BY COLETTE PEROLD | From Hbomb, the Harvard magazine of sex, power and counterculture
Allow me to introduce you to Jaclyn Friedman. A performer, poet, writer, and activist, Jaclyn is most recently co-editor of the groundbreaking anthology, Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape.
Program Director of the Center for New Words in Central Square, Jaclyn organizes workshops, open-mics, speakers, political discussion, concerts, book groups and a slew of other events and activities all related to creating spaces “where women’s words matter.”
Jaclyn also worked as Program Director of the LiveSafe Foundation, which organizes its advocacy around self-defense and reducing violence. I first saw Jaclyn speak when I went to the book reading of her new anthology at the YMCA in Central Square. I left there with tears in my eyes, breathing a little easier. I was overwhelmed by this book’s impact on my own life and its un-apologeticness around positive female power
CP: Can you explain the history of your title, “Yes Means Yes”? Where does this framework come from, and what are you trying to suggest with it?
JF: I think most people are familiar with the concept “no means no,” and that’s not an accident. A lot of activists worked a lot of decades to get the concept of “no means no” into the mainstream consciousness. “No means no” is to say that when a person says “no” to a sexual encounter or a sexual advance, you ought to stop. It’s very basic at this point. And still needs work today. I don’t think it’s a fully universally accepted concept unfortunately. But the problem with “no means no,” as important as it is, is that it doesn’t go far enough. And most of the time when we’re talking about “no means no,” we’re talking about men needing to listen to women’s “no’s.” And when we leave it there, it underlines all of the sort of diseased ideas about sex and sexuality that we have in our culture, which is that women are the keeper of the “no,” women want to say “no,” women don’t like sex, only bad women give it up, and men only want “yes.” It leaves all of those messed up dynamics in place. So “yes means yes” is about suggesting that none of us can have a complete independent sexuality – a full healthy sexuality – unless we have access to “yes” and “no” equally.
CP: What is the feminist model of enthusiastic consent and how does it tie into “yes means yes”?
JF: So “no means no” has brought forward this idea that if a woman says “no” – and I’m saying woman here in particular because that’s the construct that most of us imagine around “no means no” – you have to stop. And the corollary to that that you hear very often is, “Well, she didn’t say no.” That leaves what people consider a very blurry area where a lot of people do things that they know their partner isn’t into or doesn’t want, but will do anyway because they can “get away with it.” And what we’re saying is that those things are still sexual assault and rape. Unless you have enthusiastic consent, which is more than just the absence of “no,” consent is not complete. When all you’re relying on is the absence of “no” to equal consent, you leave out coercion, you leave out the possibility that someone is panicked or terrified, or even that the person is confused in the moment about what they want and isn’t given the space to figure it out. A healthy sexual encounter – one that is free of coercion or violence – requires enthusiastic consent, which means it’s your responsibility to make sure your partner is having a great time. Not just that they’re willing or will let you, but that they really are excited about doing whatever it is you want to do with them. And that also is where that “yes meaning yes” comes in. And that requires a culture where women are allowed to want to have sex without being ashamed or blamed for that.
CP: How might extreme gender roles lead to a culture of rape?
JF: I think that the commodity model is a good framework for this. The commodity model is this: sex is a thing. It’s something that women have. They have The Sex. And they’re supposed to keep The Sex as long as they possibly can, because they can only give it away once for something of worth. After they give it away once, it has much less value, so they have to make the best trade they possibly can for their Sex, because it’s really valuable, and they only get to give it away once. So they have to play keep-away with The Sex until they find the ultimate trade, which is “a good husband.” That involves money and a ring [ed: thanks Beyonce] and whole bunch of other social constructions.
On the other hand, on the other side of the commodity model are the men, and they’re tasked with getting The Sex for as little as they can, because this is a capitalist model. Supply and demand. It’s a very standard market, right? So that is where you get coercion and pressure and all of those “grey areas” because men are trying to trick women into it or sweet talk them into it or get them drunk to sort of convince them to give The Sex away without the sort of “husband” part. Now few men stop to think in this model, “Do I want The Sex? Do I want sex from this particular woman? Do I want sex right now?” Men are told from very early on, “You must get The Sex. Get it however you can. Get the best kind you can.” And that’s about valuing peoples’ looks, peoples’ skin color, peoples’ youth, a whole bunch of stuff. So how a woman looks, and how she presents herself, her race, her body type – those things all play into the value of her Sex as well as whether or not it’s ever been given away.
