Duke’s new sexual misconduct policy includes this example:
Angela and Aaron have been in an ongoing relationship for a year-and-a-half and have engaged in consensual sexual intercourse. One night while becoming intimate, Angela stops and says she doesn’t feel like having sex that night. Aaron continues to touch her, saying that she got him excited and it wasn’t fair of her to lead him on like that. Again Angela tells him she does not want to have sex, and then is silent. Aaron decides she has given in, and proceeds to have sexual intercourse with her.
This is a violation of the Sexual Misconduct Policy. Aaron had sexual intercourse with Angela against her will. The fact that Angela has freely consented to sexual intercourse with Aaron in the past does NOT mean he has her consent in this situation.
In the Boston Globe, Cathy Young criticizes the fictional Angela and exonerates the fictional Aaron:
Meanwhile, women, the default victims in the Duke policy, are presumed passive and weak-minded: Goddess forbid they should take more than minimal responsibility for refusing unwanted sex. In one of the policy’s hypothetical scenarios, a woman tells her long-term boyfriend she’s not in the mood, but then “is silent’’ in response to his continued non-forcible advances; if he takes this as consent and they have sex, that is “sexual misconduct.’’ Why she doesn’t tell him to stop remains a mystery.
The man’s behavior may be inconsiderate. However, adult college students have no more of a right to be protected from such ordinary pressures in relationships than, say, from being cajoled into buying expensive gifts for their significant other.
But although Cathy’s Globe readers wouldn’t know it from her description, fictional Angela said no (or the equivalent) twice, and Aaron had sex with her anyway. But Cathy puts all the blame on Angela (“goddess forbid1 [she] should take more than minimal responsibility”), and is not willing to say anything critical about Aaron’s behavior except that it “may be inconsiderate.”2
No, Cathy, having sex with someone who doesn’t want to — and who has explicitly said so, twice — isn’t merely “inconsiderate.” It’s scummy at best, and rape at worst.3
A good sexual misconduct policy should provide incentives for people to listen to partners who say “no” — but judging from what Cathy writes in the Globe, Cathy would prefer a policy that says people in relationships get a free pass to ignore the first couple of refusals.
Let me be absolutely clear about this: I don’t believe Cathy wants people to be raped. But the reasoning she uses makes rape more likely to excused. And the more rapes are excused, the more rapists feel free to rape.
There’s a sexual script in our culture which says that women in certain contexts (a date, a frat party, a short skirt, an already existing relationship) have consented to have sex until the woman forcibly says “no” several times (preferably combined with a physical struggle and maybe a slap on the face). According to this sexual script, the default is that women have consented to have sex. It is only when women “take more than minimal responsibility” — which apparently, in Cathy’s view, means more than two refusals — that women can be said to have not consented to sex.
This sexual script is a recipe for disaster and rape. This sexual script teaches ordinary boys and men that they should “push” sexual encounters “as far as they can go,”4 ignoring at least the first couple of “no”s unless the “no” is said with tremendous force.
But in the real world, people don’t always say “no!” with tremendous force. Some will feel frightened or intimidated; some will freeze up or feel that further objections are pointless after the first couple of refusals are ignored. And under the all-too-common sexual script, too many girls and women are raped by boys or men who have been taught that they can assume consent — or, at least, that they have plausible deniability — until they hear the word “no” said very forcefully.
That sexual script is what most feminists (but not, it seems, Cathy) are trying to change. And feminists have changed it, to an extent. But not enough.
And for that reason, feminists should applaud much of Duke’s sexual misconduct policy. Rather than assuming consent until proven otherwise, Duke’s policy says “Consent is an affirmative decision to engage in mutually acceptable sexual activity given by clear actions or words… consent may not be inferred from silence, passivity, or lack of active resistance alone.”
Put anther way, our society should stop teaching that consent is the default state, until a sufficiently forceful “no” is stated. Boys — and girls — should be taught that non-consent is the default, unless a person enthusiastically says “yes” with words or action. Duke is trying to teach that, and they should be praised for that.
