The great Sexual Harassment Panic of 2017 is at last dying down.  We can safely look at a screen without being overwhelmed by stories in which yet another loser – or more than one – has been outed for mistreating or exploiting women.  Resignations have been myriad, careers have been destroyed, and one suicide has occurred.  We're assured that the entire episode has been a watershed, that Things Have Changed permanently.  It's an earthquake, says Meryl Streep.  Others hail "a new socio-sexual revolution."

But what exactly has changed?  Earthquakes are noted for massive and universal destruction, revolutions for the guillotine and the firing squad.

In fact, a cursory examination of the scene reveals...absolutely nothing.  We stand at the same point we were at before it all happened.

A large number of creeps have been outed and ejected, and that's generally a good thing.  These were all trash – Harvey Weinstein, Al Franken, Garrison Keillor, John Conyers.  They will not be missed.  They should have been nailed a long time ago, and they would have been nailed for something eventually.

But apart from that, nothing.  A new day?  Where?  A new system?  In what sense?

By system, I'm not talking about a reporting system, an intervention system, a surveillance system, or any other bureaucratic or ideological structure designed to exert social control.  No, I'm speaking here about the kind of social system that, though largely invisible and widely unacknowledged (and nonexistent to feminist scholarship), does in fact exert sanctions and set limits on behavior.  This kind of systems, a shadow function of communities and societies, is the only effective method of controlling antisocial activity.  They are also the first to be eliminated by ideological liberalism.

The system controlling sexual abuses was clear and well understood.  Women had a certain status that was acknowledged and respected by everyone.  Their safety was secured by a vast distributed network of males who looked out for the interests of females they did not know personally, in the secure knowledge that other men unknown to them were looking out for the interests of their own sisters, daughters, and wives.  If a Weinstein or a Conyers bothered a woman, she could appeal for protection to her brothers, her male friends or coworkers, or even a man walking down the street – and she would get it.  The interloper would be sent on his way, the coworker or boss warned.  If it didn't end, then sanctions up to and including physical violence would occur.  In more atrocious situations, such as rape or molestation, the solution might even be more drastic.  Everyone in my generation heard the story in which the detective took aside a male relative of an assaulted woman and said, "We know who did this, but we can't prove it.  We'll give you his name, and you take it from there."

Women set the standards, and men enforced them.  That's how it worked.  Again, most men of my generation have stories – in most cases many stories – where a woman appealed for help on such grounds.  Once, on a cold winter night in the early '80s, I was walking down MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village when I noticed a large crowd gathered in front of a brownstone.  A girl was leaning out her window, screaming, "Help me!  Someone's beating on the door.  They're trying to get in..."

The crowd, fifty or more, largely male and most likely from the local branch of the Universal Betas Association (more generally known as NYU), were gaping up at her as if she were a TV screen.  Pushing through them, I called out, "Throw me your keys."

I caught them and let myself in, racing upstairs with no idea of what I would be facing.  But instead of a gang of Terminators or a Sandinista death squad, it turned out to be a drunk sprawled on the hallway floor, howling and banging on the door.  I told him to shut up and dragged him across the hall.  Knocking on the girl's door, I explained the situation to her and handed her the keys.  She thanked me and, still nervous, returned to her apartment.  I turned to leave, and that's when the boys in blue, taking only a quarter to half an hour to get there from a precinct house five blocks away, finally appeared.

They looked at me; looked at the drunk; and then, virtually as one, cried out, "Bobby!"

Racing to the drunk, they bent over him, anxiously asking him, "Did that man knock you down, Bobby?"  "Did he hit you?"

Great, I thought.  The beloved precinct drunk.

The older cop turned to me and shouted. "You just stand right there, fella."

At that moment, two other cops appeared.  "Is that Bobby?" "My God, what happened to Bobby?"

Taking advantage of the confusion, I slipped around the corner and snuck downstairs and out the door.  The mob was dispersing, and several other cops were piling out of their cruiser to Bobby's rescue.  I ran down to Bleecker and then slowed to a self-consciously casual stroll.