But her ability to do the Sex never comes into play here. It’s about an object. So men don’t have very much agency in this either – they’re just playing out a script. And women on the other hand, they’re not saying, “Well maybe I want to give away The Sex! Maybe I feel like having The Sex right now!” One of the most insidious things that comes out of it is that once a woman consents to give away The Sex, however tacitly, even if she just leaves it unguarded and does not object if you try to take it, then it’s all fair game. Maybe he sweet talks you into it, or gets you drunk until you say “no” fourteen times but on the fifteenth time you say, “Okay, fine, take it and stop bothering me.” This is all fair game in the commodity model. And then once you’ve said yes, it’s done, it’s a contract, you’ve signed it. You can’t change your mind in the middle, you can’t say “yes” to part of The Sex.
PS, what is Phonebooth? an iPad app?
Aaah correct….and I consider Dodson, from that same era, the first of the Third Wave feminists. The distinction in my mind is “consciously dealing with sex.” Dodson was the first to push bisexuality out to the front, gender queer, masturbation, etc. — all distinctive of third wave.
Adrienne Rich was second-wave feminist, way back when there was something called a “phonebooth”.
Translations
You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language
Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she’s a woman of my time
obsessed
with Love, our subject:
we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power
I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn
trying to make a call
from a phonebooth
The phone rings endlessly
in a man’s bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She’ll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister
who becomes her enemy
and will in her own way
light her own way to sorrow
ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political
(1972)
The third-wave feminist I resonate with the most is Adrienne Rich.
The Origins and History of Consciousness
Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon
sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wall,
dissected, their bird-wings severed
like trophies. No one lives in this room
without living through some kind of crisis.
No one lives in this room
without confronting the whiteness of the wall
behind the poems, planks of books,
photographs of dead heroines.
Without contemplating last and late
the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.
(1976)
A certain strain of third-wave feminist ideology can prove a useful tool.
Carol van Strum pored through the entire available record of the case and could not come up with rape.
Was he inside of her? Was he trying? Then from what I understand, she DID subsequently consent to sex, in that session. If they’ve just had sex, and then have sex immediately after, and then there was a foul in between, we really are in a gray area and something that is not customarily or legally held to be rape.
It’s not something I would do. But I don’t think that he should be facing the gallows. And if Sweden’s prosecutors have an issue and are not, indeed, under the thrall of Karl Rove, then file charges or let it go. My main objection here, and the big red flag, is that Sweden has not and will not file charges. There’s only one legit reason a prosecutor does not file charges, when a complaint of a felony is made: they know they cannot get a conviction.
Here is the problem with rape as a concept. It’s the only felony that is associated with a normal biological act. Nowhere in the course of life do people shoot one another on a routine basis for pleasure. They don’t burn one another’s houses down in a friendly way. But people fuck all the time, and certain kinds of fucking are rape.
Add to that, in the vast majority of cases, as in 99% of cases, the accusation is made by a woman to a man.
That is strange territory, especially with this kind of “enthusiastic consent” mission creep.
(Not only saying no to yourself) but looking for the root of the matter and how that changes what you think you know or how you are. What could be different. What is ‘sound’
People who don’t want to know themselves and be aware are best avoided (unless you want to work in that area), and if you run into them you can only put your best into the mix and hang onto your sense of self no matter what. That you are lovable, that you love yourself. And look for the fighting chance. Absolute honesty about your own self can save you, as can a desire for the best good of the other or the situation.
Can because it isn’t sure. Your Mum realised the world isn’t safe: growing up in Africa it is clear that the world isn’t physically safe and that what you know and how you comport yourself can make a difference. Can but not always because life is live, we have all possibilities within us as does everyone else, life is not perfect, and no one knows everything about anything, just maybe enough to be going on with in any given situation.
(I aim for that. And to understand what is sound in any real life event that I am part of. And to keep as aware as possible because you never know what you might learn without realising it at the time. A work in progress)
Coucou Eric.
I wasn’t thinking about rape with JA tho with the first woman, she woke up with him inside her in the morning (after the night before) -one of your definitions of rape. In his case he is too high profile to take risks and perhaps too high profile to easily meet people, ?compounded by his ‘arrogance’ and refusal to have an STD test. I agree his extradition is being used for other agendae, that the women filing wanted to ‘fix’ him for whatever reason.
Surely rape is about how we bring up our children and personal responsibility and awareness in social situations. And in adulthood if a man feels he is a rapist or anyone who wants to hurt a wo/man, or just wants to f*** can always decide not to. Or put themselves where they cannot do harm. Every moment of every day a person can decide to be other than what they prefer if they deem their natural/initial response inappropriate.
