Tags
A preliminary note: Maymay has a history of threatening, harassing, encouraging the suicide of, and doxxing people who disagree with them. This makes many people I know afraid to engage with them and their writings. I probably wouldn’t write about Maymay otherwise, but it pisses me off when people silence disagreement with them. So whenever Maymay threatens, harasses, encourages the suicide of, or doxes me or one of my friends, I shall write a post about them.
In addition, Maymay is nonbinary. I am unsure of their preferred pronouns, so I will be using “they”. Using male or female pronouns for them is not acceptable and will get your comment edited.
content warning: explicit descriptions of rape and sexual violence.
—
The essay “Consent as a Felt Sense” is one of Maymay’s and unquietpirate’s most fundamental writings, by their own statement.
I find a lot to like in that essay. For one thing, it’s similar to my long-held position on who counts as a rape survivor or abuse survivor. For my purposes, if someone identifies as an rape survivor, I will consider them a rape survivor and treat them as a rape survivor, no matter if what they consider to be their rape fits my definition or anyone else’s definitions of rape. (The exception is for actions that affect the perpetrator, the ethics of which are more complicated; that said, in my experience, the vast majority of interactions one has with a survivor qua survivor have nothing to do with their perpetrator whatsoever.) Think about it as a cost/benefit analysis: the worst-case scenario is that I’m nice to someone who’s blowing their experiences out of proportion or who made them up; the best-case scenario is that there is someone who is deeply in need of help, who is questioning their validity, and whom I have the ability to help. So in a sense I’ve already been using consent as a felt sense as my model for years.
Consent as a felt sense has a lot of similarities to Catherine MacKinnon’s statement that “politically, I call it rape whenever a [person] has sex and feels violated,” which I’ve long found interesting and provocative. (She said woman, because radical feminists are not so great about male and nonbinary survivors.) This is not a legal standard, and in fact MacKinnon specifically says she’s not talking about it as a legal standard, but rather a standard for support of survivors, understanding people’s experiences with sexual violence, and working to end sexual violence.
I think that both MacKinnon and Maymay/Unquietpirate are getting at an important point, which is that our culture is really really bad about dealing with sex that you gave permission for but that is still experienced as violating or even traumatizing. Sex where you dissociate to get through it; sex that makes you feel like an object, an orifice being used, rather than a participant; sex where you feel gross and cry afterward and scrub yourself because you don’t want to have had it.
Pro-sex but rape-aware culture has a tendency to pretend that that kind of sex doesn’t exist, including (to my shame) some sex-positive people. I talk about this with people a lot, and sometimes it seems like everyone I know has one of those stories. It’s not rape, and I’m not saying it’s rape… but I thought I had to agree to sex if I wanted to be in a relationship. But I was too drunk to understand what was going on, and my partner didn’t know that and she wouldn’t have done anything if she knew but it still hurt. But I thought he would leave me if I didn’t do it.
Our society is, I believe, laced with compulsory sexuality: the idea that everyone should have frequent sex of socially approved varieties. “Virgin” continues to be used as an insult, particularly against men. Polyamorous, kinky, and sex-positive communities often have an unspoken expectation that everyone wants lots of sex. LGB people are often expected to “prove” their sexual orientation through having sex with people of the same sex or with an equal number of men and women. Even spaces usually considered sex-negative have this problem: Christian culture combines an emphasis on abstinence until marriage with pressure to have great sex with your spouse after marriage, sometimes progressing to the idea that refusing sex is a sin.
Compulsory sexuality means that people may agree to sex that violates them. If I believe that I am less of a man if I refuse sex, I may have sex I do not actually want and that, in fact, makes me feel disgusted and violated. If I believe that, as a loving partner, I must have sex with my partner a few times a week, I may agree to sex that feels like a rape, even if I technically give permission for violation. Indeed, all partners might agree to sex that feels like a rape to them!
