Fantasies Are Okay

Tags

noncon cw, ozy blog post, sex positivity

[This post is a request made by Cliff Pervocracy. One person who backs me on Patreon at the $5 level or above will be randomly selected each month to pick a topic for a post or story I write.]
[content warning: murder fantasies, rape fantasies]

Is it okay to fantasize about killing your boss?

It’s definitely not okay to start researching how to get a gun license and tracking your boss’s schedule to find out when he’ll be alone. That is not fantasizing but, in fact, what is technically called “planning”.

It’s probably not okay to deep in your heart of hearts want to kill your boss, to think it would be a very good thing if he were dead and very satisfying to watch his blood spurt over your hands, and if you had a ring of invisibility you would stab him and watch him die. That is also not fantasizing; it is instead “desiring”. It is not as bad as actually planning to kill your boss, but it’s still not a very good state of affairs, and you should probably think about treating your burnout or moving to a different office.

But what if you just get chewed out by your boss, and as you sit down at your desk you think “what if I stabbed him with that pretentious gold pen he has on his desk. man, if only”– but if anybody offered you the opportunity, you’d turn it down? I mean, he has kids, and he’s a pretty reasonable guy all things considered even if he was unfair today. You wouldn’t actually want to kill him.

That’s fine, it’s normal, and everyone does it.

Maybe not about bosses in particular. Maybe it’s your ex-boyfriend, or your abusive mom, or that asshole who doesn’t know how to drive. Maybe you’re a free-speech absolutist who kind of wishes Nazis would get punched in the face. Maybe you’re not particularly prone to the sin of wrath– some people aren’t– and instead you fantasize about laying in bed all day (even though in reality that’s kind of boring) or eating 24 donuts (even though that would make you sick) or having your neighbor’s fancy car (even though you know it would stop being attractive as soon as you actually own one).

The thing about fantasies is that, in fantasies, you usually only focus on the desirable part and abstract away the parts that make the reality horrifying. You think about the good parts of murdering your boss: you don’t have to put up with that asshole anymore, and you would wreak vengeance for the injustice done you. You don’t think about the grief of your boss’s family, or your husband sobbing as visitor hours at the prison end and he won’t be able to see you for another week, or your tremendous guilt at violating your moral beliefs about murder, or the fact that there’d be a human life, a little world, forever gone.

Or think about the zombie apocalypse. Lots of people enjoy fantasizing about the zombie apocalypse. Some people like thinking about shooting zombies with their arsenals of weaponry, personally I like thinking about the details of crop rotation, whatever floats your boat. But notably I have never met anyone whose fantasies include “everyone I know and love would be dead.” Or “I would suffer crippling PTSD.” Or “no one would ever make a Star Wars movie again.” Or “I would probably not be a stone-cold badass, actually, I would probably get chewed on by a zombie while I was taking a shit and die thirty minutes into the apocalypse.”

This is why fantasies about the zombie apocalypse are cool, and the actual zombie apocalypse would be terrible.

But of course people don’t usually feel guilt about their fantasies about the zombie apocalypse or boss murder. No, this guilt is usually reserved for sexual fantasies.

All of the same arguments apply. There are lots of happily monogamously married women who sometimes fantasize about fucking a cute stranger they pass on the street. These fantasies notably do not include “my wife, whom I love more than life, feels crushed and betrayed that I cheated on her”, or “I broke my promise, which goes against everything I hold dear”, or “sex with random strangers is often really bad”, or “the random stranger might have an STI or get me pregnant or assault me”, or “I don’t actually want sex with strangers, it takes me some time to get comfortable with someone before I want to have sex with them”. It is totally consistent to have sexual fantasies about cheating and not actually want to cheat.

And similarly for other sorts of sexual fantasies. I sometimes see the argument that rape fantasies are actually ravishment fantasies, because in many such fantasies the victim actually wants sex. This argument has always seemed problematic to me (in real life, if someone says “no” but is aroused by the sex anyway, it’s still rape) and anyway I don’t know about you but I definitely don’t only have fantasies about attractive men having sex with women who say “no” but are secretly enthusiastic. My rape fantasies have actual rape in them.

But having a rape fantasy doesn’t mean you actually want to rape anyone or be raped, any more than making a zombie plan means you want all your friends to die. It is totally consistent to be sexually aroused by the thought of raping someone and to actually have moral objections to causing people years of emotional trauma and pain, such that actual rape is repulsive to you.

There are two special circumstances I want to talk about. First, sometimes having fantasies makes you want to do the thing more than you would otherwise. For instance, some recovering alcoholics find fantasizing about beer makes them want to drink, and some people who cheat on their partners find that sexual fantasies about people other than their spouses make them want to cheat. It makes sense that that would happen: fantasizing makes the good parts more salient than the bad parts. In that case, it can be helpful to explicitly remember the bad aspects. For instance, it’s fun to drink and makes you feel less anxious, and also last time you went on a bender you lost your job. Sex with the cute girl would feel really good, and it would break your wife’s heart.

Second, sometimes people don’t want to have close relationships with people who have certain fantasies. I think there’s a certain level of emotional intimacy required before that’s a reasonable request: your boss doesn’t get to request that you don’t have murder fantasies about him, no matter how much he’d like it. But it’s okay for someone to prefer that their romantic partner not have sexual fantasies about anyone else or that their friend not fantasize about killing them when they’re pissed off. If you have those fantasies anyway, you can try to stop (if that’s something that’s pretty easy for you to do, or if the relationship is worth it), or you can choose to end the relationship.

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On Peter Singer, Anna Stubblefield, and Rape

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post, rape tw

[content warning: ableism, rape apologism, bestiality, rape of children]

Anna Stubblefield has succeeded at the dubious achievement of simultaneously being a rapist three different ways at the same time.

First, Stubblefield used facilitated communication, a discredited way of communicating with nonverbal disabled people, to speak with DJ. Assuming for the sake of argument that facilitated communication works, she was literally his only means of communicating with the outside world; DJ did not successfully use facilitated communication with his family. His ability to get a GED, read books, even say what he wanted for dinner, was entirely dependent on her continued support. This creates a power imbalance in which sex cannot happen ethically. If she had been responsible, she would have said “I have feelings for you too, but we can’t explore them until you have another long-term facilitator who’s able to work with you.” (She would have also checked his desire for sex with her with another, naive facilitator, as is done when a disabled person who uses facilitated communication accuses someone of sexual abuse.)

Of course, facilitated communication does not work; according to the best scientific evidence, facilitated communication works something like a Oujia board, and what you get out of it is what the facilitator put in. So she raped him in a second fashion, by having sex with a nonverbal disabled person without taking the appropriate measures to ensure that he fully consented, instead relying on a pseudoscientific communication technique.

The third way that Stubblefield raped DJ is by ignoring his nonverbal communication: when she kissed him, he sat up, left the bed, and scooted out of the room. She then proceeded to perform oral sex on him. While she believed this was okay because his facilitated communication said he consented, given that facilitated communication does not work, our only means of understanding his preferences implies he did not want this.

