Judge Kavanaugh and the Seeming Epidemic of Sexual Harassment and Molestation Accusations.

Before beginning, let me make clear that I have no use for those who engage in this sort of behavior, and am not making excuses for them in this article. In fact, my point in writing this is not to wade into the current debate over Kavanaugh, which has been “discussed” to death in the popular media. My intention is to get to the root of the matter and discuss the basic cause.
A visitor from another world would wonder if humans generally have recently gone off the rails. However, look at the accusations and they are all about what allegedly happened twenty to forty or more years ago, in the late 1960’s through the 1990’s. The people making them are now mostly 40 or more years old. So this issue is not “recent” at all. It has been around for a long time. So what has changed?
Until World War 2, few women worked outside the home. Most married and raised children. There was less opportunity for this sort of behavior to take place. That is not to say it didn’t – Hollywood was rotten to the core and most of us knew it in the 1950’s – probably in the 1930’s, but I wasn’t alive then. Probably most adults knew the same about politicians, but us kids didn’t pay them much mind. Except for those afflicted by them, most of us never even suspected religious leaders.
Then came the 1960’s. Free love. Let it all hang out. Drug use. Womens Lib. Rejection of all authority, from God to Government. All social and religious restraints were cast aside. Yet even this doesn’t get to the root cause.
The Root Cause of most of our sexual problems is a faulty understanding of human nature.
There are three basic ways of thinking that affect the way the sexes interact with each other, and the currently popular one is behind much of what is going on.
The first and oldest way of thinking is the religious view, particularly the Christian one in the West. Because Adam and Eve, representing mankind, rebelled against God and disobeyed Him, humans have all inherited a fallen and rebellious nature. Human nature is NOT basically good! All real Christians oppose mistreatment of women (Chivalry originated with Christian thinking). However, Christians recognize that human nature is corrupt and fallible. It is also unchangeable by self-will. Thousands of years of history have illustrated the unchanging character of human nature. The Bible is totally relevant today because though science and technology have changed, human nature has not. The Law, given through Moses, failed to change human nature. Human nature cannot be changed by rules, regulations, and laws. They may suppress bad behavior, but it will always erupt at some point. The only way to change it is to give men and women a new nature! This is just what God does when someone puts their faith in Christ and the Holy Spirit indwells them. Even then, however, in this life Christians never lose the old nature and are constantly struggling against it, especially if they neglect to walk closely with Jesus.
This is why Christians have traditionally advocated separation from the world, not putting oneself into company likely to lead us astray, avoiding use of substances that can control us, and staying out of situations where both are involved. Women were respected but rather sheltered, seldom allowed to even speak to strange men unless they were introduced by family, and expected to marry and produce children. Of course, there were exceptions, like Joan of Arc and other lesser known women.
The second way of thinking is the scientific view. This largely supplanted the Christian viewpoint in much of the west in the late 20^th century. It largely rejects God and embraces evolution. Human nature has evolved to insure the survival of the species over many thousands of years (recently believed to be more than a hundred thousand).
The scientific view of human sexuality is that it exists for the propagation of the species in a way that limits the deterioration of DNA. Sex exists to produce more offspring than are wiped out by diseases, wars, etc. so that the species grows and survives, able to hold its own or more against the competition from other species. Sex exists for that purpose, not for pleasure. It is pleasurable in order to insure the species engages in it. Most species are only sexually active at times of year that insure their offspring will be born at the optimum time to survive, but humans are sexually active year round.
But, scientifically, this means that built into human nature is a strong drive to engage in sex and reproduce. If this drive is thwarted, all sorts of bad things result. Those who marry and raise families have an outlet for their drives. Those who are forced into celibacy run into real problems, as do those rejected by the opposite sex for various reasons. The modern educational system, which drags out adolescence far longer than is natural, and puts off marriage and family, also causes many problems.
The Scientific viewpoint differs from the Religious viewpoint in many ways, but they are in total agreement on the difficulty of changing human nature. Since human nature evolved to where it is over immense periods of time, it isn’t going to be changed in a short period of time by social constraints, laws, or rules and regulations.
Most people who held the scientific viewpoint before the World Wars treated women in much the same way as the religious.
The third way of thinking is the modern “culturally produced” way. This idea originated in Marxist economics. Marxism claimed human nature is basically good but is corrupted by “the system”. If the system is replaced by a better one and a dictatorship put over it to ensure it isn’t overthrown, human nature will quickly lose its corruption and the dictatorship will wither away. In practice, human nature corrupts both the system and the dictatorship.
The modern “culturally acceptable” view of human sexuality is that it was produced by societal and cultural values about men and women that were historically imposed by a male-dominated society and can be erased and changed rather quickly by abolishing freedom of speech, and through education, social disapproval and fear, and of course more laws, rules, and regulations. In other words, human nature is essentially good but has been corrupted and if forcibly changed the force can be done away with at some future point. Neither is it a result of thousands upon thousands of years of evolution, but only of societal values and can be changed quickly and easily. White men are singled out as villains, ignoring the fact most African men are sitting at home while their wives work the fields, or the fact that among most Native American tribes men did the hunting and warring and women did about everything else (The Iroquois were an exception).
In this societal/cultural view, sex is for entertainment and pleasure, not for reproduction. Having children is frowned upon because of the propaganda about overpopulation. (I say propaganda because most countries on earth now have a TFR under the replacement rate of 2.1). This leads to all sorts of perversions of the sexual drive.
This unrealistic view of human nature leads women to take risks and get themselves into situations they can’t handle, which they then blame the men for. Not that men who take advantage of women are not to blame, but having a basic and realistic understanding of human nature would limit the damages. Political correctness will not change reality. We are not going to bring about a utopia on earth by our own efforts. Human nature cannot reform human nature. Evolution cannot either, in any reasonable time period. Only God can transform it, but we have to yield to Christ and allow Him to do so – not just once but moment by moment. Since few choose to do this, realistic safeguards are going to be necessary in the real world out there. And incidentally, women have the same human nature as men!