Failure of Dialectic with Male Peccadilloes

[Marat]

With respect to most of the common violations of social mores, society responds in part by seeking explanations of those violations in the possible illegitimacy of the social structures which first create the tensions generating these violations. Thus when poor, inner city children vandalize public property, people are inclined to say that this is just a symptom of the bad effects of social injustice on these children, and the proper response of society to this petty criminality is for social programs to be instituted to relieve poverty among inner-city children. The children may also be blamed, but still there is also a search for exculpatory causes for their misbehavior.

 

But we have now seen repeated instances where prominent males have been subjected to severe public sanction for their violation of sexual norms. Grover Cleveland, Bill Clinton, Elliot Spitzer, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and now Anthony Wiener have all been subjected to public denunciation for straying outside the social sexual rules. Yet in every case, the response is always simply to blame them for violating norms, rather than to ask whether this apparently frequent behavior of norm violation indicates that the norms themselves are unrealistic and perhaps unjust violations of the type of social organization that male sexality requires.

 

Should the lesson of these norm violations be that boys are bad or that the rules are unreasonable?