"When anything goes, it's women who lose"

The line warns that the erosion of shared norms and boundaries rarely produces a level playing field. When guardrails disappear, power differentials decide outcomes, and those differentials still tilt male. Women shoulder greater physical risk, carry the reproductive burden, and endure reputational penalties that rarely attach to men with equal force. In sexually permissive or normless environments, high-status or aggressive men often capture the upside, variety, impunity, access, while women face the downside, coercion masked as choice, social fallout, and the demand to self-protect in situations designed to ignore their vulnerabilities.

“Anything goes” also shifts costs from institutions to individuals. When communities stop enforcing standards, the job of boundary-setting moves to the person with the most to lose. Women must negotiate safety in bars, on campuses, at work, and online, managing risk with vigilance that drains time and energy. In workplaces where lines blur under the banner of informality, harassment becomes easier to rationalize and harder to report. In digital spaces stripped of moderation, misogynistic targeting proliferates; the nominal freedom of speech becomes a practical silencing of women. Even in romance, a culture that equates liberation with detachment can pressure women to accept encounters misaligned with their desires, then blame them for the fallout.

The insight is not a plea for puritanism but for intelligent guardrails that widen freedom rather than constrict it. Real liberty depends on predictable norms: clear consent standards, consistent enforcement, due process, and social expectations that reward care and penalize predation. Men benefit, too, from a culture that defines honorable behavior and imposes consequences when it’s breached. The point is prudential: when societies dismantle norms without building better ones, advantages flow to those already fortified by status, strength, or impunity. To ensure freedom is genuinely shared, boundaries must be designed with asymmetries in mind, and upheld not by individual stamina, but by collective will.