However, social pressure is not the only thing that can bring a sense of violation in addition to explicit permission. I have borderline personality disorder. One of the symptoms, for me, is that I sometimes conclude that if I don’t have sex with someone then they will hurt me. I often appear consenting– indeed, affirmatively consenting, enthusiastically consenting– while inside I am actually desperately attempting to avoid my partner physically or emotionally harming me.
(Guy who is going down to the comment section right now to complain about how is he supposed to know whether his partner feels violated if they won’t say so, this is just a setup for false rape accusations, and Ozy is a misandrist: I’ll get there, I promise, keep reading.)
I think pretending these experiences don’t exist is an ethical failure that hurts people. But I think consent as a felt sense– or MacKinnon’s “rape is any sex where you feel violated”, or even the sex-positive feminist “if it isn’t fuck yes, it’s fuck no”– also hurts people. Once again, if someone identifies as a rape survivor, I have absolutely no intentions of questioning their self-identification. However, I think that for many people, including myself, using the model of “rape” to discuss these experiences is not helpful, and having a normative expectation that these are rapes is unhelpful.
First: although I have not been raped, I have been sexually assaulted. In my personal experience, it actually does make a pretty large difference whether my partner intended to violate me. That’s the reason I don’t identify all the sex I had under the delusional belief that my partner would hurt me as being rapes: because, ultimately, it does make a big difference to my lived experience that my partners actually loved me very much, respected my bodily integrity, and would have been horrified and stopped if they knew that I was consenting because I thought they would punish me if I didn’t consent. This is true for many of the survivors of rape and of sexual violation I’ve known.
Second: I am genuinely uncomfortable with declaring my partners– people I’m still friends with, people I think are tremendously ethical and respectful with regards to sex, often people I love– to be rapists.
Maymay and Unquietpirate argue that I should not, actually, be uncomfortable– that we should accept that everyone is going to violate their partner’s consent at some point, and we should come up with a framework in which that is acceptable. Their proposed way of dealing with the perpetrator side is:
Realistically, anybody who is having any kind of sex in the context of rape culture is likely to violate someone’s consent at some point. The most ethical response to this fact, obviously, is to not have sex—and, in fact, if enough people decided to opt out of rape culture by opting completely out of erotic intimacy, that would ultimately bring rape culture crashing down. But a “sexual hunger strike to bring about the end of rape culture” is an unrealistically high ethical bar to set for most real people who are trying to survive in a world where intimacy is a human necessity.
Instead, we need to take it as a given that if you choose to have sex in the context of rape culture, especially if you choose to have sex with people who have less power than you, and especially if you choose to have kinds of sex that explicitly play with that power differential, at some point you are probably going to violate someone’s consent—if you haven’t already. We need a process for dealing with that other than abject denial. We need to develop ways of regularly acknowledging, taking accountability for, and participating in healing work a round the damage our coercive behavior causes.
This viewpoint is, frankly, dangerous.
It is true that everyone is at risk of dating a borderline or having sex with someone who only agreed because of a culture of compulsory sexuality. But not everyone is at risk of having sex with someone who has said “no”, “I don’t want to”, “not now”, “maybe later”, or any other words that people understand perfectly well to be rejections in any other context. Not everyone is at risk of having sex with someone who is pushing their hands away or otherwise indicating through gestures they don’t want sex. Not everyone is at risk of having sex with someone who is silent and unmoving but unresisting. Not everyone is at risk of having sex with someone who is unconscious, or whom they know is too intoxicated to understand where they are or what is going on, without a prior agreement that sex in such circumstances is okay.
In fact, about ninety to ninety-five percent of people manage to avoid doing those things entirely! Even most people who have done those things only do it once and thus manage about 99.99% of their sex lives not doing that. The problem of rape is mostly a problem of a small number of repeat rapists who don’t care that they’re violating others’ consent.
And I think it is dangerous to place having sex with someone who has said no, etc. in the same category as having sex with someone under the influence of compulsory sexuality (i.e. everyone). Normalization is a tremendously powerful social force. The more a behavior is viewed as normal and acceptable, the more likely it is that people will do it. If you believe everyone wears fedoras, you’re more likely to wear a fedora; if all your friends support a certain political belief, you’re more likely to support it; if you believe everyone commits rape, you’re more likely to commit rape.
