In the previous thread about the thin line between an ordinary guy and a rapist, Sailorman writes:
rethinking this: why do folks insist on using “rape” or “almost rape” or “like rape” to describe things that, well, aren’t rape?
I can see it if you think those things should be legally punishable. (in other words, it makes perfect sense if you think those things ARE rape)
But if you DON’T want to put those in the legally punishable category, then I wonder if it’s not such a powerful word as to be ineffective. It’s polarizing. You’ll get men to admit their behavior is “wrong” or “bad” way before you’ll get them to admit it’s “almost rape” or “very similar to rape.”** So using those terms increases the “preaching to the choir” aspect. I’m not sure that’s functionally a good idea.
And it’s also a bit a priori which i find sort of annoying: because rape is bad then “…____ like a rapist” means ___ is very bad. So using that label assigns those things a “fault level” that is fairly high.
The problem with THAT is that these conversations inevitably contain a lot of things that differ hugely in how bad they are. But because “like a rapist” = “veryvery bad” that makes no sense: surely telling someone they’re “prude” because they won’t sleep with you is in an entirely different category from, say, filling someone’s drink with the goal of getting them drunk enough to agree to sleep with you when you know they wouldn’t do so sober. **
There are a few–very few–generalizations one can accurately make, when one includes such disparate behavior. Why is “calling someone a prude” lumped in as Teh Eevil Misogyny together with wanting to rape someone? That’s just ludicrous.
Are some of those things bad? Yes. Some are VERY, VERY, bad. But some are, in the grand scheme of things, not that big a deal. And if there’s not going to be any distinguishing between those categories, I don’t think this is a good argument.
**The power of the word “rape” is not necessarily beneficial. A parallel exists in racism. There used to be things that were referred to as “prejudiced,” which was sort of “racism lite.” Now, “racism” has been deliberately expanded to include all of that, and a whole lot more. The benefit? People get to use a very powerful and socially unacceptable word, “racism,” to control and comment on behavior. The downside? You might have gotten someone to admit they’re a bit prejudiced; not many people will admit to being racist.
After a bit of back and forth, my reply was:
Sailor,
You wrote this: “I can see it if you think those things should be legally punishable. (in other words, it makes perfect sense if you think those things ARE rape) ”
That suggests that the only definition of rape that is acceptable is one with a legal ramification, because it suggests that one only thinks things ARE rape if one seeks to make them legally punishable. That means that you’re saying that a personal definition of rape should be consonant with one’s desired legal definition of rape, and thus that the deciding factor of rape is the legal system.
Which I meant to support the following assertion: “The legal system is not the sole arbiter of meaning. Period.”
Since various people, including Sailorman and myself, feel that this line of discussion is a distraction from the other thread, I’m reposting it here so that it can be explored by anyone who wants to. If people want to repost comments from the other thread here, that’s cool.
I’m locking this to pro-feminists only, in which category I am intending to include Sailorman in case that’s a question (I know he was excluded last time this came up).
Speaking for myself, Lu, I think that “all sex without explicit verbal consent is rape” is an utterly reasonable proposition.
The thing is that in practice, it would only (hopefully) become an issue when there *wasn’t* consent . . . kind of how sex between underage partners is ostensibly illegal across the board but is (despite recent abuses in this area) rarely prosecuted. This would differ from the underage sex situation hopefully by requiring the woman to actively press charges . . . thus the situation would be that hey, it might be ‘kinda sorta’ okay to assume consent, but if you assume, don’t be wrong.
I don’t think that is a bad idea. I don’t think people should feel comfortable assuming their partner’s consent, and I think openly stated consent actually makes sex better.
I come to this in part because of my experience in the BDSM community, where consent is the main thing, consent must be actively stated, sexual activity is prefaced by extensive negotiation, and where consent can be withdrawn at ANY point, and both partners are expected to immediately stop all activity and check in to make sure their partner is safe physically and emotionally.
Let me tell you, operating within that framework has never made me feel defensive or blamed. It’s made me feel safe, and actually, it’s made me feel wanted, knowing that my partner explicitly and verbally has expressed her desire.
—Myca
For the most part, I agree, Myca — your insights from BDSM are interesting. (I said it wasn’t true in my experience because in a long-term monogamous relationship that doesn’t happen to involve BDSM, we often don’t bother with verbal consent, and that works fine for us.) But I was wondering if you could offer a male perspective on how to get through to the “ordinary guy” who thinks that all’s fair in what he persists in calling love.
Bonus question: if a friend/acquaintance/coworker of yours told you what a great time he had meeting a woman in a bar, getting her trashed and taking her back to his place, what would you say to him?