Peter Singer has written a controversial editorial about Stubblefield’s case. Several parts of this editorial have been condemned throughout the effective altruist community: for instance, Singer’s defense of the pseudoscientific facilitated communication technique and his failure to mention either the first or the third ways in which Stubblefield raped DJ. However, one passage from his editorial has led to a great deal of argumentation:

A central issue in the trial was whether D.J. is profoundly cognitively impaired, as the prosecution contended and the court seemed to accept, or is competent cognitively but unable to communicate his thoughts without highly skilled assistance, as the defense contended. If we assume that he is profoundly cognitively impaired, we should concede that he cannot understand the normal significance of sexual relations between persons or the meaning and significance of sexual violation. These are, after all, difficult to articulate even for persons of normal cognitive capacity. In that case, he is incapable of giving or withholding informed consent to sexual relations; indeed, he may lack the concept of consent altogether.

This does not exclude the possibility that he was wronged by Stubblefield, but it makes it less clear what the nature of the wrong might be. It seems reasonable to assume that the experience was pleasurable to him; for even if he is cognitively impaired, he was capable of struggling to resist, and, for reasons we will note shortly, it is implausible to suppose that Stubblefield forcibly subdued him. On the assumption that he is profoundly cognitively impaired, therefore, it seems that if Stubblefield wronged or harmed him, it must have been in a way that he is incapable of understanding and that affected his experience only pleasurably.

This is not exactly what one would call the most lucidly written passage. Several people I respect, including Kelsey and Scott Alexander, have interpreted it differently than I do; they believe the passage says that it is theoretically possible for disabled people who can’t use language to consent to sex. I certainly hope that Singer was trying to say that and failing miserably, and I hope that he edits the article to clarify given the controversy he has engendered.

However, in the overall context of Singer’s work, I believe that a more reasonable and charitable (in that it accurately reflects Singer’s beliefs) interpretation is that Singer believes there is nothing wrong with having sex with a disabled person who can’t use language, regardless of their consent, as long as violence is not used.

Peter Singer regularly compares severely disabled people to animals; one of his most commonly used arguments in favor of animal welfare is that one would not torture a severely disabled person with the cognitive capacities of a chicken, and therefore one should not torture a chicken. He has repeatedly spoken out against speciesism, the belief that one should treat beings of equivalent capacities differently based on their species. Therefore, given that he believes that many non-language-using disabled people have similar capacities to animals, and that it is unethical to treat beings of similar capacities differently based on species, we can use his beliefs about bestiality to enlighten us about what this passage means.

Singer has written in the past about bestiality. He has explicitly outlined forms of bestiality he considers unacceptable:

Soyka’s suggestion indicates one good reason why some of the acts described in Dekkers book are clearly wrong, and should remain crimes. Some men use hens as a sexual object, inserting their penis into the cloaca, an all-purpose channel for wastes and for the passage of the egg. This is usually fatal to the hen, and in some cases she will be deliberately decapitated just before ejaculation in order to intensify the convulsions of its sphincter. This is cruelty, clear and simple. (But is it worse for the hen than living for a year or more crowded with four or five other hens in barren wire cage so small that they can never stretch their wings, and then being stuffed into crates to be taken to the slaughterhouse, strung upside down on a conveyor belt and killed? If not, then it is no worse than what egg producers do to their hens all the time.)

But sex with animals does not always involve cruelty. Who has not been at a social occasion disrupted by the household dog gripping the legs of a visitor and vigorously rubbing its penis against them? The host usually discourages such activities, but in private not everyone objects to being used by her or his dog in this way, and occasionally mutually satisfying activities may develop. Soyka would presumably have thought this within the range of human sexual variety.

This suggests that Singer may believe that bestiality is morally okay as long as it is mutually satisfying, and that all cases in which the animal initiates are certainly mutually satisfying. However, there is an intermediate case: the case in which the animal is not particularly interested in sex, but is having sex for some other reason. Singer writes:

[Rural men] may also take advantage of the sucking reflex of calves to get them to do a blowjob…

For three-quarters of the women who told Kinsey that they had had sexual contact with an animal, the animal involved was a dog, and actual sexual intercourse was rare. More commonly the woman limited themselves to touching and masturbating the animal, or having their genitals licked by it.

In this case, the animal does not desire sex. The calves are sucking as a reflex action; the dogs are presumably not licking human genitals out of a passionate desire to perform cunnilingus. (My understanding is that people who practice bestiality often put a food, such as peanut butter, on their genitals to induce the dog to lick them.) Singer does not appear to have clarified whether he considers this form of sex to be acceptable. However, given the fact that he mentions it as evidence that bestiality is quite common and does not condemn it, it seems to me that the correct way of interpreting Singer’s belief is that this too is acceptable. In short, it appears that Singer’s view is that it is always okay to have sex with an animal as long as the sex does not involve injury or pain to the animal, particularly if the animal experiences something that is prima facie rewarding (as sucking is to calves and food is to dogs).

Extending this to DJ’s case, I believe that Singer’s passage above means that as long as no injury or pain was done to DJ, and DJ experiences something that is prima facie rewarding (as oral sex is to humans), then sex with him is ethical.

Further evidence is that this explains an otherwise puzzling omission on Singer’s part. Singer says that “[DJ] was capable of struggling to resist, and, for reasons we will note shortly, it is implausible to suppose that Stubblefield forcibly subdued him.” But DJ did, in fact, resist: he attempted to leave. It’s possible that Singer is ignorant of this basic fact of the case. However, Singer himself says he has “stud[ied] the evidence advanced by Stubblefield’s attorney in support of her appeal.” When I searched Google for “anna stubblefield” on incognito mode, the above article was the second result. (The first was Singer’s own.) This is readily available information for anyone who wishes to read about the Stubblefield case. Unless we’re assuming that Singer is both a liar and grossly negligent, we should assume that he is aware of these publicly available facts of the case.

Therefore, the most logical conclusion is that Peter Singer does not consider DJ’s attempt to leave to be a sign of resistance. The idea that, in general, trying to leave isn’t a revocation of consent to sex is absurd rape apologism and I would not slander Singer by claiming he believed it. However, if Singer believes that violence or pain is what makes sex with DJ unethical, then it makes sense for him to point out that there wasn’t any violence or pain. In this context, Singer’s statement makes perfect sense.

The bestiality case illustrates this clearly. One can imagine a situation where you intend to have a calf give you a blowjob, the calf wanders off, you wait a bit for it to stay still, and then you have it give you a blowjob. It seems to me that if bestiality is unethical, this situation is unethical, and if bestiality is ethical, this situation is ethical.

The difference is that calves do not have an abstract, conceptual understanding of sex, because calves do not have an abstract, conceptual understanding of much of anything. A calf is not thinking “I have a consistent preference over time to not have that guy’s penis in my mouth and I’m going to try to communicate this preference through walking out the barn door. Oh, okay, it looks like he’s not going to give in, so I’m going to lie back and think of England.” A calf is thinking “I want to go investigate that sunbeam. Ooh! A thing to suck on!”

However, while I’m sympathetic to this model when we’re talking about sex with calves, I am very unsympathetic when we’re talking about sex with non-language-using humans. Calves have known capacities; severely disabled humans do not. To pick a very clear example: it is vanishingly unlikely that calves are capable of receptive and expressive language, with vocabularies of hundreds of thousands of words, and the only reason they’re not writing poetry to rival William Shakespeare’s is that their vocal cords aren’t shaped right. Receptive and expressive language are complex capacities and there would be absolutely no reason for them to evolve in a species without vocal cords that can produce speech.

Conversely, nearly all humans have receptive and expressive language capacities. We know that some humans retain receptive and expressive language, even if they have lost the ability to speak. For instance, many humans with cerebral palsy have difficulty controlling their mouth muscles, so they can’t speak, but they can communicate with augmentative and auxiliary communication technology. Some autistic humans are intermittently incapable of speech under stress. Therefore, a non-language-using human may lack the capacity to use language altogether, or they may understand language but have such large difficulties using it that (unlike in the case of many humans with cerebral palsy or autism) we can’t tell that they have that capacity.