Misunderstandings and grey areas surely merit saying no if you aren’t sure. Assume that the other party doesn’t want to unless you yourself are sure they do.
Our society is so branched on pleasure/gratification: learning to say no to oneself is ok.
And then at the other extreme – desperation and fear and harm – there is still the need for self taming and comprehension, or the right to say no in a fashion that is understandable from anyone around them.
The song. What ca
(Am I being obtuse?!)
One of the arguments a woman gave to the male calling himself a good guy:
“I don’t know why “FriendZone” has been such a topic today, but I really liked this comment:
This whole “women only like bad boys, the fact that I am a Nice Guy[TM] and this doesn’t make every woman I am attracted to automatically throw herself at my crown jewels clearly means women are evil bitches, wah wah wah friendzone” meme is really aggravating. It’s misogynistic, heterocentric, massively oversimplistic and stereotypical, and based on some really toxic ideas. Among them:
1. That being “nice” automatically entitles a man to sex with the woman of his choice, regardless of her desires or lack thereof.
2. That there is no reason to be friends with a woman other than to get sex, because friendship with women is worthless except as a prelude to sex.
3. That sexual attraction is either (a) something women can turn on and off like a lightswitch, so if a woman is not attracted to a man, clearly she’s failing to be attracted on purpose and is therefore a bitch, or (b) irrelevant to whether a woman ought to have sex with a man or not – if he has condescended to be “nice” to her, then she OWES him sex, regardless of whether she’s actually attracted to him or not.
4. That all (straight) women always make bad relationship choices (and, presumably, all women are straight, since this particular meme never talks about women dating bad girls instead of bad boys), and no men ever do.
5. That if a man is attracted to a woman and interested in having sex with her, there’s no need for him to ever actually tell her that – she should just automatically realize that if he’s being at all nice to her or acting like a friend, clearly this is a request for sex because there is no other reason any man would ever pretend to be a friend to a woman. So therefore if she doesn’t immediately realize his attraction despite him never having voiced it, and hand over the sex he is owed, she’s a bitch.
6. That if a man and a woman are friends and it doesn’t lead to sex, she’s just using him and is therefore an evil bitch. Because she is clearly reaping the benefits of his friendship while not paying for them with sex, whereas he is getting no benefit out of the situation at all (because actual friendship with a woman is worthless and clearly something no man would ever want).
7. That any man who is capable of getting laid or getting a girlfriend is clearly an asshole, because everyone knows women only date assholes, leaving all the Nice Guys[TM] sitting around passive-aggressively feigning friendship in expectation of sex that is mysteriously not being delivered, and bemoaning their terrible fate on the internet.”
***********************
Needless to say, that response inflamed the male posters and encouraged the female posters to join in with similar posts. This kind of dialogue doesn’t seem to help resolve these issues.
Interestingly enough, there has been a conversation going on among some of my Facebook friends which touches on an aspect of this. A male poster, claiming to be one of the “good guys” was lamenting that being a good guy meant he never got laid. He said women seemed to only go for the pushy and aggressive “bad guys” and he felt that was unfair. Several women told him he was sounding entitled. The arguments started flying after that.
To me, looking at this issue in the lens of “enthusiastic consent’ is sort of like looking at a 3-D laser photo by only one shard of the glass it was printed on. It is a skewed way of seeing an issue that is broader than just consent.
I learned in my sociology classes that female fertility is controlled world-wide from puberty until menopause; the premise given was that this is because males want to have access to females without any other male having access in order to determine that any offspring was their genetic line. The text also said that this control over female fertility comes with a price; females don’t grant access which makes males angry. The text talked about this scenario setting up females as property and objects and how males are seen as the default humans and entitled to access to female sexuality.
The text went on to state that females are trained not to grant access or to even acknowledge their own sexuality or desires because to do so gets them labelled “sluts.” It also gets them marginalized by other females (who feel their value is lowered when any woman “gives up” sex without extracting fidelity or security in return for it). This sounds a lot like what Friedman is saying.
According to the stuff we had to read, females have to play these elaborate games with males; they can’t say they want sex (without being labelled negatively) so they play games to get it without being marginalized. Males get frustrated because they want their cake and eat it too; they want access to females but they don’t want females to grant access to anyone but THEM. Yet to do so means the females will be treated badly by others.
The argument was that males need to stop controlling female fertility, females need to own their own sexuality, females need to stop marginalizing other females who are honest about their sexual desires, and males have to get over the idea that they are entitled to sexual access to females or that females are property; they aren’t.