* * *
Cathy writes:
If a woman has a sexual encounter she regrets and tells a friend who decides she was coerced, the friend’s third-party report can trigger an investigation. And if she tells a dorm adviser or a women’s center staffer, they are obligated to report the incident.
Actually, according to an article in the Duke student newspaper, “Under the policy, students may still confidentially report sexual misconduct to counselors in the Women’s Center.” So I think Cathy may have gotten that wrong.
But what about dorm advisers? Cathy seems to find it obvious that all reports to dorm advisers should remain confidential, but I’m not so sure. Studies suggest that most boys and men never commit rape — but within the minority of men who rape, many commit rape multiple times.
Which is more important — protecting the confidentiality of the report, or starting a process which might make everyone safer, by punishing the rapist? I can see arguments either way (perhaps if reports aren’t confidential, students will respond by refusing to talk to dorm advisers at all). But I certainly don’t think this is as clear-cut as Cathy believes.
* * *
Incidentally, it’s not fair of Cathy to say that women are “the default victims” in Duke’s policy. Duke’s policy is written in carefully gender-neutral language, and their examples include men and women both as victims and as perpetrators.
On her blog, Cathy responds to this point:
First of all, while the text of the policy is officially gender-neutral, the policy requires the campus Women’s Center (along with the Office of Student Conduct) to be notified of all allegations of sexual misconduct. (See this August 28, 2009 article in the Chronicle, the Duke daily newspaper.) The involvement of the Women’s Center clearly suggests that the victims are generally presumed to be female.
But the article says that “the Women’s Center will reach out to the victim with medical and psychological support.” Nothing in the article suggests that the Women’s Center refuses medical and psychological support to male victims, or that they’re assuming there will never be any male victims.
That said, it would be a good idea for the Women’s Center to create a sub-organization with a gender-neutral name to handle outreach to victims, since some male victims may feel put off by being contacted by the campus Women’s Center.5
Incidentally, college students who are victims of sexual assault are “generally” female, and the people assaulting are “generally” male. Acknowledging that reality isn’t inherently sexist, as long as the policy itself is gender-neutral.
Secondly, is there anyone who really thinks that a man claiming to be a victim of sexual assault because he had sex with a woman while he was tipsy, or because the woman continued to come on to him after he told her he didn’t want to have sex, will be given serious consideration by a sexual misconduct review panel?
This is an example of how critics like Cathy bend over backwards to find anti-male attitudes in any feminist document, without regard for what the document actually says.
1) Cathy’s original claim — that “women [are] the default victims in the Duke policy” — is not logically supported by her new claim, which is that the panels will be too sexist to implement a gender-neutral policy fairly.6
2) If anything, male victims have a higher chance of being taken seriously if law and policy is written in gender-neutral language and explicitly includes examples of men as victims.7
3) For the record, I would take a man’s claim of being raped or abused seriously if I were on such a panel, and I’m not unique. Although I’m sure that some people would be sexist, Cathy assumes too much when she suggests that no one on such a panel would ever respond in good faith to a man’s complaint.
* * *
My previous two posts regarding Duke’s new sexual misconduct policy can be found here and here.
- Regarding Cathy’s sarcastic “goddess forbid”: There was a time when trendy campus feminists referred to “the goddess” in a non-ironic fashion; that time was the 1970s, and it was fading by the 1980s. It always impresses me how much professional critics of feminism are behind the times. [↩]
- I can’t help but wonder, what would Aaron have to do before Cathy would say his behavior was certainly inconsiderate? [↩]
- Refusing to hold Aaron accountable for his actions is sexist not only against women, but also against men. Men can be expected to take “no” as an answer, and anyone who thinks otherwise thinks too little of men. [↩]
- I’m paraphrasing the way some boys talked about sex when I was a teen. [↩]
- Why does it have to be the Women’s Center doing it at all, you might ask? My guess is, the Women’s Center was the only group that volunteered to do the work. [↩]
- ETA: To be clear, I agree with Cathy that the possibility of a sexist panel is a serious concern. I just disagree that it’s in any way a defense of her claim that “women [are] the default victims in the Duke policy.” [↩]
- I’d argue that gender-neutral policies such as Duke’s are necessary but not sufficient conditions for fair treatment of male victims. [↩]
In this scenario, Aaron’s behavior is rape, I agree, though he may not consciously believe he is raping Angela. He is. But without exonerating him at all, we should recognize that Angela’s behavior is bizarre to say the least. It’s easy to understand how Cathy Young is perplexed by Angela’s sudden and unexplainable acquiescence. Perhaps part of what Ms Young is trying to say, poorly and off the mark, is “at least try to get out of the room.”