Of course, language use is not a morally relevant capacity. But the same thing does apply to morally relevant capacities. How are you supposed to tell whether a person who can’t use language understands the normal significance of sexual relations between persons or the meaning and significance of sexual violation? I mean, it’s not like you can ask him.

We don’t even have a good sense of the probabilities here. It could be that every non-language-using disabled person has the cognitive abilities of a calf. It could be that every single one of them understands sexual violation. We have no way of distinguishing these two worlds.

I note that Peter Singer agrees with this argument. Inexplicably, he seems to believe that DJ can have the ability to understand sexual violation if and only if facilitated communication works as a way of communicating with him. Since presumably DJ had those capacities (if he does) before he ever met a facilitator, he could also presumably have those capacities even if he cannot communicate them.

Furthermore, it does not seem like the ability to be sexually traumatized is as complicated as all that. One-year-olds in general have a very poor understanding of consent, as one can see by their tendency to hit other toddlers to hear the interesting noises the other toddler makes, but I would expect that fucking a one-year-old would cause them no small amount of emotional harm both in the short and the long run. It certainly seems like a bad idea to decriminalize sex with toddlers on the grounds that they are incapable of giving or withholding consent.

The safest course, I believe, is to assume that DJ is a person (albeit a person with certain diminished capacities). As a person, he is capable of being sexually traumatized. This does not necessarily mean he should be consigned to celibacy. I personally agree with Scott’s proposal:

I wish there were a system in place to protect disabled people from sexual abuse while not banning all sexuality entirely. If you want to do surgery on a disabled person who can’t consent, lots of doctors and lawyers and friends and family get together and do some legal stuff and try to elicit information from the patient as best they can and eventually come to a conclusion. The result isn’t perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better than either “no one can ever operate on a disabled person” or “any surgeon who wants can grab a disabled person off the street and do whatever operation they feel like”. If there were some process like this for sex, and they decided that DJ wanted to have sex with Anna, then (again ignoring the power dynamics issue) I think this would be better than either banning him from all sex forever, or letting her have sex with whoever she wants as long as she can make up convincing enough pseudoscience.

Notably, this does seem to not have happened here even in an unofficial way, as one can tell by the fact that the family’s response to Anna revealing that she had sex with DJ was not “woohoo, finally” but “what the FUCK?” and trying to get her to go to jail for twelve years. Which is the second reason that I’ve claimed she’s a rapist.

(The fact that Peter Singer did not say something like “while good consent practices were not used in this case and Stubblefield is a rapist, I want to be clear that it is possible for a neurotypical person to have enjoyable and enriching sex with a non-language-using person if proper care is taken to ensure that they consent” seems to me to be further evidence that my claim about what Singer means is right and he in fact thinks that Stubblefield’s actual behavior is morally acceptable.)

Finally, I’d like to address the issue of abstracting away specific details of the case to talk about underlying philosophical issues. Clearly, it should be acceptable to talk about under what circumstances it is okay for non-language-using people to have sex; clearly, the routine desexualization of intellectually and developmentally disabled people is a grave harm to them.

However, let’s imagine that Peter Singer had instead written an article entitled Who Is The Victim In The Brock Turner Case? In this article, in addition to using pseudoscience to claim that Brock Turner’s victim actually consented, Singer writes that it’s a mistake to assume that sex with unconscious people is unethical just because they can’t verbally revoke consent.

Of course, it is possible to ethically have sex with unconscious people. Many couples enjoy waking each other up with sex. It is very silly for some sex-positive feminists to criticize it for lack of affirmative consent. But it seems to me that making this argument in the context of, you know, an actual rape victim is absurdly offensive and insensitive. Doing so in an article called Who Is The Victim In The Brock Turner Case? in which you argue for clemency for Brock Turner leads one to the conclusion that you’re not just abstractly considering important issues but, in fact, arguing that the particular rape which actually happened is morally unobjectionable and should not be punished.

And it seems to me to be equally objectionable to argue against protests of Who Is The Victim In The Brock Turner Case? by pointing out that it’s harmful to say that waking people up with a blowjob is rape and then saying it’s a shame that Singer didn’t do his homework about the details of the case, whereupon he would realize that Brock Turner did not in fact finger his girlfriend with her previous consent with the intent of allowing her to wake up pleasantly. Brock Turner’s case is clearly and obviously not the same thing as waking up your partner by fingering them, and it is offensive, morally wrong, and worst of all extremely unenlightening to discuss them in the same place.

On The Baby It’s Cold Outside Discourse

Tags

christmas, ozy blog post, rape tw

[content warning: rape]

It’s the Christmas season. Trees and nativity scenes are going up in houses. Presents are being wrapped. People are watching traditional Christmas movies like Die Hard. And feminists everywhere are practicing our traditional wanky discourse about Baby It’s Cold Outside.

I think it is fucked to try to get people not to listen to Baby It’s Cold Outside. I personally enjoy listening to the Chris Colfer/Darren Criss version, as well as many other songs about behavior I don’t endorse in real life. It is okay for people to enjoy things! At best, I’d suggest that it’s probably inappropriate to play Baby It’s Cold Outside in stores, because rape-culture songs really ought to be opt-in, but there are really many, many more important feminist issues than enthusiastically consenting individuals choosing to listen to Baby It’s Cold Outside of their own free will.

On the other hand, I have also seen people explaining that Baby It’s Cold Outside is not really a rape-culture song. You see– they argue– at the time Baby It’s Cold Outside was written, women couldn’t really say ‘yes’ to sex, because that would mean she wasn’t a good girl; they had to reject men’s advances whether they wanted to or not. So the Mouse is saying token ‘nos’ that she doesn’t expect the man to listen to, and the Wolf is offering her lots of excuses she can tell people. So the song is about her exercising her sexual agency in a culture that didn’t want her to! Feminism!

The problem with this interpretation is that most people– in the early twentieth century and today– don’t say “no! Stop! I don’t want this!” They use soft nos. Think about the last time you turned down something you didn’t want (nonsexually). You might say “this evening has been very nice, but I really must go.” Or “I have to leave, my parents will worry.” Or “I really ought to say no.” For most people who aren’t impaired in social skills, these sentences are still easily parsable as a refusal. Even in ask culture, refusals tend to be fairly soft: we probably wouldn’t say we’d love to do something that we wouldn’t, but we might say “I’m sorry, I just don’t have time.”

The Wolf is blatantly ignoring the Mouse’s soft nos. When a person pushes another person’s boundaries, it’s common for the other person to give in, even if they don’t want to. In this situation, the Mouse is alone with the Wolf. He is probably significantly physically stronger than her. She’s strongly implied to be more innocent than him. If he does hurt her, the general social opinion will be that she asked for it because she was alone with a man. In this situation, a lot of people would give in and do whatever the Wolf says.

So essentially this is a situation where it is very difficult to tell apart a person who’s saying “no” to sex from a person who’s saying “yes” to sex. The technical word for this is “rape culture.”

Now, a lot of people are pretty good at reading other people’s body language and tone of voice. It’s likely that the Wolf actually cares about whether the Mouse wants to be there, and if she sounded scared would help her into her coat and take her home. But that’s dependent on the Wolf’s ability to read body language: if he misreads the Mouse’s signals, he would coerce her into sex.