Lu,
A few quick thoughts, in no particular order:
1. There is nothing inherently non-sensical about making it clear that the “all sex without explicit verbal consent” statement is not talking about behavior that is legally actionable rape and that what you’re trying to do is reframe the discussion so that it focuses, from a feminist point of view, on women’s experience of all the various situations in which unwanted sex occurs. Men will either accept it or they won’t. Those that don’t remain a problem, it’s true, but I don’t think there is any magical formulation of the issue that is going to make that problem go away. Some men really are purposefully and consciously and unambivalently invested in patriarchy and the privileges they get for being men in a patriarchy. Other men will come part of the way towards where we would like them to me; other men will come further; other men will, out of apathy and indifference, remain where they are. One of the hardest lessons I had to learn as a teacher was that you cannot teach at the same time to every level in a class; at some point, you have to put the material out there in as coherent a way as possible and let the students come to it as they will.
I do not mean to deny or trivialize that there are real life consequences to women of what I am saying here, i.e., that the men who don’t “get it” will continue to rape and that the men who do “get it” will continue to benefit from rape culture, but I am with QGrrl on this: the more you try to tailor your message so that men will be able to hear it in a way that is non-threatening (and that really is what you’re talking about when you say want to make sense to “those men,” as opposed to just making sense), the more what you are doing is pandering to their unwillingness to do the work of real change.
2. A more important question, though I don’t have time to do more than raise it here, is how to get men to think not merely about what it means to respect the point at which women’s boundaries begin, but also what it means for men to have sexual boundaries of our own and what it means to live meaningfully within those boundaries.
Ok, there was more I wanted to write, but I need to go back to grading papers.
Yeah, this is kind of why I said that “it might be ‘kinda sorta’ okay to assume consent, but if you assume, don’t be wrong. ” If you and your husband assume consent to some degree with each other, that’s pretty reasonable, but you are both 100% confident that consent is there . . . and even so, if the situation changed to such a degree that you prosecuted him for rape for not seeking direct verbal consent, it’s probably safe to assume that something happened to cause that. It’s not like you just pulled the charges out thin air.
It’s a tough one. I think many of the guys with that attitude are just looking for sex and don’t really care who gets hurt otherwise. I honestly don’t think that there’s a way to directly ‘come at’ these guys that will be effective, because they just don’t care. They’re sexual sociopaths, and I think the only solution there is changing the culture around them so as to make their actions more and more unacceptable and more clearly ‘rape’. I’m talking about guys who see nothing wrong with getting a woman drunk and having sex with her, but who would be aghast at committing violent/stranger rape.
The guys I think you can come at directly and get through to are the ones who have not examined their own actions . . . who are part of the culture, and probably not very reflective, but who DO, or WOULD care if they realized that they were hurting the people around them. For these guys I think it’s hard to get past their defensiveness, obviously. Nobody wants to think of themselves as a rapist. If it were me, I would tell the guy that I know he didn’t mean anything awful, but that whatever his intentions, sex without consent is rape . . . and that since he doesn’t want to hurt women, he needs to understand that someone who’s drunk or someone he’s coerced consent from have not really consented. The idea is, “You must make it safe for her to say no, because when she says yes, that makes it meaningful.”
Also, although I hate to play on masculinity in this way, (because it’s sort of counterproductive) I think there’s ground to be gained by playing on the male ego, and talking about coerced sex as less than nocoerced. As in “The kind of guy who gets a woman drunk to have sex with him, is the kind of guy who probably needs to get a woman drunk before she’ll have sex with him.” I don’t like that, because it still uses ‘whether or not someone’s having sex’ as a measure of their worth . . . but I think it might be effective.
Aw, jeez, so much of this depends on the relationship I have with the person in question. If it was a friend I felt I could confront, I would say something along the lines of, “what the fuck is wrong with you,” and go from there.
With an acquaintance or some co-workers, I might press the issue a little more gently: “You did what? Is she okay? Had she agreed to sex before? She hadn’t? So what made you think this was okay?” You know . . . ask questions about her in a way that made it clear that I considered this something clearly negative that he had done to her.
—Myca
most men would react to this statement by getting defensive […] What I don’t know is if you can frame the issue in a way that will make sense to those men.
Lu, if I may? I start with the understanding that sex is a gift, and a gift can only be given. If you understand the meaning of gift and give you can’t be confused about rape. I feel no defensiveness or guilt; the fear of finding myself ‘cornered’ by a shift in the line between rape and non-rape, between the actionable and non-actionable is so remote to me.
… “all sex without explicit verbal consent is rape”…
I’m not sure how this can be argued against. Perhaps one might argue that “verbal” should be removed, but then you need to specify what qualifies as explicit non-verbal consent. I also don’t see how any thinking, feeling person can disagree with it.