Either way, it’s pretty lame of Cathy Young to nitpick at what is probably just one of dozens of scenarios some university lawyers came up with to try to cover their asses. The policy as a whole is designed to educate students on how their actions will be considered, not to provide some hyper-realistic examination of common behaviors among women and men. The more possible scenarios they offer, the better they are protected against prosecution or civil legal action.
Parsing, “One night while becoming intimate, Angela stops and says she doesn’t feel like having sex that night. Aaron continues to touch her, saying that she got him excited and it wasn’t fair of her to lead him on like that. Again Angela tells him she does not want to have sex, and then is silent,” as acquiescence is more than a little problematic.
Paul, the behavior you claim is “bizarre” is actually extremely common for rape victims, for reasons that should be completely obvious.
Aaron decides she has given in, and proceeds to have sexual intercourse with her.
I’m trying to figure out how Aaron manages the trick of having sexual intercourse with her given that under this scenario Angela obviously doesn’t want sex and therefore is highly unlikely to be an active participant. I don’t know how he does this without using some kind of force, so it seems pretty obvious to me that this would be rape under just about anyone’s definition.
As far as the involvement of the Women’s Health Center for assisting non-female rape victims, I’d be curious as to what the people involved in this have done to seek out any other organization for assistance in this matter. It makes about as much sense as a Men’s Health Center helping out female rape victims. Amp speculates that they may have been the only organization that volunteered for this, but this seems a pretty non-optimal situation to me and Duke needs to commit some resources to this situation. If they can’t find any volunteers they need to hire someone.
Yeah, not really that bizarre. I’ve done it. Sometimes I didn’t feel like fighting him off, or trying to distract him with something else so he would stop trying to force me. Sometimes I’d just give in.
@RonF – A common thing that happens to people being raped is that they disassociate. It’s not, as you seem to think, always a physical struggle. Often people are intimidated or coerced into passive submission. Doesn’t make it less of a rape.
I am happy to see men responding. I’m not a she-woman-man-hater, but I have been raped and it’s nice to see men respond with some understanding. Thanks!
I’m not entirely sure what a “she woman man hater” is, but I have a feeling that if I knew what it meant, I’d have to gently ask you to please avoid using anti-feminist stereotypes on this blog. (But maybe you were just making a joke I didn’t get, in which case, my apologies.)
That said, welcome to the blog! I’m glad you were pleased by the post and comments.
Paul — Pretty much what Jake, Chris, Dee and Katie have said.
When you’re watching a horror movie, it’s reasonable to yell at the screen, “At least try to get out of the room! Are you really going to just sit there and wait for Jason to come back and kill you?”
But it’s not reasonable to treat a real-life victim of trauma that way. And that’s what this sort of second-guessing of rape victims amounts to.
Real people don’t always act in the most practical and direct way, and it’s counter-productive to blame people for acting like people. Let’s just blame the rapist.
it’s counter-productive to blame people for acting like people
So much for the liberal social project!
But I’ll note your concession of the existence of an essentialist human nature for future debate :)
I think it may be a reference to the He Man Woman Haters Club from the Little Rascals/Our Gang. I don’t know how it was intended though.
“I’m not a she-woman-man-hater, but I have been raped and it’s nice to see men respond with some understanding.”
I would be curious as well what was meant by “she-woman-man-hater” and what the relevance would be to this post.
