or not engage in the sexual act or a faux sense of agency in a world that seeks to dominate them? What’s missing in Lotto’s analysis is a cultural-historical frame providing a vantage point in which the analysis of power enacted in heterosexual interactions could be better realized.

Lotto’s emphasis on female empowerment in the workplace triggers similar questions regarding the impact of broader social and cultural factors on private decision-making, and is reminiscent of the empowerment movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which proved, if our current situation is evident, ineffective. One possible reason is that the empowerment emphasis allows us to place responsibility on women’s behavior as opposed to that of the male sexual aggressor while maintaining a blind spot to the reality of the power imbalance and objectification of women in the workplace, providing a slippery slope toward blaming the victim. Power in the workplace, as a broader topic, is well beyond our agenda here. Yet we should be reminded that we have more CEOs named John in the U.S. than women combined and pay inequities persist despite over 50 years of Federal legislation. A case example may help illustrate.

A young, attractive, and highly intelligent female client of mine discussed her job prospects within the STEM field. She was confident about her search, which initially surprised me given the well-documented bias against women in her field. She discussed her confidence on two fronts. First was her well-founded trust in

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her talents. Yet she knew this alone was insufficient. What gave her confidence was that she knew her interviewer would be male and that she could use her attractiveness and slight flirtations to secure a job as she has done in the past. Initially, we might want to focus on her manipulativeness or ability to use her sexuality to gain some level of power and persuasion aligned with Lotto’s perspective. Yet this only glosses over the circumstances that give rise to her ability and, more importantly, the requirement to engage in such tactics to achieve her goal. For this client, it elicited complicated feelings of confidence and self-reproach or shame. She described an alienated state in which she must identify with a sexually objectified projected state to achieve agency, to “pathologically accommodate” to an identity fixed by expectations beyond her control in pursuit of a livelihood, control, and an ontological uncertainty simultaneously.

The case illustrates the insidious nature of male dominance. It is insidious because it is masochistic on the part of the victim and that while we, collectively, may think we are supporting women though such empowerment approaches, we may in fact be helping to enact the very thing we overtly object to. It is this insidious nature of implicit bias and cultural enactments that make them so difficult to understand and change.

Most of what is written above assumes Lotto’s basic premise that women, in most instances, control the sexual act. Given the above critique, one might question such a simplified conception of control and focus more on who has the power to define sexual acts, sexuality, roles, and the general context within which heterosexual couples interact. In Lotto’s very short, yet provocative piece, it is understandable that many of the questions raised here are not addressed. Length doesn’t allow for it. Yet Lotto makes specific claims, which require us to look more deeply into the power dynamics inherent to heterosexual encounters. Has the #MeToo movement gone too far? Lotto may have a valid concern in that, yes, it may, at times, go too far. The case of Senator Al Franken might be instructive here. A tendency of the victimized to identify with the aggressor is an ever-present potentiality. But there is, I believe, a much more important potentiality in the #MeToo movement: changing the seemingly reflexive tendency toward blaming the victim, in as much as it defends us against empathizing with the victimized experience toward true attempts for victim’s justice. This, for me, is the most vital concern and hope for the movement.

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