Hot take:
It would actually make women MUCH MORE sexually agentic / empowered if we destigmatized sex between students and professors and especially between employees and bosses.
Right now there’s an asymmetry that works mostly in the man’s favor. Regan quotes someone whose name I can’t pronounce who says:
if I know that my professor sees me not (only) as a student to be taught, but (also) a body to be fucked, how self-possessed, how exuberant can I feel sitting in his classroom?
This feeling is entirely legitimate! In the past the professor would try to fuck her and she’d either accept or slap / laugh at him, and either way it would be NBD. But it’s a lot worse and comes off as substantially “creepier” when everything is repressed, because that creates stressful ambiguities around intent.
These days white collar men are paranoid about explicitly hitting on coworkers, and professors no doubt feel the same way about their students. But girls obviously still know these men want to sleep with them, and instead of this ever being addressed with a simple rejection or slap on the face, it festers under the skin like rancid pus.
Most girls don’t want to develop a bad reputation, so they’ll never raise it as an issue if guys flirt with or ogle them under the cover of plausible deniability, and so long as you have a high verbal IQ this is very easy to pull off. But while in past decades women would just laugh at such guys for being too weak to make a pass, these days they will feel exploited by a coercive power dynamic because there is no tactful way to humiliate / reproach the pushiest subset of guys who won’t take no for an answer but always keep things under the veil of plausible deniability.
Meanwhile, plenty of women take advantage of this dynamic by flirting with their manager in an equally plausibly deniable way that will still get them favorable treatment (and this has always happened 100x more often than women “sleeping their way to the top”). This cruciallycreates just as anti-meritocratic an incentive structure as your direct report offering a beej under the desk.
If anything it’s a lot worse, because there’s a lot less risk involved for both of your reputations. For the man there is virtually no risk, and for the woman the risk is only there if you are stupid enough to do it very flagrantly around other women (or gay guys). This means that a lot of women who would never sleep with their manager will very eagerly flirt with him, and opening this kind of manipulation up in that way is actually much worse for fat / ugly girls than the way it used to work. It also makes exponential female life strategies feel less “Faustian” / dangerous / sacrificial as they become too pedestrian / accessible, and this has probably played a big role in the OnlyFansification of Zoomer women and normalization of sex work among people who can't really handle it.
It would be much better for women if we completely destigmatized sleeping with your employees and students. If we moved in this direction only the most Faustian women would pursue this strategy, while men would be more professional (because there is a less of a ceiling on the level of acceptable flirting, which incentivizes you to make a real move if interested, and this will be too scary/socially destructive for most men), and the majority of women would now have cover to humiliate men who make a pass at them.
Rolling back sexual harassment provisions in the classroom and workplace should be a central feminist issue!