It usually goes without saying at a feminist blog that discussing rape doesn’t make one a “man-hater.” Wouldn’t it be offensive (and insulting to men), if every time we talked about rape we had to re-assure men that we didn’t hate them?
I’ve done it too, in the context of a long-term relationship. The worst incident I can’t recall every detail, but fear of losing a relationship and fear of abuse are pretty strong de-motivators to keep insisting on your nonconsent when you live in the same house and sleep in the same bed, or as was the case that time, sleep in the same bed in an acquaintance’s house while traveling.
Uh, nowhere in that phrase does it imply that the nature is essentialist and not culturally mediated. Whatever.
Since pretty much everyone has already said what needs to be said about Paul’s
I wanted to come back to something that Cathy wrote:
Is it useful to look at this as “wearing down,” wherein ultimately consent is obtained because the alternative is to listen to endless pestering and whining? I’m thinking here not only of my own experiences and anecdata from others, but of the larger framework in which men are socialized to pursue sex by any-means-short-of-force (because that would be rape) – what Cathy calls “ordinary pressures in relationships.” The major reason that sexual pressure is “ordinary” in a relationship is because of the way that we’ve been socialized around sex and gender roles, and I don’t know that I buy that sex under circumstances where one party feels like they have to just to get a little peace is true consent.
I definitely support the policy either way, but that’s what jumped out at me. (Hopefully I’m making sense.)
(Edited to add that I don’t know why some of that’s bold – I don’t have bold tags anywhere in my comment that I can see?)
I want to tread VERY gingerly here, because I think it is important not to trivialize rapes which happen without physical force.
Let me change the example very slightly. The original is “Again Angela tells him she does not want to have sex, and then is silent. Aaron decides she has given in, and proceeds to have sexual intercourse with her.”
My change is “Again Angela tells him she does not want to have sex, and then is silent. She then decides to given in, and he proceeds to have sexual intercourse with her.”
Now first of all, do we agree that this isn’t rape? [I’m not totally sure, but my initial tentative answer is that it isn’t]. It certainly isn’t a sign of a very good and healthy relationship, but I wouldn’t call it rape.
Second, if it isn’t rape, we have the problem that from the point of view of an outside observer, it might look identical to the initial example. And that is a problem.
Now actually, I think the university has done something good here in calling it “sexual misconduct”. In that sense it is morally wrong, and something we want to discourage, but doesn’t necessarily invoke the full defensive response, or the full hyper-technical parsing that ‘rape’ would get in the instance.
And this may be a good thing in and of itself. As mentioned above, the number of rapists is small, but they tend to have MANY victims. I’m not sure how put off *they* are by policies of this kind.
But on the other hand, the number relationships burdened by a socially acceptable sexual whining game is probably very large, and if that could be construed as unmanly sexual misconduct, that will probably lead to a very large increase in relationship wellbeing.
An interesting question (albeit a bit of a side track) is how that fits into the fact that in reality, a decent number of relationships are intentionally built around some sort of dynamic of “not really meaning no,” or perhaps “playing hard to get.”
Those can be inherently consensual acts that carry the outward appearance of non-consent. And as such, they pretty much fuck up the analysis, to a large degree.
So the question “Should Barb be allowed to assume George is OK with having sex just because she’s dating him, and should she be allowed to initiate and execute sex even if he’s passive?” is easy: of course not, dating =/ sex.
But the followup is a bit trickier: Should Barb be allowed to assume George is OK with having sex if George acts like he always does when he wants sex, while she initiates and executes sex even if he’s passive?
Or: George says “Stop it!” but then participates in sex. Should Barb always stop? Does it matter if part of their relationship involves George saying the same thing at first, with the intent and expectation that it be ignored?
There’s no argument about George’s right to withdraw his underlying consent. But in the context of a relationship with existing history between the parties, it’s difficult to analyze if his consent actions are basically the same as his non-consent actions.
