Trust

I sometimes find that I watch nearly all dramas through the filter of the "Prisoner's Dilemma": how will people behave so that they can trust each other? What rotten and avoidable things will happen when they don't? An article this morning about draconian enforcement of Title IX rules to punish college students who have casual sex with drunk partners reminded me how crazy human interactions can get if we persist in pretending we are invulnerable, autonomous, and amoral particles when engage with each other. That works reasonably well for routine, repetitive, predictable economic transactions with distant strangers. It's a ridiculous approach to neighbors, friends, and certainly sexual partners.

The linked article described two panicked college students who woke up after a one-night stand in which both were too drunk to have given effective consent. Knowing that either could ruin the life of the other by being the first to lodge a Title IX complaint, the young man decided to be the first to rat. Title IX prosecutions being the Kafkaesque joke they are, the slower-to-complain young woman found that defending against such accusations is futile. Both would have been fine if they'd each demonstrated a spine, but neither could be sure the other would. Or maybe the whole story is nothing but a dystopian fable, who knows. If so, it's not an implausible one.

The Prisoner's Dilemma poses a limited threat to people who have an unshakeable moral core and go to some trouble to become intimate only with others who clearly have the same. With casual neighbors, you can generally limit your exposure to self-defeating treachery by trusting each other provisionally on smaller, lower-stakes interactions. The worst that can happen is probably no more devastating than not getting your borrowed tool back, so you'll know better next time. With friends, well, if he habitually walks the check or spills your secrets or expects to be bailed out of jail without reciprocating, you'll learn. With lovers, you may have to forgo sex with someone you just met and about whom you know absolutely nothing--especially if you attend a university run by crazed ideologues.

How a young woman, or even a young man, could maintain any self-respect while whining about "non-consensual" sex in any other context than violence, I cannot imagine. It's as if people were begging to be subjected to a rigid system of chaperonage. They're practically shouting "I can't be trusted to exercise any judgment about how out-of-control and helpless I render myself among people whose trustiworthiness I haven't troubled to learn anything about." In other words, you can't trust me, I can't trust him, and we all need to live in tyranny in order to be even remotely safe.

When we've exhausted the protective strategies against betrayal and still get caught short, we still have a choice: not to be a jerk. Yes, we may be unfairly punished, but we don't have to be a jerk in a more comfortable cell.