What right do politicians have to control relationships?

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

Did you hear the joke about the party of Ronald Reagan deciding to ban sex between consenting adults? Somewhere up there, the Gipper is making more fun of this Big Brother intrusion by the GOP than he did of the Soviet Union and Fidel Castro’s Cuba. While the US House of Representatives can’t agree on immigration or health reform or gun control, last week it voted unanimously to ban members of congress having relationships with anyone who is their subordinate. Boom, boom.

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When politicians decide sex between consenting adults is government business, they abandon their core business of tending to the sacred fire of liberty. Not so long ago the progressive left would have laughed at this sex ban as religious right conservatism, just as conservatives would have clung to the Reagan legacy that the nine most dangerous words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

It’s one thing to set out sensible rules about sexual harassment and who is responsible for payouts. But when a ban on sex between consenting adults barely raises an eyebrow in the American congress, even their media, it points to the confluence of three powerful forces. One is very new, one is as old as government itself and the other is from last century. The #MeToo moment has joined up with the political imperative to “do something” and both are fuel­led by a political correctness so damn stifling that no one raised a peep to the state regulating the bedroom.

Remember when Vice-President Mike Pence was mocked as an old fogey for suggesting men shouldn’t go to dinner with women other than their wives? Now it’s the height of congressional fashion to set down rules not so different.

This new rule is condescending to both women and men. The workplace is where busy people meet other people and relationships form. Some last, others don’t, but people work through them as consenting adults. It’s none of the state’s business who sleeps with whom.

The rule also reeks of a new form of classism, where women and men are being told not to date above their rank. And it’s squarely aimed at young women who are more often likely to be subordinates to senior men in congress.

So, extrapolating from this, a doctor can’t date a nurse if she works for him? A partner in a law firm had best stick to dating only partners? And women in low-ranking jobs shouldn’t date above their station?

It’s not hard to draw sensible lines: no to sex between a teacher and a student, for example, because we know that’s morally wrong, and when it comes to consensual relationships in a workplace between two adults, yes.

This creepy class snobbery is not just about who women can date, it’s about what work they do too. Grid girls at the Formula One grand prix were told by elite voices that their work was now too vulgar. Same with young women working as hostesses at a men-only dinner in London. That’s been permanently closed down by a haughty middle-class milieu that decided such work isn’t a good fit in this #MeToo moment.

Freedom should mean the freedom to be a grid girl, or a walk-on model at a darts competition, or a hostess at the Dorchester Hotel, rather than having others tell you what’s best for you. When it was men telling women what to do, women fought that injustice.

More than 100 years ago, suffragette Emily Wilding Davison died after stepping in front of the king’s horse at the 1913 Epsom Derby. The feisty woman who fought to secure our right to vote famously hid inside a broom closet in Westminster on census night so she could write down parliament as her place of residence. Davison was thrown in jail nine times, and force-fed almost 50 times during hunger strikes, as she strove for women’s liberation from the paternalism and condescension of the early 20th century.

Fast forward to the early 21st century. Women have the vote. And last week not one female congresswoman voted against a rule that tells women who they can and can’t date in their workplace.

Having the female chromosome doesn’t make you any better equipped to tell other women who they can date.

That we have gone awry tells the story of a new puritanical culture sorely in need of a counter-culture of liberation.

When women are paternalistic towards other women they enable and encourage men to do it too.

On ABC’s Radio National morning program last Friday, Fran Kelly interviewed American lawyer Avi Kumin. Kelly did her best to expose the madness of this new house rule.

But Kumin’s answers reveal how good intentions of protecting women from sexual harassment are now curbing consensual relationships. “Sexual harassment is a major problem,” he said. “This (the new ban) is not going to fix the problem but it’s one of trying to nip it in the bud.”

As Andrew Sullivan wrote last week in New York Magazine, feminism has become imbued with the cultural Marxist idea that a “microaggression … is on a spectrum with macroaggression … A bad date is just one end of a patriarchal curve that ends with rape. And that’s why left-feminists are not just interested in exposing workplace abuse or punishing sex crimes, but in policing even consensual sex for any hint of patriarchy’s omnipresent threat.”

In Australia, it’s not surprising that schoolmarmish MP Cathy McGowan wants to police consensual sex in federal parliament and the Greens think it’s a worthy discussion, too. Given how Barnaby Joyce has mismanaged his love affair with a staffer, the momentum for a ban may grow only stronger unless there are clearer rules about conflicts and employing partners at taxpayer expense.

Last year, the AFL entered the bedroom, forcing the resignations of two executives for having consensual relationships with junior employees. Neither woman complained of anything untoward, but the AFL decided it would nip any problems in the bud.

What’s next in the name of nipping things in the bud? Maybe stop women and men from mixing freely? That’s what the Saudis do, in the name of protecting women, along with requiring women to wear a full-length black abaya in public. Nipping things in the bud, Saudi restaurants have special entrances for women, with family sections for diners separated from men-only areas. It’s not a big leap from wanting to nip things in the bud to stopping women marrying, divorcing or having elective surgery without the permission of male guardians.

There are few clues as to how long the feverishness phase of the #MeToo moment will last. Clearly it’s longer than the Cuban missile crisis but, for the sake of women and men, let’s hope it’s shorter than the Cold War. But with no law of physics to steer the pendulum somewhere in the middle, it’s going to take some active nudging from those who think there is an alternative to agitated overreactions.

One alternative starts with this: don’t protect us, just respect us. It’s a useful distinction that also demolishes the case for Big Sister laws about who women can have sex with in the workplace.

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