I certainly believe that in a healthy relationship it’s perfectly fine (even good!) for people to choose to make temporary sacrifices for the “health” of the relationship and the overall benefits that they get out of it. That’s true whether it’s having sex while you’re not really in the mood, or whether it’s working a job you don’t like as much because you need to help support the household.
Whether that sacrifice is OK or really problematic depends on the degree (and frequency) of the sacrifice, and on the importance of the relationship. There are a lot of sacrifices I’ll make for my wife, and she for me; it is appropriate that we do so. There are almost no sacrifices I would make for someone I just met, and it would be similarly inappropriate to expect them.
Some people here, I believe, feel that it is pretty much never OK to make sacrifices in a relationship. I’m sure you’ll be hearing from them shortly.
What a shitty thing to say – and undoubtedly false. It makes me want to say, “Fuck you.” If you don’t want to be treated like an asshole, don’t behave like one.
Sailorman wrote:
I wasn’t going to comment on this thread because others were saying so much of what I was thinking, but this comment got me thinking about two different things:
1. In response to Sailorman’s comment: I do not understand why people have a hard time seeing the difference between someone who is in a long term relationship who decides, even though he or she is not really in the mood, to have sex with her or his partner in order to do something nice, to give the other person what they want, etc., and someone who “gives in”–and I think it is important that this is the phrase used in the example from Duke’s policy–because they have been badgered into doing so. I recognize that context means a whole hell of a lot in a discussion like this and that people might differ on what actually constitutes badgering, but someone who “makes the sacrifice” of having sex when he or she is not really in the mood–to use Sailorman’s terms and in the spirit of his example–has not “given in” in the way that Angela “gives in” in the Duke example.
2. This is a little bit off topic, I guess, but the whole discussion reminds me of how a woman I was involved with when I was in my 20s–and we were together for nearly 7 years–would give me what I wanted when she wasn’t in the mood for sex and I was (and sometimes this means genital intercourse, sometimes it meant oral sex, sometimes it meant masturbation) as a way of “getting me off her back,” so to speak, and without saying no even once. I wish I could remember exactly how I found out that this was what she was doing, but I do remember that when I asked her about it, she admitted that, yes, that’s what she’d been doing. I understood all the cultural, etc. reasons why she might assume I wouldn’t take no for an answer, but the fact that she didn’t even try to say no angered me and hurt me very deeply; I felt patronized and even infantilized; and it was only because I got angry that she started to treat me like an adult, saying no when she meant no.
I don’t think Angela’s behavior is “bizarre” at all even if she’s not traumatized. What if she’s tired and half-asleep and just doesn’t have the energy or awareness to keep saying no or push him away? People who are falling asleep are often “silent”.
Are women supposed to stay awake all night and keep reiterating “no” if they don’t want to have sex? Hypothetical Angela said “no” twice, which is twice as many times as she should have had to say it.
@Sebastian: Um, it does count as rape legally unless “decides to given in,” means that she consents in some clear way.
hf,
Sadly, under North Carolina law, merely ignoring the verbal rejecting an advance (even twice) preceding sex does not make someone legally a rapist. Sexual offenses in NC must be both “by force and against the will of the other person,” non-consensual sex without force is not a crime in NC (and most other states). Rape law is way more limited than most of us think it should be. Sailorman raises this point frequently, and he is correct.
Sailorman,
I agree with Jake. Consider yourself officially warned. Refrain from acting like an asshole on Alas or you will get banned.
Unless I’m confusing this site with Feministe, I stand by what I said, having had that exact argument with at least one and I think three people, some time in the last year. I’m fairly certain it was here.
If it wasn’t here, Jake, and and was on Feministe: Well, if you think that the mistake of confusing two feminist blog sites which I routinely read is so incredibly inconceivable and unforgivable, that the simple mistake makes me an asshole, well, fuck you too.
Charles, if reacting poorly to Jake’s accusation is enough to make you want to ban me, feel free.
I think it was Feministe. I’m pretty sure I read that thread, though I stayed far, far out of it.