And for Sailorman’s benefit, I think I’m okay with this also being the legal definition.
sorry (for those who give a hoot) to drop out; got slammed at work.
Q, your statements (#54 et al) re legal stuff seem like sort of a catch-22. You don’t like the legal system because it’s misogynistic. But you also don’t want to talk about changing it, because defining things in the legal system is inherently misogynistic. That doesn’t make sense if you want the legal system to be NONmisogynistic; it’s not going to get there by magic.
However, I would like to explore #72 a bit. You are certainly correct that I view the legal system as a powerful tool to change men’s behavior. In fact, I think it is and can be one of the best ways to achieve speedy and significant social change. Social processes can achieve more in the end, and can do a better job. But they’re often VERY slow.
Do you think the entire realm of law is so misogynistic that it is a useless tool to fight misogyny at all? That would explain your position. Or am I missing something else?
Mandolin,
I am not defending Chris. but as per the reference to me: this is a discussion, not a limit. It’s 1) on a blog, that’s 2) not mine, 3) on a thread designed to discuss this exact topic; 4) which you started; and 5) on which I have no control over anyone else’s posts. How much limiting do you think I’m able to do?
Telling someone I think their use of a word is incorrect, or a bad idea, isn’t ‘limiting the conversation.’ It is a conversation. there’s nothing amoral about it.
Thank you. It’s not, really. I gotta go to bed but am drafting a response to your question; hopefully i’ll post it tomorrow.
“I am not defending Chris. but as per the reference to me: this is a discussion, not a limit. It’s 1) on a blog, that’s 2) not mine, 3) on a thread designed to discuss this exact topic; 4) which you started; and 5) on which I have no control over anyone else’s posts. How much limiting do you think I’m able to do?”
Perhaps you’re misreading me. Your claim is that feminists, indeed everyone, should stop using definitions of rape which do not reflect the legal standard, because for us to do otherwise is damaging to rape activism, etc. etc. You want other people to alter and limit their conversation based on the rule you set up. Whether or not you have the power to enforce it, you want the conversation that feminists describe as helpful to them to be eliminated in favor of the good that you find in its absence.
A little belatedly I’m going to say, that I’m not convinced the message should be “Don’t rape” with a definition of rape. That can encourage men to get their toes as close as possible to the line.
I think the message should be “Make sure that all the sex you have is truly consensual.”
I think that’s a really excellent (and simple, and easy-to-understand) way to put it, Maia.
I agree, Maia — I’ve been trying to puzzle out what exactly bugs me about the “explicit verbal consent” rule, and I think that’s part of it. We’ve been talking about the kind of guy who thinks it’s OK to bug or sweet-talk a woman mercilessly until she gives in (if only to get some sleep), and telling that guy “you have to get her to say yes, I will have sex with you” doesn’t help much. It’s the guy, not the line, that needs to move.
It might help women quite a bit, though. The message “you mean no unless you say yes, and you never have to say yes” is a powerful one.
S’posin’ that he says that your lips are like cherries,
Or roses or berries,
Whatcha gonna do?
S’posin’ ‘at he says ‘at you’re sweeter ‘n cream and he’s gotta have cream or DIE?
Whatcha gonna do? Spit in his eye?
Well… yeah.
(I realize btw that that song is about a different predicament, but it came to mind.)
But as to the legal aspect… if we’re saying that a man should have to be able to prove in court that any woman he had sex with said, “yes, I will have sex with you” — that, to me, butts up against “innocent until proven guilty.” If they’re alone (as will most often be the case), does he have to get her on videotape? As Myca said, it might devolve to “if you’re sure she’s willing, go ahead, but make damn sure.” I still don’t know if it would be practicable legally.
Mandolin:
Sure. Don’t you have equivalent wishes, though with different facts? Don’t lots of people here have diverse opinions about this type of thing? in fact, I am almost 100% sure that people on this very blog have told me that my definition was wrong, and that i should stop using it and adopt theirs. (it might have been another blog, but I think it was here.) Are they immorally limiting my conversation? I don’t think so. Same goes for here.
I don’t think I said anything about immoral.
As far as whether or not I have equivalent wishes, I’m sure there are subjects on which I do. I don’t think this is one of them. I support the existence of a legal definition, and I support the existence of legal-minded conversations. I certainly don’t want to eradicate them. It seems from what you’ve said that you support the eradication of ours.
Clearly, in this case, I think that’s a mistake. That doesn’t mean that it’s a mistake in all cases to want to eradicate some kinds of discussion.
Oh, okay. I did say something about moral.
I think what I meant (it’s been a few days) is that it’s not morally correct for you to do X. I didn’t necessarily mean it was immoral for you to do X, just that it wasn’t a moral positive. But it was totally not clear, and I apologize.