Furthermore, part of what allows rapists to keep raping is what Millar calls the “social license to operate”– the fact that most rapists will experience no negative consequences to raping and there is nothing stopping them from finding victim after victim. That, in general, people tend to make excuses for rapists, to assume they’re good people who just made a mistake, to socially punish victims for coming forward. “Everyone does it” is a tremendous boon to the social license to operate, whether it comes in the frat-boy form of “a drunk girl is an opportunity” or in the radical form of “everyone who has sex in the context of rape culture violates someone’s consent at some point.”
Because they don’t, actually. Most people don’t want to rape anyone. Even most people who aren’t aware that sex with someone silent and unresisting (say) is rape would probably be freaked out by an actually totally passive partner.
I support the project of figuring out a better way for people who had consensual sex that nevertheless left their partners feeling violated to acknowledge what happened, take accountability, and participate in healing work. I support the project of figuring out a better way for rapists to stop being rapists. I do not support these being the same project.
The former group needs to figure out how to deal with their irrational guilt, to communicate better with their partner and future partners, to support their partner, and develop a healthier sexuality. The second group needs to learn that it is not acceptable to have sex with someone after they’ve said “no”. These are fundamentally different needs! The former group already knows they’re not supposed to have sex with people who have said “no”! The latter group’s guilt is totally rational and their problem is more “entitlement to others’ bodies” rather than “bad communication”! It’s different!
We need to deal better with the existence of consensual sex that is still a violation. But consent as a felt sense will not do it.
Taymon A. Beal said:
Thanks for writing this. It’s the kind of analysis that we need more of.
I know I’ve seen at least one recent article dealing with this problem (http://totalsororitymove.com/is-it-possible-that-there-is-something-in-between-consensual-sex-and-rape-and-that-it-happens-to-almost-every-girl-out-there/) that garnered a lot of attention, and not just among social justice people. (You might have seen my Tumblr post in which I expressed pleasant surprise that there wasn’t a feminist backlash against it, as far as I could tell.) I hope that this conversation continues to happen.
LikeLike
Protagoras said:
This is just the sort of discussion I missed so much when you were away from blogging. A lot of issues just are complicated, and need more careful analysis and making of distinctions and less simplification.
LikeLiked by 1 person
theLaplaceDemon said:
Thank you for writing this. I have also had one of those not-rape-but-not-okay experiences, and I often struggle to find the right words for it.
LikeLike
Not Really Anyone said:
Isn’t this effectively a semantics argument? It’s an important semantics argument, but that’s all it is. Everyone agrees that consent isn’t only saying yes, but is also something that is felt. I’m pretty damn sure that everyone would also agree that having sex with someone who hasn’t said yes, or has outright said no, is a more serious violation then somebody who had made sure the other person had explicitly consented first. but that party did not in fact feel consent.
Best situation I can think of is rape is sex without explicit consent, and we have some new word to describe sex without consent being felt. It’d be a useful idea to have around, because we’d be able to quickly put a word to the experience, allowing those who are victims to identify the problem, and those who have done the deed be able to communicate and hear problems.
LikeLiked by 1 person
multiheaded said:
Ozy, yer a saint of rational SJ. A *saint*, I’m telling you!
LikeLike
Zorgon said:
Sometimes there is nothing left but to applaud. Thank you.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ben (@deisum) said:
This is wonderful, insightful commentary on this very thorny take on the complex issue of sexual ethics.
As someone who has participated in the social kink and sex-positive scenes for upwards of ten years, I’ve long internalized the message that consensual sex was the messiah of ethical sex, and have only recently begun to examine that ideal. As a legal framework, I believe delineating criminal from non-criminal sexual conduct on the basis of consent is the best we are able to achieve, at least for now (the inadequacy of the police and judicial system not withstanding…)
However, as an ethical framework, consent (affirmative, if not enthusiastic) is a necessary component of a fulfilling and beneficial sexual interaction, but by no means a sufficient one. As you point out, sex can still be consensual but fail to be healthy and affirming for everyone involved. Furthermore, sex that feels good to everyone involved may still perpetuate or reinforce harmful behaviors or ideals, which is a whole other ethically fraught realm in which consent (of the parties directly involved) isn’t even relevant.