One of the problems with Taylor’s version is that it’s hard to read it as being in good faith, considering the other errors of fact in the piece and the elision of what (to me, at least) is an enormous red flag in the boyfriend’s behavior. Namely the “you led me on, so you have to put out”. That’s the kind of reasoning an abuser employs. Yet Young continues to fill in the details in the story on a much more egalitarian, mutual basis.
I don’t recall any such argument here, SM.
Sailerman, when suggesting that an extreme view is held by other “Alas” participants, it would be better for you (or anyone) to only do so when you have a specific person’s specific views in mind. If you can’t remember who said it, or where specifically it was said, then it would be better to just not bring it up.
I’m calling this entire digression off-topic on this thread. No further discussion of the final paragraph of comment #17, and no further exchanges of “asshole”/”fuck you”, are on topic on this thread.
Every so often, we would go to visit my best friend. Her parents had a swimming pool and a hot tub, and she had back problems, so she frequently went outside to soak in the hot water. We’d bring our swimsuits. We would be there, and she would come out with her boyfriend, and maybe some other people. Her parents would be asleep, up behind the dark windows on the second floor, over-looking the water.
Boyfriend had an interest in water. Exhibitionism may or may not have been a component. I knew he wanted to have sex in that pool, but that pool was not ours, and we were never there alone.
Once, something called my best friend and her boyfriend away, and he was on me. Kissing was fine, but his hand went under the suit toward my breasts. I pushed it away. His fingers pulled aside the crotch of my suit. I shifted back. I shook my head. He came toward me again. “No,” I said. He smiled. He pulled aside the crotch of my suit a second time. His fingers went inside. “No,” I said, pushing at his hand. He kept smiling. He continued to push inside. My flesh was cold, above water and below. I scanned for my best friend and her boyfriend, both wanting them to return and terrified they would find us.
I often had sex with boyfriend when I didn’t want to even though this was usually painful. I would have acquiesced despite my discomfort except for the public situation. I dreaded–dread–being sexual in public, even as little as removing my shirt at events where everyone is naked is upsetting to me, though I’ve done it, keeping my arms crossed over my breasts afterward, shifting away from the crowd.
What could I do? A shout and shove would only be likely to attract attention, from best friend if I was lucky, or if I was unlucky her boyfriend who disliked me and might have found it funny, or worse, her parents, behind those dark-eyed second-story windows above, who I held in that fragile, sincere regard one has for the parents of one’s friends from youth. It was better to be raped than to wake them up; it was better to be raped than to embarrass them; it was better to be raped than to be publicly known as being raped.
My remaining tools, the quiet ones, were to attempt to dissuade boyfriend. I said no, I pushed him away, he continued to press. That night, we’d go home together. We’d probably have sex. We’d play a game. We’d make a plan. We’d talk about the future. We’d lie in bed together, skin to skin, unavoidable. How do you tell a loved one to stop raping you when “no” will not suffice and even a hint of the r-word will cause an explosion?
I said no. I pushed him away. I did it more than once. But he was continuing, he was smiling. He was sure the no was something he could bat away. He didn’t talk. He just kept acting.
Here is the concession, the elision, the giving in. Here is the stillness and silence. Here is where he pushed into me. Here is where he kissed my mouth and pushed his hand over my breasts. Here is where he thrust a half dozen times.
Best friend and her boyfriend returned, and my heart was pounding, and I swatted him again and swam away, and we were separated by the time they arrived. The parents, behind their dark-eyed windows, were not disturbed. Boyfriend did not get to completion. I did not get to possess my body. No one was fulfilled.
I do not call this rape, although if someone else described it to me, I would probably call it assault. It is not the only time something like it happened to me. Yet I don’t consider myself a rape victim because I worry about hurting people who have had much worse experiences. I would support someone else with my story who called it rape or assault, but I don’t.
It was only a normal amount of rape. It was only a normal amount of having my consent ignored. It was only a normal amount of having my body used against me.
I refused multiple times. There was no force. Sexual activity occurred anyway.
