My point is that self-ownership isn’t necessarily violated. We intentionally touch people without permission ALL THE TIME, albeit usually in nonsexual ways (a pat on the back or shoulder, a touch on the arm, a quick shoulder rub, etc.) and with very few exceptions NONE of these are deemed to be improper or violations of self-ownership. Heck, guys will often slap each other’s ass (in sports environment in particular) and nobody considers it a violation of self sovereignty.

Please give me a PRINCIPLED reason why touching a woman’s ass is necessarily different. Isn’t it just because it’s potentially “sexual” (and I say the word sexual with my best “Church Lady voice)? And because we’ve brainwashed women into believing that it’s improper for a man to gently touch her rear but not her arm because...SEX?! (SEX, SEX, SEX!!!! OMG, that last touch was SEXUAL, you can’t let him do that to you!!!). We’ve taught women from the youngest ages that any man doing THAT is “disrespecting” them, but not when the man just touches your arm, that’s place is okay sweetie. But patting your bum? Will THAT violates your “self sovereignty”. “Why is it disrespectful and a violation”, a naive child might ask? “Well, it just is!, we tell them” But the real answer is simply... BECAUSE SEX!!! Sex is the only reason. If butts were desexualized, there’d be no more worry over butt pats than back slaps, right?

And so we have literally conditioned our daughters to freak out when anything sexual happens to them (outside of church and parent approved parameters). We’ve taught them to panic. To feel violated. To feel like their sovereignty has been challenged or “taken”. That the man has insulted and disrespected them. That they should be incensed!

Why? Again, just because of SEX! I mean, God forbid our daughters might respond to that butt pat not with panic and offense but instead with a little wiggle that lets the guy know that she actually enjoyed the squeeze. Why? Because then SEX(!!!) might happen! OMG! The horror! SEX!!!! Not SEX! Not with MY daughter, you asshole! (And owe, by that way honey, you should be ASHAMED for that little wiggle you gave him. You shoulda slapped the guy!)

Don’t you see how this fear over even gentle loving touches from men (if sexual AT ALL) is just one giant sexual hangup perpetrated over thousands of years by churches and parents (often fathers) who view their children almost as property (they literally did so back in biblical days) and who have consequently terrorized their daughters over sex and “strange men” in order to keep their daughters from engaging in SEX (!!) outside of boundaries firmly established and controlled by the parents and the church? We’ve literally TERRORIZED our own fucking daughters for God’s sake! It’s an absolute travesty. An evil.

And the fact that it took outright systematic TERROR to overcome our daughters’ natural interest in sex shows just how UNNATURAL it is for them avoid it to begin with! When terror is required to change human conduct, you gotta know you’re doing something wrong.

It’s only this conditioned terror over sex that causes them (and you) to view a pat on the ass any differently than a pat on the back. So, no, I don’t agree that every time someone touches you without explicit advance “consent” its “simply wrong” and a violation of self sovereignty. And neither do you, actually. Your problem isn’t with harmless consentless touching (as evidenced by the fact that you’d have no problem with a pat on the back given without seeking advance consent), it’s with...SEX!! You deem any sexual touch, or even potentially sexual touch, to be harmful per se to the female, as if our daughters are little snowflakes who are sure to be taken advantage of by men if not terrorized away from them.

In fact, this traumatic conditioning is so deep that men don’t even have to touch a woman to terrorize her and make her feel threatened or violated. Let’s suppose, for example, that we could all agree on some sign that a man could give that would let a women know that he’d like to give her little bum a squeeze (please, madam?). The man could make the sign (i.e, ask permission) and the woman could respond by either offering her rear for pat or by declining to do so. You know what, even if we were to do THAT, there’s so much trauma and so much baggage around sex that just making the sign to a women would eventually come to be seen as “harassment” or even an “assault” when actually all you were doing was seeking her consent!

I don’t want to in any way minimize the significance of this conditioning. After all, it was accomplished by literally TRAUMATIZING our daughters over thousands of years about sex and their bodies. In order to prevent them from being fully sexual beings and acting upon their natural instincts, especially as a teenager (or God forbid getting pregnant by a scoundrel, which is something we don’t have to worry as much about today with both birth control and abortion available), we conditioned them through terror to fear being propositioned by men rather than to be aroused or intrigued by it (actually, they studies show they often ARE physically aroused while stil being mentally terrified). By warning them constantly of being “raped” and “violated’ and having their “sovereignty denied”, we have caused them to associate any potentially sex related conduct (outside of STRICTLY controlled parent and church sanctioned environments) with FEAR and OFFENSE.

So, the conditioning is deep because the trauma is deep. We’ve turned our daughters into fearful and sexually disempowered little snowflakes rather than roaring fully empowered sexual women. We can pretend that we did it “for their own good” and to “protect them from the bad guys”, but we really didn’t (at least not in today’s day and age where birth control and abortion are readily available). No, we did it for ourselves. For own own selfish and egoic reasons. To preserve the integrity of our religion. To avoid being shamed by the moralizaers. To avoid “dishonoring the family name”. Etc.

The solution (as I have proposed it) is simply to STOP FUCKING TRAUMATIZING our daughters about sex! Stop the madness! Let them be the sexual beings that they are. Stop teaching them to fear the sexual interest of men and instead to capitalize on it. And most importantly, teach them to enjoy the hell out of sex, one of evolution’s great gifts to humanity, rather than fear it.

Your response to my proposed solution seems to be “but Sean, you’re ignoring the trauma-induced sensitivity of the existing generation of women. You can’t fully appreciate the extent of their trauma and the stuff they’ve been subjected to. It’s unkind to expect them to change and embrace their sexuality when they’ve been so abused for so long.”

To that I have two answers. First, we shouldn’t continue terrorizing future generations of women just because past ones were. Enough is enough! Mamas and Daddies shouldn’t be encouraged to terrorize their daughters about sex (as religion and traditional feminist do), and make their daughters fearful of it, just because they were terrorized about it by their parents.

And second, when people have suffered trauma, the moral and compassionate thing to do is NOT to enable it but rather to help HEAL it, to help them get over it so that it no longer adversely impacts their lives in harmful ways. That’s how we treat victims of PTSD in other instances, and that’s how we should be treating these trauma survivors. We don’t tell veterans suffering from PTSD to stay inside and hide so that won’t have to cope with terrifying noises (the slam of a car door or a car backfiring). We don’t tell people driving cars not to slam their doors. Instead, we rehabilitate the victims by helping them learn to overcome the trauma so that they can not only function , but actually excel, at normal life.

We owe that to the women in our lives who have been so terrorized and shamed over sex. We owe it to help them heal, not to continue encouraging them to hide and be fearful and feel traumatized or “violated” every time a man approaches them (no matter how innocently or kindly).