I believe that this inadequacy of consent in assuring a positive experience is ultimately the motivating force behind much of the theorizing about models of consent. However, my view is that ‘our’ perception of what makes sex ‘ethical’ or ‘good’ or ‘healthy’ needs to be expanded beyond just consent. We also need to develop the language to describe a sexual interaction that actively avoids harm, and what that consists of, beyond consent. Until there’s a framework to refer to these ‘better’ sexual (and non!) encounters, we’ll struggle to express these ideas to the most receptive of folks, much less to the larger community.
LikeLike
MugaSofer said:
>Consent as a felt sense has a lot of similarities to Catherine MacKinnon’s statement that “politically, I call it rape whenever a [person] has sex and feels violated,” which I’ve long found interesting and provocative. (She said woman, because radical feminists are not so great about male and nonbinary survivors.) This is not a legal standard, and in fact MacKinnon specifically says she’s not talking about it as a legal standard, but rather a standard for support of survivors, understanding people’s experiences with sexual violence, and working to end sexual violence.
I don’t *think* that’s what the word “politically” means. While this clearly *is* a good standard for understanding/supporting rape survivors, I really can’t parse that statement as referring to anything but politics.
I read it as “when determining policy, we should use harm, not law-breaking, as a metric”. Which is a *very* important point.
But I can see how someone might read it as, say, “as a political statement, I consider any [person] who participates in sex that leaves their partner feeling violated a rapist, with all that implies in our culture”.
LikeLike
Daniel Speyer said:
I think we need some more words here. There’s a reason common English distinguishes between “murder” and “kill”, and people who discuss killing a lot have even more words.
I propose reserving “rape” for acts of mens rea. While generally I don’t regard definitions as true or false, I think any definition that requires you to endorse the statement (which I don’t!) “everybody rapes and that’s ok” is a bad definition.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Daniel Speyer said:
(emphasis added)
I don’t like where this goes. Maybe your concept of “accountability” is different from mine, but as I see it, where there is accountability there is responsibility to prevent. How does that play out concretely?
A: Wanna have sex?
B: I’d love to, but I think you’d feel violated.
A: What? No I wouldn’t. I’m totally down for sex.
B: Your saying that isn’t enough, and people are very bad at predicting their own feelings.
A: And you’re better at predicting my feelings?
B: No, but I need to play it safe.
A: My sexuality is mine. It isn’t yours to control
B: This is for your own good. All consequences are my responsibility.
A: Isn’t managing my sexuality and my emotional state my responsibility?
B: No. You aren’t the sort of person who can be responsible for things.
Granted, B could be more tactful, but this is fundamentally the message. Does anyone here want to be the A half of this conversation?
LikeLiked by 3 people
Thomas said:
Daniel, each of us can refuse to be sexual with anyone else, for any reason — even a paternalistic one. If I tell you I want you to fuck me and you decline, I am not even entitled to a reason. You don’t even have to have a reason. And if you have a reason, and decide to tell me the reason, and the reason is being paternalistic about my potential future feelings, I have not one goddamn thing to complain about. Because you can turn me down for any reason, or no reason, and even a paternalistic reason. And I damned sure have turned people down for sex when I thought I had a better idea how they would feel about it than they did. In fact, as a kinkster, tops have a right to limits, and “I think that will shake you up more than you appreciate” is a perfectly sound reason to decline to do a certain scene.
