fable whaddya got > Brownmiller's Against Our Will (1975) made the foundational move: rape is not deviance but function — the mechanism by which all men keep all women in a state of fear > MacKinnon and Dworkin then extended the structural analysis from violence to desire itself: under conditions of male dominance, heterosexual desire is shaped by and expressive of that dominance, so the line between wanted and unwanted, seduction and coercion, is not a bright line but a gradient on a single axis. > Most prohibitions are specifiable ex ante — you can know before acting whether you're speeding. Harassment doctrine makes the moral and legal status of an advance depend on its reception, which the actor cannot fully know in advance. Schrödinger's harasser is not a Tumblr exaggeration of the law; it is the law's actual epistemic structure > But the phrase [male gaze] was too good, and its vernacular career (accelerating through the 2000s film-blog era into 2010s Tumblr) stripped the apparatus and kept the moral charge: male looking itself became a species of act, something done to the looked-at. This is the move that extends the harassment framework backward from advance to desire — you can now be complicit before you've spoken. > The reception context did the rest — an anxious, rule-seeking young man reads [Schrodinger's Rapist] not as "here is why she seems guarded" but as "you are, until proven otherwise, indistinguishable from a rapist in the eyes of any woman you approach, and imposing that assessment on her is itself a cost you're inflicting." > Comment 171 (December 2014) is a first-person report of what the composite messaging does to its most conscientious recipients: Aaronson describes spending his youth in terror that his desire was inherently predatory, to the point of asking a psychiatrist about chemical castration. > anti-harassment messaging is a broadcast signal, but its absorption is inversely proportional to the recipient's need for it. Men high in conscientiousness and anxiety — rule-followers, scrupulosity-prone — internalize it as a total prohibition; the men actually doing the harassing aren't reading Shapely Prose and wouldn't update if they were. > the motte-and-bailey point: "nobody is saying you can't ask women out" (motte) coexists with an enormous accumulated discourse in which unwanted advances are creepy, creepiness is a moral failing rather than an aesthetic misfortune, and — here's the trap — whether an advance is unwanted is largely a function of the approacher's attractiveness and status, which he cannot reliably self-assess and which it is also forbidden to reason about explicitly. > #MeToo (2017) added enforcement salience, with the Aziz Ansari case (January 2018) as the crucial boundary dispute: a bad, clumsy, pushy date, narrated in the idiom of assault. The intra-feminist fight over that piece (Flanagan, Weiss, et al. versus babe.net's defenders) was precisely over whether ordinary failed heterosexual initiative was now classifiable within the predation frame. > Now, the implicit worldview — since you asked what was transmitted rather than just by whom. I'd decompose it into four load-bearing assumptions. One: male desire is default-suspect — continuous with violence, differing in degree, so that the burden of proof sits on the desiring party before any act occurs. Two: the moral status of an approach is determined ex post by its reception — intention is inadmissible, which for the scrupulous means no advance can ever be known-safe. Three: consent is the entire ethical content of sexuality, conceived contractually and ideally verbally — which quietly criminalizes ambiguity, and ambiguity is the actual medium of courtship; flirtation just is the artful maintenance of deniability on both sides. Four, and least noticed: female desire vanishes from the model entirely. Women in this framework do not want; they grant or withhold, assess threats, bear risk.