Most of us are familiar with the mildly lingering regret that comes with meeting a person whom we wished we had met years ago, primarily either when we or that other person still possessed a particular relational availability, or maybe simply because that person could have told us something from which we could have greatly benefited. I believe that the process of discovering insight can work in a similar manner. I have recently finished F. Roger Devlin’s Sexual Utopia in Power. The eponymous essay of this powerful collection of essays was originally published in 2006, but I was made aware of it only through its Nine Banded Books reissue nearly ten years later. From having feasted upon a steady diet of red-pill offerings for the past years, I cannot say that any of the particular dishes served in this work were new to me; however, the manner in which they have been prepared (i.e., the clarity and cogency of the argumentation) make this tome valuable even to most experienced of red-pill gourmands. I can only imagine, though, with regret, what a different person I might now be and what situations I could have avoided had I discovered this way of thinking back in 2006.

The reality is that I could quote from nearly every page, so I am practicing intellectual restraint by quoting only the following. This passage led to me to wander back into my thought laboratory, hence why I am quoting it:

I have come across male commentators, for example, maintaining that professors who “prey upon” female students should (in certain cases) be treated as rapists. This is a radical departure from the Christian view of women as moral agents, and the high status of women in Western society is essentially bound up with such a view. As far as I can see, if we are unwilling to hold women strictly accountable for their actions, we have only one logical recourse available: a return to the ancient Roman legal doctrine that a woman is a perpetual minor.

The usual qualification: I am not saying there does not exist men–and women!–who are predators and who will, either through strength of body or mind or will or a combination, attempt to subjugate unwilling would-be victims. However, what needs to be acknowledged is that once a person reaches a certain age (though this age will vary depending upon a host of factors), if there is any amount of consensual activity, then both parties bear the moral burden of that activity, though one party may be more responsible/guilty than the other.

Let us take an example that no one who wants to keep his/her job and a respectable position in polite society will publicly discuss: campus date rape. There is a qualitative difference between the following scenarios: one, a man lurks in the shadows and physically overpowers a struggling woman on her way to the library or to her apartment and viciously tears away her clothing to insert forcibly his penis inside of her and, two, an alcohol-infused horny frat boy who went too far after a woman willingly came to his fraternity home and willingly separated herself from her female friends and willingly drank herself to oblivion and willingly went back with said frat boy to his bedroom. In the first scenario, the woman, according to most anyway, bears absolutely no responsibility for her actions and should be pitied accordingly. In the second, as unfortunate as the situation may be and as much as I, personally, do not care for frat boys, the woman bears some level of responsibility for abandoning all forms of prudence, especially given the ubiquity of such stories. However, the legal and moral environment in which we live today is one in which the woman in scenario two is absolved of all responsibility in the matter, putting her on the same moral and legal plane as the woman in scenario one, which is unjust and an insult to the woman in scenario one, especially if she happens to be someone who makes a point of avoiding potentially hazardous parties.

The aforementioned passage made me think the following: let us give women a full moral pass, absolving them of all moral agency, as if they were minors. In doing so, however, we need to try to be as consistent as we can; as minors they should not be allowed to do the following: own property, work beyond a strictly-set number of hours each week–and only in establishments suited for minors (e.g., neither corporations nor academia), take out loans, drive, vote, go to college, stay out past a certain time, and, in general, stick their noses in the affairs of men–the true adults of society. Of course, this would make things rather difficult if one wanted to marry a woman, but surely a little inconsistency could allowed for the survival of the species.