LikeLike
ozymandias said:
I believe Daniel was not talking about whether you have a moral right to refuse sex when you believe your partner may regret it (which you do, because you have a moral right to refuse any sex you want to) but rather about whether you have a moral obligation to refuse sex when you believe your partner may regret it. The latter is thornier, at least to me, and I think the risk of removing people’s agency to decide to have sex that (other people think) they will regret in the morning is definitely a morally relevant consideration.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thomas said:
Ozymandias, Daniel closed by asking if anyone wanted to be the A half of the conversation. Whether we have an obligation to do as A does is the question you pose, and that’s much more difficult in theory but in practice it isn’t — that’s not what Daniel asked. He asked if anyone wanted to be the A side of the conversation. I’m saying yes. If someone says to me, “I want to do [x]” and my reaction is that that’s a trainwreck waiting to happen because they have no idea how likely they are to react poorly to it and I should not agree to it and instead should talk them out of it, then I very much do want to be the A half of that conversation, rather than be the cliff they drove over because they don’t know better. The question you asked never really gets answered because in practice, accepting that B can make their own mistakes and thinking that B has a better handle on their reactions is coextensive. I think that if people greenlight the sex, in practice they’re buying B’s assertion that they are right about what they want, as well as B’s assertion that even if they are wrong about what they want A should let them make that mistake.
LikeLike
ADifferentAnonymous said:
So this thing needs a name. I don’t have any concrete suggestions, but a preliminary question is what grammatical form(s) it will take. The following discussion will use placeholder terms for illustration.
My mental model of a feminist says that of course there should be an active verb for what the ‘perpetrator’ does–“you badsexed me.” My mental model of an MRA gets outraged by this and suggests
what the victim does should be the verb–“I badconsented”.
IMO the fact that both of these carry implicit blame makes them both terrible, especially for a couple trying to work through the problem together. I would suggest we accept the linguistic inconvenience of having no active verb at all and treat it as a phenomenon that happens to the victim: “I was softcompulsed”. And so that blame doesn’t creep back in, the preposition towards the ‘perpetrator’ should not be ‘by’: “I was softcompulsed with you,” perhaps.
I also think the ‘perpetrator’ should be called something besides the ‘perpetrator’, also to avoid implicit blame.
LikeLiked by 1 person
ADifferentAnonymous said:
Copying to toplevel where I intended to post; please delete this and the above
LikeLike
oneforward said:
Thomas, you switched the labels. The B side is the one declining. Daniel asked if you want a potential partner to reject you because they can’t take the risk that you might have regrets.
LikeLike
Daniel Speyer said:
There are circumstances under which the B approach is proper.
“I’m sorry, you’re too drunk/stoned/tired/endorphin-high to make that decision right now. If you’re still interested when your head is clear, we’ll talk.” is a totally legitimate thing to say. So is “I don’t think you know what you’re asking for. How about we start with something milder?”
These cases involve specific temporary reasons. And it’s possible for the A person to reply “I’ve only had half a glass of wine” or “I’ve done ${similar thing} and that went fine.”
The problem comes when person B regards person A as generally and intrinsically unable to run their own life. That’s not a healthy way to relate to another person.
I suppose sometimes you’ll meet people whom you really don’t regard as capable of running their own lives, and refusing sex with them is probably wise. But if you find yourself running into such people often, you should check your thinking. And if you (happen to be straight and) regard every member of the opposite sex that way, there’s definitely something wrong.
LikeLike
Thomas said:
Daniel, you’re adding an element that I think is brand new, that A thinks B is intrinsically less capable. I hadn’t even considered that, and don’t wish to. That’s a wholly different scenario. I’m only interested in addressing scenarios where the specific thing proposed by B have downside risks that A and B can each analyze differently with different information and different biases. Take breath control, and the ancient argument between Wiseman and everyone who thinks Jay bought the excuses the LA cops gave for dead black men in custody. B says, “I understand the risks perfectly well and I accept them.” A says, “I want no part of that.” I see zero disrespect for B’s autonomy.
