Originally a comment by iknklast on The amount of labor women do each day.

replaced by puritanism

I so hate this trope…In a puritan world, women were often regarded as belonging to men, and they didn’t have a lot of say in who, when, or where they married. They were not given the option of refusing their husband once married to the person their parents approved. They were not allowed the sexual freedom to make their own sexual choices – in short, they were not allowed to say “yes”.

This is the opposite – the extreme opposite – of what the #MeToo and other feminist anti-groping crusaders are wanting. What most of us want is the ability to say “no” when asked (and not have to push away hands that didn’t bother to ask), but also the right to say “yes” if we are eager to be intimate with that individual. I see very little that could be more sex-positive than that.

What we are fighting against is not sex-positive behavior, it’s sex negative behavior. It makes sex a negative experience for women, and in some cases, may make them hesitate to ever say “yes” because their experiences with sex have been unpleasant, painful, forced, and embarrassing. And made them feel like a piece of meat.

Giving men the freedom to do whatever they want, and expecting the women to just deal with it (and be called sluts if they report any of it, or don’t fight hard enough against it) is going backward in time to a day when women were property, when they were bought, sold, traded, or bartered without any say in it, and they were vilified if some man took what they wanted, because it was assumed they “led him on”.

Now, I’m not saying these women are suggesting we should be bought, sold, traded, or bartered. They are just suggesting we should leave men alone to do what they want, as long as it is just something someone else might see as a petty annoyance, and as long as it isn’t a crime (and I suspect some of what they claim is okay actually is a crime, since touching someone without their consent in an attempt to make them do something they don’t want to do borders on assault and battery).

In short, empowering females is not Puritanism; Puritanism didn’t want to empower anybody.