So the text went on to say that we all have to stop thinking in the old paradigm and get with the reality: females LIKE SEX, should be able to say that and have sex with whomever they want and males will just have to negotiate that (and female fertility) with females instead of controlling them. Doing this would mean a lot more females would (once slut-shaming disappears) be open about wanting sex and having it and males would get more sex. What males would lose is their control over female fertility; they would have to approach that and negotiate with females as equal people instead of females as property. Males (and females) would have to see female-ness as equal to male-ness; males could no longer be seen as the default humans. The upside is males could also be more feeling, own their feelings, and allow themselves to act with feeling because doing so would not be seen as feminine (or lesser).
I am still not sure if the text was right or not; research was cited but I know it is easy to dig up research to fit any particular agenda or belief. Seems Friedman may have read the same texts as I did.
“I believe that regarding sexual healing, the beginning is masturbation. ” Not necessarily. I’ve written a lot here about how amazing and liberating it was for me to discover masturbation aftr splitting up iwith my boyfriend – and it has undoubtedly been a vital part of the healing process for me. However, the healing started with that same boyfriend I split up with. It was a pretty wretched and dysfunctional relationship, but we both came to it with our wounds and were open and sensitive with each other and we managed to address stuff we’d never looked at before. I was sexually abused as a child, and it involved a deep betrayal of trust. I never realised, until I met this man, how terrified I was of men and how deeply I mistrusted them, and also how I was unable to live my sexuality fully. I was able to look at this stuff with him for the first time – and move towards healing it. When i look back on that relationship I always feel really negative about it, so it’s good for me to remember how good it was for me too.
A “Rapist List” is being anonymously spread at Columbia University in response to the school permitting alleged sex offenders to remain on campus. Is public shaming the best way to promote justice and ensure campus safety? (Huffpost Live May 14, 2014)
http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/anonymous-rapist-list-spreading-on-columbia-campus/5371311d78c90a3c99000136
• Jaclyn Friedman, Author of ‘Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape’; Writer, Educator & Activist
• Samantha Cooney, Student, Columbia University; News Editor, Columbia Daily Spectator
• Lindsey Smith, Sexual Abuse Survivor; Spokesperson for RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network), an American anti-sexual assault organization, the largest in the United States
I appreciate the words of ‘bodymindalchemy’ and ‘Strawberrylaughter’ for bringing our attention to the deeper energies that are operating within our being- both the life force as well as the traumatic energies we all carry from a variety of sources.
What I would offer is that when we are exploring issues regarding sexuality we are touching into the territory of incarnation, the specific energies and experiences which led to our opportunity to embody into this carnate (meat body) life. To sink into and explore the depths of emotion and karmic story lines that organize around incarnation is a vast quest, and without some beginning guidance we can easily be led astray, or fall into the trap of unresolved suffering that we alone do not have the skills to make whole.
Levine’s work is a subtle and detailed exploration of these terrains, and to learn the type of self-exploration we are talking about my experience has demonstrated that an inner familiarity with this work, or similar understandings of shock are essential to make genuine progress.
I appreciate the appeal of making this about sex, gender, and relationship. But truly at the heart of the outward expression for each of us, there is a vast reservoir of inner experience, including our self-relationship, which requires tending. Once we are skillful in this inner way we can turn our attention to the outer situations from a core of clarity. If not, we will be stuck in a house of mirrors, continually projecting and acting-out our unresolved suffering on others, such behavior becoming the soap opera story lines and political perspectives that have served us here as a starting point for inquiry.
Thank you Eric for making this conversation available to us.
Wilhelm Reich on the Emotional Plague
http://theempireneverended.wordpress.com/the-emotional-plague/
Sexual Theories of Wilhelm Reich
http://www.orgonomy.org/articles/Baker/Sexual_Theories_of_Wilhelm_Reich.pdf
I understand that, and I believe that regarding sexual healing, the beginning is masturbation. We have all but banned and outlawed sexual healing modalities, sexual surrogacy, and many other forms of healing that would work for many people. There are many types of processes that could, in conjunction with other modalities, use a masturbation focus on resolving trauma, accessing body memory and feelings and learning to experience pleasure without anxiety. At a certain point sexual healing must be about sex. It may take a while for some to get there; for others it will be their first stop, but eventually to be sexual healing, it will need to ‘get sexual’. Establishing a boundary within oneself, and establishing an inner relationship and self-affirmation, is a safe and necessary place to explore.
