The Inadequacy of Sexual Consent?

Earlier today, I fell down one of those Internet rabbit holes reading reflections about the Aziz Ansari story. (I confess to having previously had no idea who he was.) In truth, I jumped in myself, once I realized what was really at stake here, since it's something in which I've been increasingly interested myself over the last couple years. The best piece I read was by Amanda Alcantara, on The Lily. Here's the crucial bit:

[This] story...pushes us beyond the parameters of what we've been saying about consent: That "no means no", or to seek an active "yes". This form of teaching consent focuses on feelings of power during intimacy. It's a response to a request—"will they let me have sex with them?"—rather than seeing sex as something mutual. The question should be, "Do they want to have sex with me?" That is essentially where this conversation lies. Is consenting about "wanting" or about "letting"?

That's almost right, I think. But the real lesson, which seems to run just under the surface of a lot of these discussions, concerns the limitations of the notion of consent. In fact, this is not a new idea. See this piece by Rebecca Traister in The Cut, for example. But perhaps it's an idea who time has come.

Great (and Funny) Video on Consent

Amazing Reflection on Sexuality and Sexual Violence

On Feministing:

When I started having sex, disposability was the first thing on the menu. Fuck you, ignore you, make fun of you on Facebook. Even now, it is the public penance exacted from women who dare.
A friend of mine said as much at the end of our first semester of college. ...“Boys aren’t going to want to date you if you keep having sex with them,” my friend said. The words smashed against my face like ice or glass.

And that's just the part about sexuality.

Every Woman Has Been a Little Bit Raped

Terrific piece on Role Reboot about why we (as a culture) need to broaden our understanding of rape and sexual assault. See also this piece on Bustle and this follow-up piece.

One of the most striking things to me was the idea, apparently expressed as often by women as by men, that stopping in the middle of sex "robs a man of his orgasm". This is particularly odd given that what's being discussed here, for the most part, is stopping intercourse. There's no indication, for example, in the Bustle piece that the author wouldn't have been happy to continue having some other sort of sex. Of course, it's her right not to stop altogether, if that's what she wants to do, but, as I said, that's actually not what seems to be at issue in most of these stories. There are other ways a guy can have an orgasm, you know?

Amazing Photo Essay on Consent

"Face Value is a series of photographs, taken by staff photographer Aubrey Schuring, that showcase the emotions of various human beings as they discuss moments of consent, assault, and their feelings of worth with Project Consent."

See it on Project Consent.

Alcohol and Consent

I post a lot of links to what Thomas MacAulay Millar writes about consent, because so much of it is so sensible. And his recent piece "Draining the Swamp: Alcohol and Agency" is no exception.

Yet More About Consent

Kind of basic stuff here, but worth reading. The nice point is that one doesn't have to go so far as to satisfy the legal definition of rape to violate consent in a way that does harm.

• "Coerced Consent: When 'Yes' Really Means 'No'" (Harris O'Malley, Good Men Project)

This one is thought-provoking. I won't even try to say what it's about. Probably, as she suggests, men shouldn't read it.

• "Consent Is Way More Complicated For Women Than Just 'Yes Means Yes'" (Samantha Eyler, Role Reboot)

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

• "6 Myths About 'Yes Means Yes'" (Soraya Chemaly, Role Reboot)
• "Neutral Evil: The Problem With Refusing To Decide" (Thomas MacAulay Millar, Yes Means Yes)

Which means we should remind ourselves again why people have a problem with this.

More on Consent, Assault, and the Like

Just to be clear: I couldn't care less about Jian Ghomeshi. I'd never heard of the guy until a week or so ago. But when these sorts of things happen, and you see and hear the kinds of reactions we have seen and heard, it's a teachable moment. And it's an especially good moment for men to shut the fuck up for one freaking moment and listen to what the women around us are saying about their lives and their experience.

Good Reads: Consent, Ghomeshi, BDSM

This is an oldie but a goodie. The basic point is that people rarely refuse an invitation of any kind by saying "No". To the contrary, refusals are usually hedged in various ways, to soften the blow. The lesson is that people who violate consent don't "not understand". They don't want to understand.

• "Mythcommunication" (Yes Means Yes)

Another oldie about how communities "work around" the knowledge that one of their own is "sketchy on consent".

• "The Missing Stair" (The Pervocracy)

And this is a wonderful piece on a much older case explaining the fundamental difference between BDSM and abuse:

• "Not What We Do" (Yes Means Yes)

All of which brings us back to Jian Ghomeshi:

• "Ghomeshi: The Developing Story, And Predator Theory Observations" (Yes Means Yes)
• "Jian Ghomeshi Isn’t the First Alleged Abuser to Cite the Right to BDSM Sexuality" (The Cut)
• "Do You Know About Jian?" (Nothing in Winnipeg)
• "I Knew About Jian Ghomeshi" (Slate XX)

One of the really important reminders here is that "innocent until proven guilty" is a legal standard that applies to criminal prosecutions and not even e.g. to arrest.

While we're at it: Here's a nice cartoon that explains what the real objection is to affirmative consent.

(Via Everyday Feminism).

Two Great Pieces on California's New Affirmative Consent Law

A couple days ago, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a new law in California establishing "yes means yes" as the standard by which sexual consent must be judged by colleges in California, rather than "no means no". Feminists, and other decent people, too, have been pushing for this sort of change for years, and it is important. Symbolically, it recognizes in the law that women are sexual agents and subjects of desire, not just passive objects of male sexual desire whose only choice point is to say "NO!!"

Sex as a Jam Session

There's something extremely important happening in feminist re-thinkings of the nature of sexual consent. Namely: the idea that there is something seriously wrong with the language of "consent"; that this language embodies a certain model of sexual interaction that is itself part of the problem. The locus of this work is the book "Yes Means Yes!" and an associated blog. There's no way I can spell out all the ideas here. The rough idea is that there is something oppositional about the language of consent and the "commodity model" of sex that underlies it. Person A has something person B wants, and so B asks A's permission to take or borrow or use it. When you see sex that way, you are just asking for people to take or borrow or use when A doesn't give permission.

So, the suggestion is, we should instead see sex as collaboration. The key advantage to thinking this way is that it now follows immediately that rape isn't sex. Period. You can't force someone to collaborate with you.

Sex educator Karen K. B. Chan has produced a (non-explicit) video that promotes this way of thinking about sex. It is absolutely fantastic stuff. Everyone should see this.