Man and woman He created them

Predatory sexual behavior by powerful men has been a prominent cultural theme so far in 2017, has it not? Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly and Eric Boling at Fox News were all brought low, as was Harvey Weinstein and now Roy Price of Amazon Studios. We've had, in the course of discussions about these figures, opportunity to review the transgressions of previously exposed (excuse the pun) practitioners of socio-sexual leverage such as Anthony Weiner, Roman Polanski and Bill Clinton. Donald Trump's remarks to Billy Bush and Howard Stern have resurfaced in this context.

You've no doubt seen that it has led to a hashtag-me-too response on social media that, like the hashtag-bring-back-our-girls effort a few years back in response to Boko Haram's kidnapping of 200 schoolgirls in Nigeria, is a feeble attempt at a sense of moving the needle, "making a difference," in the face of plain and brutal facts.

Charges of hypocrisy are ripe for the picking on both sides of the ideological spectrum. The Fox News personalities made themselves easy targets for those who wanted to point out the hollow nature of these men's public championing of traditionally understood virtue. The leftist - "progressive" - ne'er-do-wells of the film industry and Democrat politics set back any claims of their party's sincerity in carrying the banner of gender equality and "empowerment" of women immeasurably.

The two phenomena of the mid-twentieth century that upheaved the traditional understanding of distinct gender traits and family formation were the founding of Playboy in 1953 and the radical wave of feminism that held sway throughout the 1970s. The stark opposition in which these two developments stood to each other was absolute for several years, but, alas, along came a day when the lines became blurred.

Playboy was the expression of Hugh Hefner's hopelessly unrealistic belief that men and women could each regard casual sex as enjoyable and innocuous as did the other. What was required to have this work merely in theory, though, let alone practice, was for all other aspects of gender difference to remain in place, since that was the basis for the appeal of each to the other. Men were expected to have the builds, voices, and more importantly, dispositions that men had always had, and women were expected to have the physical curviness, softness to the touch, fragrance and daintiness that the traditional romantic impulse had celebrated in poem and song (by male writers).

The problem was that changing the sexual dynamic without changing anything about the surrounding context showed up the same old power dynamic that existed prior to the Playboy era.

If one tries to play the thought game of imagining the mirror opposite of the Playboy phenomenon - a female publishing magnate who had built her empire on a magazine featuring nude photos of males, as well as a string of nightclubs featuring male servers dressed as bunnies - it falls flat. It quickly becomes a thing of preposterous impossibility.

Then there was the radical feminism of the 1970s, the heyday of Robin Morgan, Germaine Greer, Kate Millett and Susan Brownmiller. It jarred society, like no previous wave of feminism, into challenging some of humankind's bedrock assumptions. Why should a woman take a man's last name upon getting married? Why do women wear cosmetics and jewelry? Why is chivalry considered a social good?

Questions worth asking, since the case could be made for the inherent unfairness of these norms.

The conclusion that it was indeed unfair, expressed in burnt bras, the eschewing of makeup, two-surname marriages and unshaved legs, did not, as a cursory look at cultural history of recent decades indicates, catch on. The beauty and fashion industries forged ahead as strong as ever, and the unadorned look was relegated to women's music festivals, which were largely attended by lesbians.

Then came the 1980s and a notion that oddly combined the Hefnerian wish for randiness to be found in the same kind and degree in both genders with the broader forms of equality sought by 1970s feminists. This was most notably embodied in the persona of the dance-pop performer Madonna, which served as the prototype for a parade of such music-industry products up to the present day.

It's worth noting that that era also gave us Prince and Michael Jackson, whose androgynous takes on maleness were pointing the way to a diminishment of universally understood masculinity.

There were forms of backlash, most notably on the male side. These took the pop-culture forms of hip-hop, thrash metal, violent video games, extreme sports, and pornography utterly devoid of even the slightest pretense of traditional seduction. The common element in these forms of diversion is gratification of an adolescent urge to shut out the larger world and turn oneself into a self-contained conduit of purposeless energy.

Still, the larger culture did try to find some kind of stage on which the new definitions for masculinity, femininity, and the interaction thereof could get played out. Hollywood turned out date flicks and cinematic treatments of Elizabethan, Bildungsroman and Victorian novels, testing out versions of the strong female protagonist and the well-meaning guy who is getting the hang of melding lives with such a person. The restaurant and hospitality industries catered to, and found a receptive consuming public in, couples keenly interested in injecting some romance into their hectic have-it-all lives.

But, as the years have gone by, there's been a growing sense that it's a jungle out there. With the traditional notions of what a gentleman is, and what a lady is, having been officially deemed hopelessly antiquated, everyone was on his own or her own in defining the ancient art of coming together.

It got very cold on college campuses. Consent forms and safe-dating seminars became commonplace.

Finally, dating pretty much went out of vogue.

Meanwhile, the slippery slope from ridding state legal codes of sodomy laws to transgender bathrooms was a factor in our "evolution."

A lot of trends and splinterings-off therefrom have come along in the past seventy years, some contradictory and some just plain strange.

What didn't change was the underlying intrinsic traits that make for male nature and female nature. That's because no manifesto, no music festival, not even genital-mangling surgical procedures, can alter the DNA in every cell of a male or a female body.

Thus, while certain trappings of the Harvey Weinstein saga, such as fundraisers for abortion advocacy, are relatively new, the underlying dynamic has been around as long as humans have been organized into societies. Some ambitious, aggressive guys amass a lot of power and look for ways to manipulate pretty young women into serving as their playthings.

Male energy, not channeled according to the way it was designed to be channeled, will come out in ugly ways.

We opened Pandora's box. We ate of the tree by which we now know evil.

There's only one recourse, and it's not fun from a pop-culture standpoint. We must all become cognizant of the necessity for self-restraint.

Both masculinity and femininity are powerful forces, and must be channeled with extreme care. To unleash in wholesale fashion either or both of them is to invite first widespread distrust, then societal brittleness, and then complete chaos.

For women to take precautions, such as being mindful of their attire, being mindful of safe walking routes, and, yes, carrying a gun, and, more generally, comporting themselves with unmistakable self-respect, is not self-relegation to disadvantaged status. It's merely recognizing the world as it is actually constructed.

For men to acknowledge their inherent rowdiness, as well as their ability to objectify and depersonalize any and all aspects of this world, including the women they encounter, and to make a point of riding herd over these traits, is not to surrender any power. In fact, it is the harnessing of a formidably concentrated form of that power, a form that can build quarter-mile-high office towers, invent ever-faster forms of transportation, and hone the ability to find diplomatic resolution to the world's thorniest International problems.

We must relearn being ladies and gentlemen. It's the only way out of the jungle.