If the Wolf is a little less scrupulous, the difficulty of distinguishing “yes” and “no” offers him a way to salve his conscience. After all– he might think– women always say “no” when they mean “yes”, so there’s no harm in convincing or even forcing a woman who says “no”. With a little bit of self-deception, he can convince himself that he didn’t notice the signs of her fear, or that those signs were actually eagerness. That means he’s much more likely to commit rape.

Even if the Wolf doesn’t care about whether or not he’s committing rape, his friends might. In that case, “yes” sounding like “no” gives him a way to justify his behavior to others: after all, women always say “no” when they mean “yes”, and she went up to his apartment and took his drinks and didn’t leave, so she definitely wanted it. Many people are not consciously aware of the small signs of anticipation or happiness that they notice in people they’re flirting with; it’d be all too easy for a rapist Wolf to describe his behavior in a way that sounds like what everyone else is doing.

It’s a much better system to assume that when a person says “no” to sex– including soft nos– that they probably actually mean “no” and it is not a good idea to attempt to repeatedly convince them. This system offers no plausible deniability to rapists, either to themselves or to others. And it minimizes risk that someone will misread another person’s signals when by “no” they actually did mean “no”.

In conclusion: depending on how the song is played, it’s very possible the Mouse consented. However, Baby It’s Cold Outside is still a product of a rape culture.

Why Everyone Is Irrational About Victim-Blaming and Rape

Tags

ozy blog post, rape tw

The nice thing about helpful advice, in general, is that you can refuse to take it.

Consider the case of the helpful person who says to me “Ozy, if you ride in a car, you’re significantly increasing your chance of dying in a car accident. You should only take buses.” I would respond with “thank you, but I don’t want to spend hours of my life waiting for the perennially late bus to arrive; I will take a car.” No one finds this a strange conversation.

Or consider the person who observes me leaving my bike unlocked. “If you leave your bike unlocked, it might get stolen!” they say. “Yeah, I know,” I say, “but the bike lock hasn’t come from Amazon yet, and I need to get dinner.” Again, this is not considered a strange conversation.

Now, imagine the case of the person who helpfully informs me that walking around alone late at night in the sort of semi-gentrified neighborhood I tend to live in increases my risk of getting raped. I reply, “Yes, I know, but I enjoy the peaceful feeling I get when I walk alone late at night when the stars are shining and the world is quiet. So even though it increases my risk of getting raped, I am going to continue to take my long walks.”

Or imagine someone who isn’t me having a conversation with a friend about the risks of getting wasted in public. The friend says, “you know, if you get wasted, you might get raped.” Imagine if that person replies “I’ve thought about it, and actually I’ve decided I care more about being able to get wasted sometimes than I do about getting raped.”

If you are like most people I’ve talked to, the latter two conversations sound really weird. Those people sound careless, like they’re taking pointless risks with their safety, like they fail to understand how horrible rape is, and it is quite unlikely that their friend will go “yeah, that makes sense” instead of “but you might get raped when you walk around late at night!” Rape risk is just not the sort of thing you make tradeoffs about.

Note that this has absolutely nothing to do with how objectively bad the consequences are. Most people agree that being a rape survivor is less bad that being dead (otherwise, rape survivor euthanasia would be a much more popular program than it actually is); nevertheless, the risk assessment is done much more sensibly for car accidents than it is for being raped.

What this means is that saying “this thing increases a woman’s risk of getting raped” essentially means “no woman should ever do this thing ever again, no matter how good a reason they have for doing it.”

Furthermore, for things that are not rape, how much you get condemned for doing something tracks pretty well with how important it is to the average person to do that thing. For most people, leaving their bikes or houses unlocked is not particularly important, and so you get criticized pretty hard for leaving your bike unlocked; however, for most people, riding in a car is a pretty important part of their lifestyle, and so you don’t really get criticized for riding in a car if you have a car accident.

This is, incidentally, why “I don’t walk around in bad neighborhoods late at night waving my wallet stuffed full of cash around!” is a terrible analogy. Most people have no reason to walk around in bad neighborhoods late at night waving around a wallet stuffed full of cash, while many people do have perfectly good reasons for going on late-night walks.

For rape, how much you get criticized for doing something does not necessarily track with how much it interferes with your life. In a study of which rape prevention tips are the most common, several were things that wouldn’t interfere too much in the life of an ordinary person (“communicate sexual limits”, “leave unsafe or uncomfortable situations”, “lock your doors”). However, many would limit the lives of the average person: “be aware of surroundings” (whoops, so much for playing Pokemon Go or listening to podcasts while you walk home), “avoid secluded areas”, “walk in well-traveled areas”, and “avoid being alone.”

(There is also the separate issue that, due to the undercounting of male victims, this advice is provided almost solely to women, and therefore circumscribes women’s lives while leaving men’s untouched. Men may very well be as likely to be raped as women, and are certainly as likely to experience violence at the hands of men, so there is no reason to direct this advice solely to women. Everyone must avoid secluded areas!)

So let’s assume that you’re an average introvert for whom “avoid being alone” is advice about as good as “consider doing surgery without anesthetic on your own foot.” In what way can you respond to this advice?

Well, for rape, you can’t say “I value being alone and thus am willing to take the increased risk of getting raped.” Indeed, the thought might very well be unthinkable. Rape is something you’re not used to thinking of in terms of acceptable risk and reasonable tradeoffs; that’s utterly taboo. Deciding to increase your risk of being raped is just not a thing people do. But, naturally, you also have no desire to be around two or more people every day for the rest of your life. You can’t say “I want to make this particular tradeoff,” and you certainly can’t say “I am part of a culture in which it is unacceptable to say I want to make this particular tradeoff”; like a lot of reasoning, avoiding cultural taboos happens on a subdeliberate level and you don’t have access to exactly what your brain is doing.

So what do you say? “Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.”

Which is usually cunningly disguised as the phrases “don’t blame victims” and “teach men not to rape.”

Which seems super-offputting to people who just want to give useful safety advice. Of course you agree that people of all genders shouldn’t rape, and of course you agree that it is insanely douchey to tell a rape survivor that they should have stayed sober, and so you don’t see how those topics have any relevance to the thing you’re saying. And some people seem to imply that no one should ever talk about reducing one’s risk of rape– which is an attitude we don’t have about any other issue.

Well, here’s the problem: You functionally cannot have a discussion of sensible risk management if other people can’t respond with “having thought about it, I am totally comfy running this particular risk”, and particularly if the subject is so taboo that they can’t respond with “fuck you, I get to make risk tradeoffs that make sense to me.” If hopping on one foot reducing your risk of rape means that all women everywhere are going to be hopping on one foot next week, then women are going to do some hella fallacious reasoning about why they shouldn’t have to hop on one foot.

If you want to be able to have sensible conversations on avoiding rape, start by making rape risk something it’s acceptable to make tradeoffs about. Doing it the other way around won’t work.

Thoughts On Victim-Blaming Rape Survivors

Tags

ozy blog post, rape tw

A lot of people say “why can’t we criticize rape victims’ behavior? I mean, I agree that no one should commit rape; it’s a horrible crime. But you have to admit that there are some things that can increase your risk of being raped.”

I certainly agree.