What you’ve proposed is that A thinks that A can evaluate all risks for B better than B can. Some people are paternalistic toward others and that’s a kyriarchal problem that isn’t really specific to sex, consent or kink. Why is A differently positioned in refusing sex than, say, refusing to buy B’s very rare first edition book which is a family heirloom and which A, if A were B, would not sell except under the most dire of circumstances? In fact, I would say that because of the rule (that we all seem to accept) that anyone can refuse to be sexual with anyone else for any reason or no reason, A is on better ground refusing B sex than refusing to buy B’s rare book.
So that’s an intellectual dead end. When we’re talking about A’s refusal to be sexual in a specific way with a specific person in a specific circumstance, you have not said one thing yet that convinces me it’s particularly problematic to take A’s stand.
LikeLike
Thomas said:
I seem to have inverted by As and Bs. Sorry.
LikeLike
Anon256 said:
I think you can “take accountability” for causing a problem even if you made the best decision you could with the information available to you at the time. You have a responsibility to try to prevent an outcome where someone feels violated, but you can reasonably weigh your estimate of this risk against the likely benefits of mutually-enjoyed sex. In the (hopefully very rare) event of error you have a responsibility to try to help and support the person who felt violated if possible (it makes sense for you to share in the downside to the extent you can, since you share in the upside the rest of the time).
This is in contrast to your responsibility to heed clear non-consent, which is absolute, with failure calling for strong (negative-sum) punitive measures.
LikeLike
popjammer said:
I have been. It’s not so bad.
LikeLike
veronica d said:
I want to talk about this:
This is certainly true enough on its own, but I think it erases the way that alcohol is the weapon of choice for successful repeat rapists. From http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/predator-redux/
So there problem is not that they will not respect a no. Instead, it is because the arrange it so the women never gets a chance to even say no.
This, I believe, is the genesis of the affirmative consent model. Any model of sexual violence needs to clearly target this kind of rapist.
LikeLike
Anon256 said:
How do you think the model should deal with all the sex that happens where both parties are too drunk to consent?
LikeLiked by 1 person
ozymandias said:
veronica: Hm. I’d parsed that sentence as including both those who rape people too drunk to consent and those who rape people who are capable of consenting, aren’t consenting, and are too drunk to resist meaningfully. (Not to mention how the woman being drunk gives rapists a social license to operate.)
anon: In the rare occasion where all parties involved are too drunk to understand that sex is happening, I am perfectly happy with declaring them rape survivors with no rapist.
LikeLike
Anon256 said:
That’s probably the best answer, but it’s a bit strange because if they committed some other crime while drunk we’d consider them guilty of it. Also at the margin one could imagine it incentivizing excessive drinking (or feigned drunkenness) by potential rapists in order to shield against accusations.
LikeLiked by 2 people
ADifferentAnonymous said:
Simply excellent. True, important, and orthogonal to the ongoing tug-of-war.
Your thesis has already gone from novel to obvious-seeming. I need to get my praise in before I alieve that I’ve always known this.
LikeLike
ADifferentAnonymous said:
So this thing needs a name. I don’t have any concrete suggestions, but a preliminary question is what grammatical form(s) it will take. The following discussion will use placeholder terms for illustration.
My mental model of a feminist says that of course there should be an active verb for what the ‘perpetrator’ does–“you badsexed me.” My mental model of an MRA gets outraged by this and suggests
what the victim does should be the verb–“I badconsented”.
IMO the fact that both of these carry implicit blame makes them both terrible, especially for a couple trying to work through the problem together. I would suggest we accept the linguistic inconvenience of having no active verb at all and treat it as a phenomenon that happens to the victim: “I was softcompulsed”. And so that blame doesn’t creep back in, the preposition towards the ‘perpetrator’ should not be ‘by’: “I was softcompulsed with you,” perhaps.
I also think the ‘perpetrator’ should be called something besides the ‘perpetrator’, also to avoid implicit blame.
LikeLike
Anon256 said:
Is just saying “I felt violated” a reasonable approximation? I could imagine it being twisted to attack either side but only with some difficulty. Not sure about the term for “person whose actions made you feel violated”, or for that matter “person who felt violated”. It would be nice if we could get by without these since it’s really a property of the specific situation and not an enduring property of the people involved (especially as it’s quite possible for both parties to feel violated), but I suppose not having terms risks defaulting to “perpetrator” and “victim” which is worse.
