aggression and male powerlessness before a "sexual" woman.

in May I was on a fourth or fifth date with a guy I’d been casually seeing for a few months (we didn’t hang out very often due to the fact that he lived in Jersey, an hour away on NJ Transit, which suited me and my desires for dating perfectly). We’d both had a few drinks by this point and the conversation turned toward feminism (on which I’d just started doing some really in-depth research in the last month or so), and my views on what I’d been calling “Closet Sexism” in Western society for years and would periodically rail against, despite my lack of vocabulary and rounded out knowledge.

            However, just a few days earlier I had started reading a book by second-wave feminist Susan Douglas in which she attacks that same idea (she calls it “Enlightened Sexism”) and so it was a bit of an inevitability that the topic would come up.

            My date listened to my arguments quite respectfully, asked a few questions, and challenged some of my ideas, which I sometimes had to concede due to lack of knowledge or to avoid getting into any serious fight. It was altogether a very egalitarian discussion, until we got to the issue of jobs. He pointed out that more women are employed than men (in retrospect I’m sorry I didn’t site this, and ask if there was a more legitimate reason for this fall in male employment than laziness.) Instead I pointed out that in 2009 the top five jobs for women were secretaries, registered nurses, elementary & middle school teachers, cashiers, and retail sales persons.

            It was at this point that my date said something that left me speechless. He suggested that when a woman enters a group of men, the dynamic changes and the men start competing for the woman sexually, which undermines the productivity of the group.

            Although it is true that adding a member of the opposite sex to a previously single-sex situation does change the dynamic, I was furious at the idea that this should be an excuse— to suggest that women should be excluded from jobs because men cannot control themselves is deeply insulting to me. We are all adults here and yes we all have a sex drive (to some degree or another) but this is the 21st century. We have put people on the moon, for fuck's sake. I'm sorry you're horny, deal with it.
            Additionally, it implicitly legitimizes sexual harassment in the workplace. "Boys will be boys, right? They can't help themselves when in the presence of a woman, poor dears; they're just powerless."
            I sputtered and shouted about this for several minutes but we were seeing a show and had to leave so I stopped in the bathroom while he went outside to smoke. When I rejoined him, I apologized for my outburst, for the possibility that I might have come on too strong.

            This brings me to my punch line in the story: in spite of what I saw (and still see) as my legitimate outrage, I felt compelled to apologize for perhaps being too aggressive. I can’t tell you when I learned that in our society an “aggressive” woman (one who exhibits strong emotions of any sort) is quickly labeled a “bitch” but the conditioning is there; even while I hate getting called “sweet” or any variation on that theme, I could not escape the conditioning that said that such an outburst was not kosher, for which I must therefore apologize.