For instance, 27% of perpetrators of rape are a spouse or romantic partner– a statistic that is particularly startling given that most people only have one spouse or romantic partner at a time, while they generally have several relatives, friends, acquaintances, and strangers they see in passing. Of the people you interact with in your day to day life, your spouse or romantic partner is by far the most likely to rape you. And no wonder! Most people regularly put themselves in a vulnerable position around their spouses and romantic partners: they sleep next to them, spend time around them naked and unarmed, and even have sex with them.

And it’s easy enough to avoid the risk, isn’t it? You have essentially complete control over whether you have a romantic partner. All you have to do is be celibate and not have any romantic relationships; to be on the safe side, you should probably also avoid platonic primary relationships, because most of the being-in-a-vulnerable-position-around-others concerns still apply, even though those are rare enough that they don’t show up in the data. Surely that’s a tiny price to pay for a reduction in your risk of getting raped, right?

(And there are other benefits! Current research suggests that it is very uncommon to be a victim of intimate partner violence if you don’t have an intimate partner.)

And, hey, how come these helpful people never talk about men? If you include men who are forced to penetrate women, year-to-year, men are as likely to be raped as women. Therefore, no man should ever get drunk or high unless he’s alone in a locked room, because a woman might rape him while he’s intoxicated. We should probably close down bars altogether. Or maybe they should be gender-segregated? We can have a heterosexual female bar and a heterosexual male bar, all flirting strictly prohibited. (Sorry, LGB people, you’re out of luck. It’s locked rooms for you guys.)

That doesn’t make any goddamn sense? I agree! For a lot of people, a primary relationship is one of the most fundamental sources of strength and happiness in their life, and sex and romance are really fun for most people. It’s smart to take reasonable precautions– don’t fuck people who violate small boundaries because they might violate big ones– but ultimately you just have to accept that dating people does increase your risk of being raped, and that you’ll take a small increase in your chance of being raped in exchange for not coming home to an empty twin bed for the rest of your life. Similarly, many men enjoy getting drunk with their friends; they don’t want to decrease their risk of getting raped at the cost of all their drunken half-remembered camaraderie.

The same thing is true of any other behavior people criticize in rape victims. I occasionally walk alone at night, because I did the cost-benefit analysis and decided that the low risk of being raped by a stranger on a street corner was outweighed by being able to get snacks at 2 am when I want them. Other people get drunk in public because, for them, the risk of being raped when drunk is outweighed by the enjoyment of getting drunk at bars.

(You might argue that perhaps these people are making an incorrect tradeoff. But in my experience there is not exactly an absence of the message that rape sucks really hard and you are more likely to be raped if you are drunk; I suspect all women who go out drinking are fully informed of the risks.)

This is, I think, a taboo tradeoff. Rape is the Worst Thing In The World. You’re not supposed to make reasonable cost-benefit analyses about the Worst Thing In The World and decide what is an acceptable risk to run. There is no such thing as an acceptable risk of the Worst Thing In The World! Can’t you read? It’s the Worst Thing In The World!

So here’s the corollary: If a person takes a calculated risk, and they get the bad outcome, they didn’t do anything wrong– even from a prudential perspective. If I offer to give you a thousand dollars if the coin comes up heads if you give me fifty dollars if the coin comes up tails, and it came up tails, this does not magically make the bet a bad bet. If I die in a car crash, that does not magically make my decision to ride in a car instead of taking a bus everywhere a bad decision, even though buses are safer. And if I decide that I really like partying and I’m willing to take a risk of being raped, and then I am raped, it does not magically make my decision a bad decision.

(The thought that it does is called hindsight bias, by the way.)

The rape victim did not make an unwise decision; they made a wise decision that, unfortunately, due to circumstances outside their control, turned out poorly. They are not at fault and should not change their behavior. The only person in this situation who ought to change their behavior is the rapist, on account of they violently attacked someone.

Do Rapists Believe All Men Are Rapists?

Tags

ozy blog post, rape tw

Do rapists believe all men are rapists?

I’ve seen this claim around the feminist blogosphere. It’s perhaps expressed most powerfully in this comment by Time-Machine:

A lot of people accuse feminists of thinking that all men are rapists. That’s not true. But do you know who think all men are rapists?

Rapists do.

They really do. In psychological study, the profiling, the studies, it comes out again and again.

Virtually all rapists genuinely believe that all men rape, and other men just keep it hushed up better. And more, these people who really are rapists are constantly reaffirmed in their belief about the rest of mankind being rapists like them by things like rape jokes, that dismiss and normalize the idea of rape.

If one in twenty guys (or more) is a real and true rapist, and you have any amount of social activity with other guys like yourself, then it is almost a statistical certainty that one time hanging out with friends and their friends, playing Halo with a bunch of guys online, in a WoW guild, in a pick-up game of basketball, at a bar, or elsewhere, you were talking to a rapist. Not your fault. You can’t tell a rapist apart any better than anyone else can. It’s not like they announce themselves.

But, here’s the thing. It’s very likely that in some of these interactions with these guys, at some point or another, someone told a rape joke. You, decent guy that you are, understood that they didn’t mean it, and it was just a joke. And so you laughed…

That rapist who was in the group with you, that rapist thought that you were on his side. That rapist knew that you were a rapist like him. And he felt validated, and he felt he was among his comrades.

This comment is missing a citation. Which is fine; it is powerfully written, and I don’t cite all my claims in blog comments either. Unfortunately, when I look for “psychological study, the profiling, the studies”… I don’t find it.

First, I looked for people making a similar claim who actually did cite their sources. Van Badham, writing for Comment is Free, links to the following site, which shows a distressingly high rate of acceptance of rape myths in the general population. The general population is, you know, mostly not rapists. In fact, the rhetorical strength of Time-Machine’s point depends on the general population not thinking rape is okay. Furthermore, the book they’re citing was published in 1991, which means it probably mostly relies on research from the 1980s. The sexual assault rate has fallen by more than fifty percent since 1993. If one is arguing that rape myth acceptance leads to increased rape, one probably shouldn’t use data on the rate of rape myth acceptance from before the extremely large drop in the rate of rape. Unfortunately, I cannot find the source itself online for a more thorough critique.

So let’s look at Google Scholar. Feild finds that there is no difference between rapists and the general population about how normal rape is. However, this study is also from 1978. Maybe the general population’s belief that rape is very normal dropped in the past forty years, leaving rapists the lone population that considers this normal behavior?

Tieger, however, finds that men who rate themselves as likely to commit rape if they were not caught are more likely to believe that rape is normal and acceptable. I am worried, however, by the lack of apparent controls for social desirability bias; is it possible that some men are simply more likely to admit to stigmatized traits on surveys? Malamuth finds similar results but has a single, aggregated ‘rape myth acceptance’ variable, which does not allow us to figure out whether the correlation is primarily driven by e.g. rapists believing that women ask for it.

Mostly, what I’m seeing is a fat lot of nothing. It doesn’t look like this is a subject that is commonly explored at all– at least using the keywords I’m searching.

In short, I must say that I cannot find the profiling and psychological studies that this blog comment claims exist, and thus provisionally– while it certainly seems plausible that rapists generally believe everyone rapes– I do not accept it as fact.

Noncon Porn Taught Me About Rape

Tags

noncon cw, ozy blog post, rape tw

When I was a young fan, I remember reading a bunch of posts that said something like this: “When you write fanfic, warn for rape if you’re treating the subject seriously as something that traumatizes the victim. Warn for noncon if it’s treated as sexy or if the victim starts consenting part of the way through. Warn for dubcon if the characters’ ability to give consent is dubious– for instance, fuck-or-die, sex pollen, one character being another character’s boss, emotional coercion, or sex where one character is extremely drunk. Of course, in the real world, all of those are rape!”