LikeLike
Kim said:
I would be very interested in following any additional discussion on this that comes up.
I actually /really/ like using “with you” as the preposition. It acknowledges shared experience in the sense of proximity – and that that proximity was relevant. I like that.
But what I really like is that “with” can also be used to indicate a shared experience beyond just proximity, as well. The OP already established that one can be an active partner yet still feel “softcompulsed.” I think that using with also opens the door linguistically for the other person to perhaps acknowledge any softcompulsion they might have felt as well (if they did).
To put it a bit more vaguely, I’d say that using “with” strongly counters the sense of it* being a zero sum game – which I see reflected a lot in the discussions I’ve seen/read about it.
* “it” being…. consent? sex? There are a lot of things that live in close proximity to sexuality and how humans interact around it that seem to feed into this, and I haven’t teased out the individual bits. But I wanted to remark on the fact that I do hear “zero sum” language a lot when these kinds of topics come up.
LikeLike
thirdxlucky said:
Hi, this is Unquietpirate.
First, thanks for the signal boost of our post. I appreciate it and I’m glad to see this concept being discussed more broadly lately.
Second, I think it’s a bit petty that you’ve framed this post as, “I’m going to talk about consent as a felt sense just to spite Maymay, nyah nyah,” instead of, “I dislike Maymay, but I’m going to talk about consent as a felt sense anyway, because I think that’s an important conversation to have.” But whatevs.
Third, Maymay’s preferred pronouns are they/them — so yes, those are fine. Thank you.
In response to the actual content of your post, I wrote a bunch of stuff but it got really long-winded and personal, plus I wasn’t sure if my HTML formatting would transfer into your comment section, so I just posted it on my Tumblr here: http://unquietpirate.tumblr.com/post/102073446838/on-consent-as-a-felt-sense
Feel free to check it out if you’re interested, or ignore it if you’re not. It’s my preliminary, unedited articulation of a couple of things, so it might not all hang together. (As they say, “If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”)
P.S. I appreciate you acknowledging my work on this alongside Maymay’s. Even if you did just make this post to spite them. 😉
LikeLike
Pingback: Consent in a society of mind | Nurse Cthulhu Is Swimming
Pingback: Mapping the grey area of sexual experience: consent, compulsory sexuality, and sex normativity | The Asexual Agenda
Pingback: Grey Consent | epochryphal
Elizabeth said:
I appreciate this post, but I don’t really have any coherent response to it. However, I think you may have misread the numbers here, when you say:
“In fact, about ninety to ninety-five percent of people manage to avoid doing those things entirely! Even most people who have done those things only do it once and thus manage about 99.99% of their sex lives not doing that. The problem of rape is mostly a problem of a small number of repeat rapists who don’t care that they’re violating others’ consent.”
Specifically, saying that “most people who have done these things only do it once.” (I would change “have done” to “have admitted doing” there.) The post you linked to says:
Lisak & Miller: 120 self-reported rapists of whom 44 reported only one assault. Thus, only 36% of rapists who identified themselves as such reported one assault. 63% (most) were repeat offenders.
McWhorter: 144 self-reported rapists of whom 48 reported only one assault. Thus, only 29% of rapists who identified themselves as such reported one assault. 71% (most) were repeat offenders.
It’s worth noting that these are only those who admitted their actions, but obviously we don’t have data on undetected rapists who don’t admit it, so…
LikeLike
armorsmith42 said:
Thank you for writing this. I read that essay last night and started kinda freaking out about not ever being able to avoid being a rapist except celibacy and even then I’ve already had sex.
LikeLike
Pingback: Regarding consent in nightclubs
Pingback: The felt sense model of consent
Pingback: Mapping the grey area of sexual experience: consent, compulsory sexuality, and sex normativity – Concept Awesome
Pingback: Consent as a felt sense | The Asexual Agenda