I sometimes get into discussions with social conservatives about why I am not at least trying to get married. I have a lot of reasons for not trying to get married. For one, I don’t want to fall under the authority of hierarchies (school, work or church) who don’t think that women should ever be held responsible for their own choices. Let’s take a look at a news story that illustrates the problem.
Once upon a time, men would meet their wives in school, workplaces or churches. As long as the man was not in the reporting hierarchy of the woman, (i.e. – as long as he was not her manager or her director, etc.), then it was fine for people to meet up, date, get engaged, and get married. But that’s all changed now.
Consider this story from the New York Post:
A renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist who was axed after having what he said was a consensual fling with a much younger colleague, said the mushrooming scandal forced him on the unemployment line.
David Sabatini, 54, whose research involved unraveling how tumors develop, resigned from MIT last month and has been surviving on employment after fellow scientist Kristin Knouse claimed he “groomed” and “coerced” her into a sexual relationship, according to a report and court papers.
A longtime friend and dean at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine tried to offer him a job, but after an uproar, the school announced on May 3 that it would not hire him despite the fact that colleagues described him in a recent article as one of the world’s greatest scientists — a “genius” in line for the Nobel Prize.
“What wormhole did my life take, to … protests and being called a sexual predator? What quirk in the universe allowed this to happen?” said Sabatini, who has denied wrongdoing and noted Knouse did not work in his lab or report to him.
In an October lawsuit against MIT, Sabatini said that his relationship with Knouse, who is 21 years his junior, was consensual — and told a reporter he was shocked to find himself the subject of protests at NYU when the school explored the possibility of hiring him.
Sabatini has contended he and Knouse began their fling during a 2018 conference, while he was in the midst of a divorce. By 2020, he thought the affair had cooled, though he claims Knouse wanted to continue. By October 2020, she complained she’d been harassed, and in a later lawsuit alleged Sabitini oversaw a “sexualized” environment in his lab.
What’s interesting about this story to me is that it’s been reported that this woman entered into this relationship with this man after he clearly communicated to her that he was only looking for something casual. I.e. – he was not trying to hide that he did not want to be tied down. He was telling her that up front.
There are more details about the story in Common Sense.
After their initial hook-up…
…they met up at Knouse’s condo near Boston Common where they discussed a few ground rules for their tryst. They agreed they could see other people. Knouse, Sabatini remembers, had ongoing flings with men who she referred to with nicknames like “anesthesiologist f*** buddy,” “finance bro,” and “physics professor,” and she wanted to keep it that way. Also, they wouldn’t tell anyone. Why complicate things at work? It was all supposed to be fun.
Why did this woman get the man fired? Well, there is an old saying about women that goes like this: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”. Apparently, Sabatini was getting interested in another woman, and less interested in Knouse:
Things were fizzling… he was getting involved with another woman, a microbiologist in Germany.
Knouse didn’t want to let go. In January 2020 she texted, in part: “I get anxious when I don’t hear back from you and then I see you post stuff on Twitter and it provides an admittedly small and silly but still another bit of evidence to this growing feeling that you don’t care about me in the way that I care about you.” He wrote back: “I am sorry but you are being crazy.” In another text, Knouse admitted feeling “stung.” She added: “I think it’s worth thinking about whether you want someone who matches your passion, intellect, and ambition.”
Feminists think that people are faithful and committed because of self-interest, e.g. – “passion, intellect, and ambition”, i.e. – self-interest. They think that a woman can just like fun, and choose a man who likes fun, and have a permanent, exclusive relationship based on continuous fun. No need to care about religion. No need to care about the rationality of moral behavior. No need to care about traditional gender roles. Things will just work out, if each person acts selfishly all the time.
So what happened to Sabatini next?
This:
In October 2020, Knouse texted her friends that she was “unpack[ing] a ton of suppressed abuse and trauma from an obvious local source”—an apparent reference to Sabatini. Knouse’s fellowship at the Whitehead was ending, and she didn’t apply for any faculty jobs there. When the new director, Ruth Lehmann, called Knouse to ask why, Knouse complained for the first time of being “harassed.”