And the thing is… this isn’t really a message I got anywhere else. My parents never talked about sex; my middle school sex education mostly covered all the different kinds of horrifying STIs you could get; my high school sex education was Catholic, and so was mostly themed around how sex outside of marriage inevitably doomed one to unwanted pregnancy, HIV, heartbreak, low self-esteem, inability to bond with one’s future partners, and becoming a metaphorical cup of water everyone has spat in. And, frankly, the less said about mainstream media’s ideas about how consent works the better.

And then there was noncon fanfic. The porn itself was laden with rape myth after rape myth, of course: from “he secretly likes it!” to “erections mean consent!” to “sometimes people just get so horny there’s nothing they can do!” But the discourse around the porn was some of the most anti-rape stuff I’d ever read.

For one thing, it had the category “dubcon.” It didn’t treat emotional coercion and people technically consenting to sex they don’t want as a normal part of how sex should go; it treated it as a separate thing, clearly distinct from ordinary sex. It treated dubcon as disturbing! As something it would be perfectly reasonable to want to avoid reading about! And the message was clear and unanimous that in real life dubcon is rape.

Now, I want to be clear that I’m not applying this analysis to everything. In particular, I’m not sure it applies to porn that doesn’t have a culture around it of obsessively discussing the porn, and non-fanfic porn has this depressing reluctance to tag its dubcon. And it’s perfectly plausible to me that I happened to find a remarkably anti-rape corner of fandom, and many others are far worse.

But… I see a lot of writing about noncon fanfic that says something along the lines of “it’s all very well if adults want to get off on this, but what happens if someone underage and vulnerable finds it? What if shipping Reylo makes them think that that’s how relationships are supposed to work in real life?” Well, I’m only one person, with only one person’s history, but as someone who read a lot of noncon fanfic when I was underage:

What happened is that I learned how consent worked. I learned that if someone makes you have sex you don’t want, it’s rape. I learned that the rape myths used in our stories aren’t true: that a man with an erection can still be raped, that the physical pleasure some people experience during rape doesn’t make it not rape, that being led on is no excuse to rape someone. I learned that sex needs to be between people who want to have sex with each other. And if I hadn’t learned it there, I’m not sure where I would have.

I Stand With Juanita Broaddrick

Tags

2016 election, ozy blog post, rape tw

In 1978, Bill Clinton allegedly raped Juanita Broaddrick.

For obvious reasons, a rape nearly forty years ago is difficult to prove, and there is certainly not enough evidence to convict Clinton beyond a reasonable doubt. However, there are, I believe, several reasons that Broaddrick’s allegation should be taken seriously. She has a witness to her alleged injury, a black lip, and several people who say that she has consistently stated for decades that Clinton raped her. Her story has been consistent since the allegations came out.

Furthermore, Clinton did have sex with Monica Lewinsky, who was at the time his employee. While his relationship with Lewinsky was consensual, that is not the act of a man who is particularly concerned about consent; most people would recognize the obvious power disparities between a White House intern and the President of the United States and at least have the grace to confine their philandering to people who have a meaningful ability to say ‘no’. While obviously there are many people who have consensual sex with their employees and never rape anyone, this does speak to Clinton’s integrity and, in my opinion, means that him raping Broaddrick would not be out of character.

But, to be honest, my true reason for supporting Broaddrick is not just about the evidence, although it is concerning to me. I support her because Hillary Clinton has made anti-rape activism and believing survivors one of the cornerstones of her campaign. (Well, technically her campaign prioritizes campus sexual assault, despite the fact that college girls are less likely to be raped than non-student girls, presumably because it is very important that we make sure that our anti-rape activism prioritizes the most privileged survivors.)

And I support her because I am appalled at the behavior of my fellow liberals. We talk a great game about supporting survivors, and then we turn around and pull out the most rape-apologist bullshit when the rapist in question is a beloved Democratic president. There are a lot more plausible reasons than “she’s faking” that she might be reluctant to accuse a powerful and popular politician who eventually became the literal President of the United States. Going through a few months of denial after a traumatic experience is perfectly normal and reasonable behavior. And the fact that she can’t prove her rape in a court of law does not mean she was never raped.

“I support survivors” shouldn’t come with a footnote that says “…unless they’re politically inconvenient.”

I don’t suggest that we make our voting decisions based on whether the presidential candidate’s husband raped someone. Personal character matters less for choosing a president than positions on the issues. (Personally, I’m a three-issue voter on expanding foreign aid, increasing immigration, and not getting in wars.) Even if we did, the current Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has been accused of rape, leaving one with the unappetizing choice between a rapist and a rape-enabler. But I don’t think that voting for Hillary necessitates claiming that Broaddrick is lying or pulling out rape-apologist garbage that we would rightfully condemn otherwise.

BDSM Questions, Answered

Tags

abuse tw, disability, mental illness, ozy blog post, rape tw, sex positivity

[Commenting Note: I am trying to be as charitable as possible to radical feminists in this blog post and I would greatly appreciate it if my audience would do the same]
[Content warning: extensive discussion of sex, BDSM, abuse dynamics, and sexual violence; brief, approving discussion of self-harm]

I recently read an article by a radical feminist asking five questions about BDSM she had never heard satisfactorily answered. And, you know, how else does one respond to a temptation like that?

1. How would you teach women that they are owed bodily integrity, freedom from violence, and mutually pleasurable activities if they are also taught that it’s normal for sex to be degrading, painful, and non-mutual?

I want to turn this around into another question: how would you teach women that they are owed bodily autonomy, freedom from domination, and activities they find pleasurable, if they are also taught that those rights only extend to activities no one finds sufficiently gross or incomprehensible?

My thoughts here are closely tied to neurodiversity activism. One concept arising from the intellectually and developmentally disabled people’s rights movement is dignity of risk. Even today, a lot of people decide that intellectually and developmentally disabled people should be protected– other people should make their decisions for them, because what if they make the wrong decisions? But if you’re not allowed to make bad choices, you’re not actually allowed to make choices. Actual autonomy involves the ability to take risks, to decide what costs you’ll accept for what benefits, to make decisions your guardians or peers disapprove of, to make mistakes, to fail, to fuck up. Otherwise it’s meaningless.

The policing of nondisabled women in our society is, of course, not nearly as bad as the policing of disabled women. But I still think a lot of sexism takes the form of “don’t worry your head about that, little lady. Just let someone else think about it for you. We’ve already decided what’s good for you.” So I think we should, at the very least, default to the position that, when a person’s choice is not directly hurting other people, you don’t have to like what they choose, you don’t have to understand it, you don’t have to want it for yourself, but they are making understandable choices given their own life circumstances, and you shouldn’t limit their choices without a damn good reason.

“Hey, wait!” you might say. “I have a damn good reason! Those women are hurting themselves!” The Icarus Project, in their excellent workbook on self-harm, gives examples of things that could reasonably be thought of as self-harm: running a marathon; not exercising; getting tattoos; working when you’re sick; skydiving; even undergoing psychoanalysis. The point, of course, is that it’s pretty hard to draw a hard line between the intentional infliction of damage on one’s body that we accept and even approve of, and the intentional infliction of damage on one’s body that we pathologize. Therefore, the line shouldn’t be drawn around acts, but around the relationship people have to particular acts. If someone wants to not work while they’re sick but has panic attacks whenever they try to stop, or it’s making them unhappy or making it harder for them to reach their goals or harming their relationships, then they have a problem. If someone cuts, and it calms them down and is a useful tool in their emotion-management toolkit and generally improves their life, and they’re taking appropriate safety precautions, then they’re fine. The best thing is to provide nonjudgmental, harm-reduction information that allows individuals to make the best decisions for themselves.