*offers hugs to Mandolin*
Thank you for sharing that. I have a similar story (minus a pool) that I do not call rape, but have begun to regard as assault, and am coming to terms with what I want that to mean to me. Hearing stories like yours does not … well, it doesn’t make me happy, obviously, but it does make me feel less “you just want to be a victim”-y.
Hooray for rape culture. /supersarcasm
Yes, thank you for sharing that. I feel like people shouldn’t have to expose so much in these discussions, but sometimes a story cuts through the bullshit and confusion and ambiguity.
I wonder sometimes in these discussions if we often aren’t using the same words or phrases – giving in, going along, not in the mood – to describe very different situations. When I say that I have had sex when I was not in the mood, I generally mean that I started out not in the mood but I ended up enjoying myself – or at least, not finding it an unpleasant experience – and it falls into the give and take of any long-term relationship. What I have in mind when I use these words is not gritting my teeth through painful sex, much less the level of coercion you experienced in the pool that night (though I, too, have my “not rape” story). I don’t think anyone could read that and put it in the category of sacrifices we all make in our relationships. It’s important for people who would never do something like that to remember that many people have been in relationships with people who would, and so when we talk about saying no and the other person kept going, we don’t mean “and then I came around.” No, it really means “I said no and the other person kept going.”
Bringing it back around to the example in the OP, the purpose of the example is to make it clear that one partner does not have to be physically fighting, screaming, etc., for sexual misconduct to have occurred, for something wrong to have occurred. We can make subtle changes to the example or provide all kinds of context to make it something either less wrong or not really wrong at all, but it seems to me that’s missing the point. The point of the example is to illustrate one way in which sexual misconduct could occur, not to illustrate 20 ways in which it couldn’t. And given that the dominant idea of sex and rape in our culture is that it’s totally normal for men to push and women to resist, I think that’s a valuable point to make.
Yes, a lot of people have problems with communication and gendered expectations – often unspoken – around sex that can make it more likely that a genuine misunderstanding could occur. But is it really asking that much of our partners to hear our words and pay attention to our body language, to check in with a “are you okay with this?” or a “do you want this?” if there is hesitation or passivity, to not make getting their dick wet such a high priority that the only thing that counts as non-consent is screaming and clawing?
I think this is probably happening more often than not – or maybe I’d just prefer to believe it does – because I basically assume that most folk are speaking from their own experience and “not in the mood” doesn’t necessarily always or even usually mean “not in the mood to be in the mood” – as in, don’t most people start out as “not in the mood”? Isn’t that the whole point of seduction and foreplay? But the difference is that one can be open to sexual congress and thus open to seduction and foreplay – or one can not, and it’s the latter cases that we’re talking about whereas others may be thinking of the former.
Exactly. I hate that Cathy has written this off as “ordinary relationship pressures” because the ordinary-ness of it is precisely what’s wrong with the framework – that no one questions the normalcy of, say, one partner pressuring another for sex, or of larger narratives like “men always want sex” coupled with the virgin/whore complex that teaches women to only seem unavailable, lest they get a bad reputation. It’s valuable to include this example in the policy of sexual misconduct because that’s what it is – at the very least, surely we can agree that continuing amorous advances in the face of an unwillingness by the second party to participate and/or reciprocate is unacceptably rude and selfish?
I don’t think it is, and I’d be willing to guess that many others in this thread feel the same way. But apparently the rest of society disagrees … and I don’t know how to fix that. :(
What Mandolin said.
“Why didn’t she resist?” is, sorry, fucking idiotic. Somebody twice your size who has just made it plain they don’t give a rat’s ass for your opinion in the matter has made it clear they are going to have sex with you: do you want them to do it the easy way and get it over with, or the hard way and make it even worse for you? I don’t think men often understand even when they don’t mean to be, they can be physically threatening to women.
Richard @19, perhaps you omitted this from your post, but it sounds like you really didn’t understand all the reasons she gave you sex to ‘get her off your back’. Did it occur to you that perhaps her fear of your reaction to ‘no’ might be as worthy of consideration as your anger? You come across as one of those guys who throws a fit because a woman doesn’t trust him, and how unfair that she’s so mean as to consider he would be unsafe.
