Recently, I’ve seen two social media influencers who propounded the “rule” that women shouldn’t settle for coffee on a first date. These two influencers, both women, appear to be working separately, and use unique wording, so they probably aren’t bots. But they agreed that, unless a man takes the initiative to plan a complicated, and implicitly expensive, first date, he wasn’t worth a woman’s time. No coffee, meals a minimum.
Social media had provided would-be influencers a platform to peddle their malarkey, and many have. Few have achieved the cultural permeation of, say, Emily Post’s Etiquette or that 1994 encomium to personal repression, The Rules. But others have become widespread. Thank-you notes for job interviews, a thing that literally didn’t exist when I entered the job market in the 1990s, are now virtually mandatory in most industries.
Rules exist because we need them. Imagine a society without rules against, say, murder. I believe most people wouldn’t murder, but without a specific prohibition, a tiny minority would. Rules exist not only to standardize the principles we use to operate a complicated society, but to standardize punishments for those who transgress. Rules, written in advance and enforced by putatively neutral arbiters, make a safe and reliable society possible.
But the very processes which create rules, frequently turn those rules abusive. As Joe Nocera writes, universities created the NCAA to standardize the rules for American football. But once those rules existed, the NCAA had to enforce them—and it’s become notorious for enforcing them in arbitrary, high-handed ways which frequently disadvantage student athletes. The players hit hardest tend to be disproportionately Black and poor.
The NCAA is perhaps a frivolous example; little truly depends on BCS game rules. But the same principles apply to more significant examples. The perseverance of the Electoral College shows how rules written to preserve slaveholders’ economic advantage remain part of American law. The famous difference between sentencing standards for powdered cocaine versus crack show how lawmakers continue inserting such inequality into law.
Rules inevitably create hierarchies. Even benevolent rules, like laws against murder, enshrine some people (and not others) as worthy to enforce those laws. Rules demanding job interviewees write thank-you notes protect those who not only know to do so, but have the available time. And because rules almost always arise because somebody did something that needs correcting, rules contain moral judgement against some social out-group.
When self-appointed arbiters create dating rules, we should ask whom these rules serve. Declaring that a man must present a lush evening’s entertainment, on his own dime, seems facially neutral. But it serves those who have money enough to observe the rule—which means it serves men who are generally older, Whiter, and from stable urban environments. In other words, only men already well-protected by American society deserve romantic love.
Because the rules don’t specifically say rich men deserve women, one can argue that the rules don’t marginalize women. But that’s like saying redlining isn’t racist because it doesn’t name race. Making first dates more expensive grants advantages to those already well protected by American law and economics. It functionally states that only those who have money deserve women—an attitude that reduces women to the level of market commodities.
The #MeToo movement arose in 2017 because a subset of American men believed themselves more deserving of women’s affection, romance, and sex. These men were mostly well rewarded by America’s unequal distribution of wealth, and regarded access to women as just another perquisite. Money encouraged America’s worst men to degrade and dehumanize women, specifically because they had money.
Remember, coffee dates were recommended specifically to let women escape potentially hazardous encounters. Any rule, no matter who writes it, reflects the moral presumptions of its authors, and the informal rule of having low-commitment first dates in public places stemmed from the reality that a dangerous minority of men cannot be trusted. If the last decade taught us anything, those men are more likely to have money to splash out.
Some critics might respond that some men use inexpensive first dates as access to cheap sex. This is true; no rule is perfect. But the sense of entitlement that money fosters, has historically served women very poorly, except perhaps the minority of women with comparable social and economic status to their men.
Rules are never morally neutral, and always reflect the people who write them. If those writers are rich, well-protected, and high-status, they’re also probably untrustworthy, and so are their made-up rules.
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