The same thing applies to BDSM. If someone wants to stop having kinky sex but feels compelled to do it anyway, or it makes them feel like shit, or it harms their ability to reach their other goals, then we have a problem. If someone is having kinky sex and it makes them feel happy and at peace, or more connected with their partners, or even just gives them some good orgasms and no other consequences– there isn’t a problem. It doesn’t matter what the act is. It matters what the individual’s relationship to the act is.

2. How do you expect to prosecute and prevent domestic violence when you promote controlling relationships, sexualized abuse, and psychological and physical abuse as part of “healthy” relationships?

The Conflict Tactics Scale is a commonly used method of measuring interpersonal violence. It typically finds that men and women are equally likely to abuse each other, and that a substantial number of relationships are “mutually abusive”.

Why? Because the Conflict Tactics Scale looks at individual acts of violence. If a man hits his partner because she burned the dinner, and she hits him back in an attempt to get him to stop, the Conflict Tactics Scale will record it as each partner having hit each other once, and therefore both the man and the woman are abusive and the relationship is mutually abusive.

The context of the relationship is not a minor detail. It is not something you can handwave past. It is not something you can leave out for simplicity. It is literally the entire difference between an abusive relationship and a nonabusive relationship. Abuse is not a particular set of behaviors. You don’t get two abuse points for name-calling and five for gaslighting and ten for shoving and if you get more than twenty-five the relationship is abusive. Abuse is, at its core, the act of maintaining power, control, and domination over your partner; hitting is just a popular strategy for doing so. If no one is trying to maintain power, control, and domination over anyone else, it ain’t abuse.

Now, this does get into the thorny issue of 24/7 relationships. As it happens, I tend to get decision-fatigued very easily. Therefore, I sometimes ask my partner to order for me at restaurants, or decide what task on my to-do list I’m going to do. I feel like this is fine. If I said “partner, I am going to be decision-fatigued for the next while, so just order for me at restaurants until I say for you to stop”, I think that would also be fine. It seems implausible to me that this setup would suddenly become unethical if I added collars or boners.

The important difference here is between my partner taking power and control and me giving power and control. In a healthy 24/7 relationship, the submissive is deciding, of their own free will, to do what their dominant wants; if they decide that they don’t want to do that anymore, then they can just stop. If you could stop abusive relationships by going “nah, I don’t want to be abused anymore”, there would be a lot less need for domestic violence shelters.

Look, I agree with you that consent is not enough. Consent is the bare minimum standard. “Enough” is that the sex contributes to the happiness and flourishing of everyone involved. But I don’t think you can strip a particular act from the entire context of the relationship and the people involved and be like “that! That is clearly harmful to the people involved!” People are more complicated than that.

3. How would you teach men to respect women and want to engage in mutually pleasurable activities if they are also taught that it is sexy to hurt, dominate, and coerce women?

Well, uh, to begin with, I don’t support teaching men that it’s sexy to hurt, dominate, and coerce women. I think one of the great things about the Internet is how polymorphously perverse it’s allowed human sexuality to be. I want there to be balloon fetishists and dragons fucking cars and knotting and Comstock Films and dendrophiles and transformation fetish and inflation and wetlook and feederism and giantesses and 200,000 word fanfics where they don’t fuck until word 180,000 and the Hydra Trash Party. The faster we get out of this vanilla/BDSM binary where the only alternative to cunnilingus and cuddles is bondage and flogging, the better, I say.

But even in that polymorphously perverse world some people are going to be enjoying the Hydra Trash Party, and therefore some men will get off on the idea of hurting, dominating, and coercing Sebastian Stan their sexual partners. However, in my experience, this is not related to actual abuse.

People in the BDSM community are probably at higher risk of experiencing sexual violence, although it’s confusing. However, the BDSM community also has a lot of casual sex. In a monogamous community, Jane Rapist will get married and rape her wife; in a casual-sex-heavy community, Jane Rapist will rape three, or four, or a dozen sexual partners– greatly pushing up the percent of people who have survived rape. In addition, the plausible deniability offered by such communities makes them extremely attractive to rapists. Does the BDSM community have a higher rate of rape than, say, the vanilla bar scene? I don’t know. But I suspect the answer is “no.”

To be honest, this is a hard question for me to answer, because of how absurdly distant it is from my own experience. The sex partner I’ve had who fantasized about the most objectively horrifying things is also someone I’ll be forever grateful to, because they were the first person to notice that I had a hard time setting sexual boundaries and deliberately teach me how to say “no” to things I didn’t want. My current primary is pretty fucking kinky, and also tremendously understanding about and patient with my disabilities in a way I’d never expected a neurotypical to be. Conversely, the partners I’ve had who most blatantly disrespected my preferences, limits, and boundaries all fantasized about sweet, loving sex with attractive women. I admit I am only one person, and this is only anecdote, but you understand why this question is much less satisfying than the others. I have no experience to draw on.

4. How do you expect to teach men about affirmative consent when BDSM practices themselves do not embody affirmative consent — including situations where consent is physically impossible?

I want to emphasize that we’re on the same side here. I agree that the BDSM community all too often fails to embody affirmative consent, and I agree that we should work on fixing that. In fact, the author’s very own FAQ quotes from an extended series of essays by a kinkster about preventing rape in the kink community.

If we applied the same standards to non-BDSM sex that this question applies to BDSM, we are all going to be celibate for the rest of time. The vast majority of rapes are not BDSM-related. The vast majority of rapes are oral sex, manual sex, anal sex, and PIV, because of the simple fact that most sex is oral sex, manual sex, anal sex, and PIV. Forced electricity play is essentially a rounding error.

Earlier in the FAQ, the author gives a more extensive idea of what she means by the BDSM community’s poor consent practices and situations where consent is physically impossible. She says, describing the former:

The author described the rapist’s grooming behavior (subjecting his victim to other forms of penetration and lying about what he was doing) thusly: “It’s not a bad way, this sort of mind game, to move towards opening up a limit.” [emphasis mine]. Respecting a boundary is to take the boundary as an absolute limitation on behavior; not something to be pushed, or worn down, or (euphemisms again!) “opened up.” The author condones the grooming because the victim “didn’t say no,” in spite of the fact that the victim was uncomfortable with the perpetrator’s behavior. Insofar as they condone grooming, manipulation, and coercion to violate boundaries (and this author apparently does), BDSM practitioners cannot claim that they respect consent.

On the same blog, this author dismisses unwanted torture and assault, as well as resulting permanent trauma, as “shit happens” (which sounds disturbingly like the oft-cited dismissal that various forms of sexual violence or abuse are simply “bad sex”). Some of this, he claims, is due to “miscommunication” and the fact that a “good top” is not going to do simply what has been explicitly discussed. A very flimsy excuse — if there is the slightest ambiguity about whether a partner is uncomfortable with a sexual activity, one can always ask.

I think these passages greatly misrepresent Millar’s points. First, it is a very unusual definition of “lie” which includes “I am going to put my fingers inside you and claim that it’s a knife. Is that okay?” Normally, “lie” implies that you are misleading people about facts. Do you also think that reading fiction to your partner is grooming behavior?