Mythago:
It did occur to me, yes, and that was very much part of the conversation we had when we first talked about it, but it didn’t stop me from feeling the way I felt; and–and I am, of course, leaving out a whole lot of details here, as I did in my comment above–it, the conversations (because we had more than one) also didn’t convince her to stop that behavior. It was only when I got angry at her, not in the sense of blaming her or denying the validity of her fears about my reaction to “no,” but about the fact that we were in a relationship, that she was either going to trust me or not and that if by that point I hadn’t earned her trust–and here too I am leaving out details, but we’d been together a couple of years by this point–then we had a larger problem to deal with. (And I just don’t have the time to go into all the details.)
And Mandolin, let me also say that I am sorry you went through the experience you describe above. No one should have to go through that.
One reason I did that sort of thing was because I didn’t think I deserved sexual volition. I was trying to punish myself for being female, and for other things. His needs were important, and not only were mine unimportant, but I felt I deserved to be punished for having needs.
Women shouldn’t have sex drives at all, after all.
I knew I was a failure at femininity, and I felt allowing people to harm me was an appropriate punishment.
I had eating disorders for the same reasons. I knew it would damage my health, but it was important I be punished for being fat and unfeminine–punished with hunger, with weakness, with pain. Permanent effects were to be understood as a side effect.
You really may not have understood her reasons.
(One notes, of course, that the reasoning I cite is not distinct from fear of what happens if you say “no,” since sometimes when I said “no,” it didn’t work.)
Mandolin:
First, I want to say that it takes courage to reveal what you have revealed in this thread. Thank you for doing so.
Second, this:
You’re right, of course. There are perhaps things that she didn’t tell me, that she couldn’t tell me, that she wouldn’t have told me even if we’d been together for 30 years (I say that without irony), and I certainly don’t want to pretend that in my early 20s I had as sophisticated an understanding of these issues as I do now, but I do know–and I did understand as well as I was able to back then–what she did tell me, which was all I had to go on in how I handled my part of our trying to deal with the situation.
And now, tempting thought it is to try to tell the entire story (and I am realizing that perhaps I shouldn’t even have brought it up if I am not going to tell it), I need to dive back into my technical writing students’ analytical reports, my creative writing students’ book responses and my freshman comp students’ essays on the role of media in their lives. (I really don’t like grading papers.)
I don’t think you need to tell the story, Richard. I just… sometimes think that even progressive men forget the chasm that divides the experience of growing up with your body subject to misogyny, and growing up without it.
I think we all forget these kinds of chasms, in different ways. My husband and I went to a very beautiful house today belonging to some of my parents’ friends, who have more money than my parents, but not so much more money that they aren’t basically in the same class, and I realized that, of course, my husband would not have spent his childhood going, from time to time, to parties at beautiful, many-roomed houses with gardens and peacocks in the Los Gatos hills, the way I did. I’m not sure he’d ever been in a house like that before he met me. “No,” he said, when I asked, “but some of the rich kids at my school had houses like ours,” referring to our own nice, but not mansion-nice, suburban house.
And I am aware that when he was a child, getting to drink real fruit juice was a luxury rarely afforded, but I still can’t be trusted to understand what that means for him.
So, that’s why I said something, just to open a question for you, not to remonstrate or force you into defending your story.
Exactly. Richard, it’s not that you were a bad person to feel angry at all, or that you shouldn’t have been hurt that she did not trust you after two years of good behavior in a relationship – but a lot of those kinds of things (distrust, wariness, self-protection) are not about you.
There’s a certain level of institutional distrust that’s a matter of survival, unfortunately.
Mandolin, mythago:
Just because I don’t want my silence to make it appear that I am walking off in a huff or something, let me say that I appreciate your comments, that I agree with them, and that I have just reread what I wrote and realize that I sounded in my comments a lot more defensive than I felt, which was, honestly, not at all.
And now back to end-of-semester paper grading mayhem.