It's a historically well-worn response to blame female victims for provoking heinous behavior in men. Look at cases like the recent Steubenville rape trial, for example, in which a teenager was gang raped while unconscious by a number of football players at a party, videotaped, and then crudely blamed across the Internet for her own rape by a startlingly large portion of her community. The most upsetting thing about the Iowa case, however, is that victim-blaming is now being legally justified and entered onto the judicial books just as there had started to be some tangible progress for women's rights between the '60s and '90s.

The justification for the court's ruling presupposes that men are no more than conscienceless animals, unable to behave in any way other than purely instinctively and outwardly. This premise doesn't just disempower women. It also disempowers men, perhaps to an even more insidious and far-reaching extent, when they are taught from that it is not even expected of them that they would be able to control their responses to stimuli, that it is some kind of fundamental truth that men are blathering, drooling slaves to their impulses, wholly incapable of making rational, moral decisions, lacking personal agency. It's ultimately an exceedingly emasculating generalization to write into the lawbooks.

Amid all of the understandably angry women reacting to this case, where are the masses of outraged men objecting to the utterly reductionist and disempowering characterization of their gender? Rulings like that of the Iowa Supreme Court are not merely misogynistic. They are also misandrous. Where are the thinking men who will stand up against the belief that they cannot be trusted with civil behavior? Do we need to accept that the only way for them to behave in mixed company is to seal their ears or bind them to the mast as they sail past alluring women at the workplace, out on the street, in social settings, rather than to teach them to take some personal responsibility and exercise a bit of self-control as grown men? Ultimately, this assumption should be as alarming to men as it is to the women who fall victim to it. Don't the men out there want to show that they are capable of evolving past archaic gender clichés?

Men must become part of the conversation. A good place to start would be to take some tangible steps to empower young boys with the belief that they are capable of making respectful choices and instill in them a sense of agency rather than helplessness when it comes to sociosexual behavior. As long as men do not recognize this as a pressing male issue that they too have a stake in, and subsequently become involved in a visible way, out on the picket lines, authoring op-ed pieces, taking vocal offense at the notion that they are unthinking creatures susceptible to being bewitched by modern-day Sirens, the fundamental belief system that fuels the disquieting gender politics in this country will never change.

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