That's the way it works.  The betas will not help you.  The cops will be late and, likely as not, useless when they appear.  What is required is somebody who, despite his sporting a biker jacket, earring, and a spiked punk haircut, still lives under the old dispensation, according to the old rules.

That's the way it was.  Informal yet effective.  Were there errors?  Certainly.  But there wasn't much in the way of Weinsteins, Frankens, and certainly Kevin Spaceys.  Because the trash understood the rules as well.

It doesn't work that way anymore.  That system has been dismantled.  Weinstein and the rest took advantage of the fact that there were no longer any rules and simply imposed their own.  The eradication of the gentleman – which most people don't know evolved from the role of the knight (that is, someone who lived by a code of honor), the sanctification of the beta male (Anybody with questions as to what I mean by that term need merely look at this video – the betas are the ones sitting in the background, silently gazing off into space with blank looks on their faces while the ladies slug it out.), and the feminist discouraging of women turning to males for anything at all marked the end of general protection of females as a way of life.  As that way of life has receded, we have, naturally enough, seen an upsurge of violence and exploitation of women.  If unchecked, it will eventually reach the point that it did in Montreal on December 6, 1989, when a slug named Mark Lépine entered a classroom at the École Polytechique with a rifle and a blade.  He ordered the men to leave, and all those staunch betas got up, left, and then stolidly waited outside while Lépine murdered fourteen helpless girls (and yes, ladies, they were college students, so they were girls).  That's how it is in Quebec.  That wouldn't happen even today in many areas of the U.S.  But a generation ago, it wouldn't have happened at all – and the areas where it could happen are spreading. 

They're spreading because, with the old system largely destroyed apart from Cro-Magnons like myself, no other system has been created to replace it.  This is typical of postmodern liberal ideology, which is unparalleled at destroying things but has no skill at construction.  Obama completed the demolition of the U.S. health care system and "replaced" it with Obamacare, which is being put out of its misery at the hands of Donald Trump.  Obama's sideshow foreign policy team destroyed the modus vivendi prevailing in the Middle East, resulting the deaths of hundreds of thousands in a cataclysm that has still not been completely extinguished.  It has become a cliché – pulling down is one thing, but when it's time for the real work, they're nowhere to be found.

And that is the story with sex.  The old method of doing things is verboten, nothing has replaced it, and our ladies are suffering as a result.  Meryl and her girlfriends are whistling in the dark. 

Just look at whom they hired the run the inquiry: Anita Hill, a gibbering neurotic whose sole claim to fame is accusing a great man of telling of risqué jokes.  Sheer empty symbolism, with nary an iota of substance behind it. 

Hill's "commission" will emerge with some kind of Code of Behavior that they will insist that men obey, a code that will effectively eliminate banter, flirting, jokes, compliments, even eye contact, while leaving the actual problem untouched.  The world at large will shrug it off as an asinine extension of P.C.  The Weinsteins and Lauers will simply maneuver around it, choosing their targets more carefully and honing their tactics.  Men who brutalize women are psychically twisted.  Unless physically restrained, they are not going to stop.  Certainly not at the behest of a tag team run by Anita Hill.

Regardless, this new Code of Conduct will become the Thing.  It will be posted in offices and public places.  H.R. personnel will be required to memorize it, workers forced to sign copies, which will be kept on file.  It will be enforced among the more ethereal levels of society – the media, large corporations, academia.  Much will be made of it.

And it will fail.  It will not halt a single case of sexual exploitation, for the simple reason that it will be not be backed up by social consensus in any tangible way whatsoever.

It will have no effect on sexual harassment in the real world, any more than the tens of thousands of reports, articles, learned papers, and studies have in the past.  

This won't continue.  It's one of that class of things that can't go on and won't go on.  Men want to be heroes to their women, and women want their men to be heroes.  If a woman had complained to any normal male outside of the Quebecois system of higher education, somebody would have clocked Lauer or Weinstein or Franken, and that would have ended it.  But they didn't, out of fear, or ambition, but also because we don't live in that world anymore.  We live in a world that has deliberately been made more complex and at the same time more stupid.  We will remain on cruise control until the next blowup.

A lot of people will suffer before it ends.  As is always and ever the case, liberalism, the ideology of neurotic females and beta males, degrades everything it touches.