But a small percentage of men are not satisfied with this room and they cross over to the next room, the predator’s room. In this room, the pleasures of sex get mixed up with the pleasures of power.

Harassment is not just sex and it’s not just power; it’s a wicked mixture of the two. Harassers possess what psychologists call hostile masculinity; they apparently get pleasure from punishing the women who arouse them.

There hasn’t been enough research into what goes on in the minds of harassers, but the studies we do have suggest a few things.

There are no standard personality types. But predators do seem to start young, often beginning their predatory behavior in college. They are not looking for a relationship. Narcissistically, they are unwilling to acknowledge what their victim is feeling. They have morally obliterated that person. But they are far from irrational. They perpetrate their acts in male-dominated environments where they think they can get away with harassing women.

There are three points to be made about this situation.

First, one key element in any relationship is how well you see the other person. In the first room people see each other deeply. In the second regime they see each other in a degraded way. In the third regime the harasser doesn’t see his victim at all. The men who have recently been exposed say they had no idea how much pain they were causing.

Second, the line between the prospector room and the predator room is getting blurrier. On campuses, the few predators use the general prospector atmosphere as a perfect playground for their exploitation. More important, in the public mind the line between unwanted sexual attention and force is growing indistinct.

In the political world, for example, partisans of left and right rationalize their support for Bill Clinton or Donald Trump because they could tell themselves in effect, “Oh, he’s just a horny prospector.” By treating such behavior as “locker-room talk” or laddish behavior, they helped smooth the ground for all the predators to come.

Finally, one core problem is the collapse of the first room, the room of love.

It is necessary but not enough to have a negative vision of what men should not do. It would also be nice if there were some positive vision of how sexuality fits into a rich life, how it flourishes in the private sphere as a (very fun) form of deep knowing. If we had a clearer concept of a beautiful relationship we’d also have a clearer concept of what predatory behavior looks like and what it takes to eradicate it. In a degraded environment, the predators, who are few and vicious, are more likely to be tolerated by the many, who are numb.