Second, I think this passage confuses you pushing my boundaries and me pushing my boundaries. If I say “no, I don’t want to do that” and you say “please please please please”, you are clearly being an asshole. However, if I say “I’m uncomfortable doing that, but I’m going to do it anyway. Can you help me work my way into becoming more comfortable?”, that is perfectly ethically fine. If it wasn’t, I would be morally obligated to never leave my house. (It’s true that Millar’s essay leaves it ambiguous which one is happening, and if it’s the former it’s obviously unconscionable.)

Third, the author fails to mention that what Millar calls “shit happens” are technical errors and emotional landmines. While those may have awful emotional and physical consequences, they are clearly not the same thing as actual rape. Millar does not dismiss the consequences of those acts; he compares the effect of an accidentally tripped emotional landmine to a tsunami. He simply points out that it’s no one’s fault, which is true.As someone with a hell of a lot of emotional landmines, the idea that my partner accidentally triggering me is the same as rape is absurd. And both of those are also issues in vanilla sex: the broken condom, the rape flashback.

I agree that people don’t check in enough during sex; a “can I pull your hair?” saves a lot of trouble and guesswork. However, people are still not perfect at reading each other’s signals. The problem comes exactly when from one person’s perspective there isn’t any ambiguity and no need to check in. Fortunately, most cases of miscommunication aren’t particularly disastrous, because in a healthy sexual relationship you can just say “actually, that’s not my thing”; legitimate sexual-violence-by-miscommunication is probably even less common than forced electricity play.

Next, she discusses cases when, to her mind, people cannot consent:

A submissive may be in such a state of fear, pain, or disassociation she is unable to give or withdraw consent: “Lots of bottoms, especially subs, are not really in a state of mind mid-scene to advocate for themselves… Some folks just can’t use safe words at all because they can’t access them in scene: they have to negotiate up front and then trust.” But if there is no consent if someone is in such a state of pain, fear, or disassociation — or for any reason feels unsafe expressing her feelings — that she cannot withdraw consent or communicate (certainly no one could claim that someone in such a state is actively giving consent).

First, this is clearly a misrepresentation of Millar’s point. Millar is not talking about “feeling unsafe expressing her feelings”– he would most certainly agree that making someone feel unsafe expressing their feelings so they can’t say “no” to sex with you is an act of sexual violence. What he’s talking about is that for many people BDSM induces an altered state of consciousness. For many people, altered states of consciousness make them vulnerable– think of it like having sex with someone who’s drunk.

(Tangent: nonverbal people are capable of communication. Everyone is capable of communication. When I go nonverbal and point to something, or make an upset noise, or bring someone a movie I want to watch, that’s communication. All you need to be able to communicate is the ability to move at least one (1) muscle. The idea that nonverbal people can’t communicate is regularly used to ignore the preferences and consent of disabled people, and you should not put it in your feminist blog post.)

Now, it is a defensible position that it is unethical to knowingly have sex with someone in an altered state of consciousness. Indeed, many people have a similar position with alcohol: if your partner is sufficiently drunk, you shouldn’t have sex with them. In that case, you don’t have to condemn all BDSM, you just have to condemn BDSM that puts people in an altered state of consciousness such that they are more likely to agree to sex acts that, in the cold light of morning, they wouldn’t approve of. However, I disagree. I believe that if I say to my partner “honey, when I’m really drunk, you can have sex with me if you want”, and my partner respects my limits and my drunken “no”, then this sex is ethically fine. And I believe that if I say to my partner “honey, I get very deep into subspace, but I’m okay with doing a scene with you”, and my partner respects my limits and my subspacey “no”, then that sex is also ethically fine. Riskier? Perhaps. But I don’t think it’s a risk that it’s wrong to knowingly take.

5. How would you prevent emotional and social coercion into these practices?

Now that’s one difficult as hell question!

I don’t think anyone has come up with a satisfying answer about how to prevent emotional and social coercion into sex. But that’s the thing– there’s nothing special about BDSM. The feeling of being socially coerced into a flogging you didn’t want is really not a whole lot different from the feeling of being socially coerced into cunnilingus you didn’t want. If you rule out BDSM but allow cunnilingus, you’re not going to solve the problem of social and emotional coercion into sex, any more than you’re going to solve it if you rule out cunnilingus and allow BDSM.

One important step, I think, is to get rid of the bullshit status games around sex. The quality of your sex life is measured in how much enjoyment you and your partners get from it– whether that means celibacy, missionary-position penis-in-vagina intercourse once a week, quadruple penetration while being suspended, or all of the above at different points in your life. Not being into kink doesn’t make you a prude. Not being interested in penis-in-vagina sex doesn’t mean you’re being unreasonable. Not wanting to orgasm doesn’t mean you aren’t liberated. And not wanting sex at all is perfectly fine– for whatever reason you don’t want it.

We should also get rid of the idea that certain sex acts are something we ‘owe’ our partners. Of course, we should strive to find partners we’re sexually compatible with: it’s tremendously convenient to have a partner who isn’t interested in the sex acts we aren’t interested in. And there’s nothing wrong with trying something out if you’re not sure if you’ll be into it, or doing a sex act because you like making your partner happy. But in the event that your sexualities change, or you discover new things about your sexuality, or perhaps you or your partner were not quite as open in communication as one would hope– you don’t have to engage in any sex acts you don’t want to. Period. End of story. If you decide to let your partner finger you, or fuck you bent over the desk, or diaper you, when that’s not your thing, it’s a favor you’re doing for them. There is nothing your partner is entitled to.

Finally, in a linked article, a person argues that widespread BDSM creates a form of social coercion. A woman who doesn’t like BDSM may have a choice between BDSM and celibacy. However, ending BDSM does not solve this problem. I myself have a hard limit around receiving oral sex. Let me tell you: there are a lot more people who will sulk when you say “please don’t touch my genitals” than people who will sulk when you say “please don’t tie me up.” I think there are about three solutions here. First, you can argue that being socially coerced into bondage is far, far worse than being socially coerced into a sex act that makes me dissociate from gender dysphoria, in which case, uh, good luck with that. Second, you can support mandatory celibacy for everyone. Third, you can support a diversity of sexual preferences, so both I and people who aren’t interested in BDSM can find sexually compatible partners.

Depressing Thoughts on Rape

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ozy blog post, rape tw

Barring mass surveillance, we are not ever ever ever ever going to be able to prove that most rapes happened beyond a reasonable doubt.

Normal rapes are “I said ‘no’, but I was too drunk to fight zir off”; it’s “I said ‘no’, but then I froze up and didn’t resist”; it’s “my partner was abusing me and I knew that if I kept refusing he would hurt me”; it’s “I couldn’t hit a girl”; it’s “he pinned me and I couldn’t move”; it’s “I fought back but it didn’t leave any marks”. Rapes that are provable are rare, they are the exception, and smart rapists can easily avoid them.

If we don’t allow colleges to expel people for committing rape, or we use a relatively high standard of evidence, then the victim will have to see his rapist across the quad, in the cafeteria, in science class, at parties. And the rapist has access to a new crop of vulnerable people, and she can rape again and again.

If we do use a relatively low standard of evidence, then abusers can easily get their partners expelled from school as a punishment for leaving them or as a tool for isolating them from their social group. Abusers already make their partners think the partners are the real abusive ones; do you think they’ll have very many problems stepping it up to “…and if you leave I’ll report you to the Dean”?

So it goes.