In November, Knouse warned her friend—an incoming Whitehead fellow—to “squeeze out as much advice as possible before your mentor is Weinstein’ed out of science.”
In December, at Lehmann’s behest, the consulting firm Jones Diversity sent the Whitehead employees a survey “based in part on Dr. Knouse’s false complaint about Dr. Sabatini,” according to a complaint later brought by Sabatini. All participants were anonymous. Five or so of the nearly 40 employees in Sabatini’s lab took part.
The next month, two former Sabatini lab members lodged complaints to H.R.—the first complaints against him in his 24-year tenure—about “bro culture” in the lab.
This prompted the Whitehead to hire the law firm Hinckley, Allen & Snyder to conduct an investigation on “gender bias and/or inequities and a retaliatory leadership in the Sabatini lab.” The Whitehead never told Sabatini what he was accused of. Former lab members told me their co-workers were sobbing when they came out of meetings with the lawyers, saying that the lawyers had put words in their mouths. “They had a very strong agenda,” one of them told me.
Knouse was 29 years old. She was not a child. Sabatini never worked with her. He never supervised her. He never threatened her or pressured her. This was a relationship between two consenting adults. But that doesn’t matter, because in every school and workplace, women cannot be held responsible for their own bad choices. Women are always victims of men. It is always the man who must be punished. And men have to go to school and work in these environments for their entire lives – walking on thin ice, never knowing when the axe will fall.
Sabatini is ruined:
In the 24 hours after the report came out, Sabatini’s life fell apart. MIT put him on administrative leave. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, another prestigious non-profit that funds biomedical research and was paying Sabatini’s salary, fired him. He resigned from the Whitehead, and eventually MIT, at the advice of his lawyers who thought it would help him secure his next job. (“I one hundred percent regret that,” Sabatini told me).
Soon, the biotech startups he’d helped found— Navitor Pharmaceuticals, KSQ and Raze Therapeutics—started severing their relationships with him. Sabatini was axed from professorships, fellowships, and professional societies. Awards and grants were pulled. His income disappeared.
Knouse is still working. They decided that she didn’t violate the policy – only he violated it. She has no problem at all with this outcome – she really believes she is a victim, and shouldn’t have to take responsibility for her own choices. Can you imagine being married to a woman who does whatever she wants, then blames you when things go wrong? And worse – goes to the authorities to have them punish you, when she is the one who chose poorly?
This was a consensual relationship. Expectations were set at the beginning – this was casual, no commitment. She agreed to the casual nature, she was sleeping with several other men. Suddenly, she reached age 29, and decided it was time to get serious. He reminded her about their arrangement – nothing serious.
They were BOTH EQUALLY in violation of the company rule. Abuse was alleged by her, but there was no police involvement to verify it. He was punished, but there was no criminal trial where he could defend himself. He was not given due process. No lawyer. No self-defense. This lack of due process is common on college campuses, workplaces, and even in religious organizations. Women who are jilted by men are able to make these allegations and get these men fired without any due process.
Some people might say “well, he was treating her badly, so he deserved it”. The issue is not whether he is to blame, or whether she is to blame. The issue is what message it sends to men about the safety of having relationships with women. Women aren’t punished for breaking the same rules as men break. And men are learning from that not to engage in relationships with women, because the authorities always side with the women even if their own decisions have gotten them into trouble.
Some people might say, “well as long as you act morally, then this won’t happen to you”. But these accusations can also be made against innocent men who are just “guilty” of offending women in the school or workplace with their conservative or Christian views. This was already happening to people in companies like Mozilla and Google. Men sometimes get accused of false rape and sexual harassment for rejecting a woman’s advances.
I know that a lot of pro-marriage social conservatives love to load men up with duties, and blame them when things go wrong. But those social conservatives cannot expect men to continue to marry in an environment where men are always to blame, men must always be punished, men must always pay alimony and child support, men must always go to jail, men must always lose their jobs or custody of their kids. Men are learning NOT to talk to women, date them, mentor them, or marry them.
It’s lots of fun for pro-marriage social conservatives to treat women like children, and embrace chivalry in public. It’s a form of virtue-signaling. But if you ignore the incentives facing men, then you are causing the very decline of marriage that you claim to oppose.
WINTERY KNIGHT 