That’s not a headline I would have thought to write yesterday, or the day before that. But each new day brings a new revelation, doesn’t it?

Flash-forward a few months, and Knight, a 25-year-old Washingtonian, is sleeping with someone new. He is asking “Can I touch you here?” “Can I do this?” every step of the way, and his partner wants to know what is with all the questions. She prefers a more proactive approach.

Knight is well-prepared to date in the #MeToo era. He has completed a two-month discussion class on how to reject toxic masculinity. He still has his “Consent is sexy” T-shirt from freshman year of college. He has thought about how men have the power in courtship, and with that, the ability to abuse it. So when he meets a woman while out at a bar, rather than ask for her number and potentially make her feel pressured to give it, he will give her his number and wait for her to text.

Is it right to blame the movement? After all, this guy sounds like the sort of unreconstructed dweeb who will just never have sex, right? But the article actually opens up with an anecdote in which the poor fella does have sex, and the anecdote helps to explain where his testicles went:

Over the summer, Geoffrey Knight is in bed with a woman he is dating. He puts his hand on her breast, and she swats it away. “You need to ask before you touch me,” he recalls her saying. Knight apologizes, saying he had assumed it was okay because they had just had sex.

“You should never make that assumption,” she retorts.

Holy schnikes. It reminds one of the woman in the Aziz Ansari story, who repeatedly believed that she had sent subtle cues to suggest to Ansari how uncomfortable she was with his attempts to have sex — but muddied her message by voluntarily undressing with Ansari and fellating him more than once. Taking such silly behavior seriously apparently turns men into consent-seeking robots, offering signed contracts of consent to women who just disrobed.

None of this is to say that the #MeToo movement is not legitimate or that there is not an obvious, huge, widespread problem with men making unwanted sexual overtures and contact. There quite obviously is. But the New Norms that are being enforced by the more radical proponents of #MeToo have no effect on the men who are the real problem — while in their most extreme form they emasculate men who are trying to do right to begin with, as the quoted passages above show.

As such, these social regulations are like so many other attempts to control behavior by the left: they target the wrong people. It’s reminiscent of gun control. The thug gang members who shoot rivals on the streets couldn’t care less about your rules, while the responsible gun owners are often far too hampered by them.

As usual, leftists ruin everything with their rules, when all that is needed is a healthy dose of common sense.

P.S. Thanks to Allahpundit for the pointer on Twitter to this article, by the way. Easily half of my blog ideas come from his Twitter feed. If I thanked him every time my post was inspired by something he flagged, that’s all I’d ever do.

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