Our discussion of consent requires compassionate consideration of the reality that rape, sexual abuse and other traumatic assaults on personal boundaries can make it difficult for some persons to “say yes” to themselves. Many are never fully able to feel at home with themselves, and anyone or anything else due to the level of traumatic shock in their body-mind system:
“They may spend months or even years talking about their experiences, reliving them, expressing their anger, fear and sorrow but without passing through the primitive ”immobility responses” and releasing the residual energy, they will often remain stuck in the traumatic maze and continue to experience distress.
“Fortunately, the same immense energies that create the symptoms of trauma, when properly engaged and mobilized, can transform the trauma and propel us into new heights of healing, mastery, and even wisdom. Trauma resolved is a great gift, returning us to the natural world of ebb and flow, harmony, love and compassion.”
– Peter A. Levine, Ph.D., the originator and developer of Somatic Experiencing®, a potent psychobiological method for resolving trauma symptoms and relieving chronic stress
Yes, enthusiastic consent is better as a social model, as a custom rather than as a law (it would be a travesty, because “enthusiasm” is so vague and so subjective as to be meaningless; the law must be clear).
By the way this is why I start all sex education with masturbation — and why I would present only on masturbation at poly and swing conferences. If you cannot say yes to yourself, you cannot say yes to anyone or anything else.
We are Women Against Rape but we do not want Julian Assange extradited (see article in The Guardian).
My point in posting the Wolf-Friedman debate video (see the first two comments of this thread) was not to defend Assange. It was to highlight the potentially catastrophic social policy consequences of a certain strain of third-wave feminist ideology (represented by Friedman, in my opinion).
Quite simply, if “enthusiastic consent” were imposed as the legal standard for non-rape sexuality in today’s social environment, most of the population (both female and male) would be in prison.
Not so good, methinks.
Pam, the poor treatment of women is a serious problem and may under some conditions be noteworthy as news, but that does not make it rape, or a prosecutable crime.
As Naomi Wolf points out, Assange faces torture and lifelong imprisonment if extradited to Sweden for an ulterior incident. It’s difficult to believe that anyone is falling for this ruse, but that is the nature of the rape standard.
As Kari points out, the sexual wounding is so severe that far less triggers a response. This is compounded by lack of attention to the injuries, lack of understanding, taboos on discussing them and many other factors.
Meanwhile it is homophobia that is preventing the discussion of male-male sexual abuse (particularly involving hetero identified men) from being revealed. In a later post I will describe a local scenario of a police chief who sexually abused many boys, who are now grown men who with families, who are cops — and no survivor would cooperate with prosecuting him. One reason I love our local DA is he figured out, at least, now to get the guy out of being a police chief.
The problem with the current rape discussion is that it’s being conflated with bad sexual manners and a larger problem of lack of consent by all parties leading into sex. I have detailed this in several articles and podcasts. That again is not felony rape, a crime once punishable by the death penalty in many of the United States — the only more serious crime being murder.
As I said in a comment to another post:
If you want to see where the culture is at, consider that this is a current #1 hit. It’s a song about getting so drunk you won’t remember what happened, but it was the hottest sex of your life. Hello Pitbull (net worth $50m), thanks Chelsea for sending this in — she noticed her kids were singing the song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHUbLv4ThOo
As Daniel Sternstein noted, this could have been a B-Side and it took the judgment of a lot of people to make it an A-Side. Then it went to #1.
Here are the lyrics.
Thank you DivaCarla: “I suggest this community take the lead and lay claim to the concept of Enthusiastic Consent and imbue it with everything positive, including the education that makes it authentically possible for individuals and couples to have fulfilling erotic expression.”
Thank you bodymindalchemy: “In my view, full healthy humanity requires overcoming all “us” vs “them” mentality.”
Thank you Eric Francis for your thoughtful and heartfelt remarks that, in my opinion, get to the heart of what is UNDERNEATH (let’s not forget Pluto!) so much of the controversy and widening gap between some men and women. When we move toward ‘blame’ as a way of being and a way of living, we are not honoring ourselves and our own journeys and growth. And, we are not honoring each other.
Thank you to all the contributors in this forum for bringing this issue alive — Mars in Libra — Uranus in Aries — Pluto in Capricorn — Jupiter in Cancer — it’s all here — beautifully outlined, waiting for us to unravel, untangle and heal.
Some of us are carrying so much trauma around sex–karmic, generational, personal or otherwise– that any form of sex can trigger our core trauma and feel like a violation. From this perspective, one of the paths to healing, and perhaps there are others, is to heal the core trauma where it lives energetically in the physical & subtle bodies. And there are lots of paths in to those energy bodies — therapeutic hypnosis has been effective for ages, a clear body worker can work wonders on that level of disturbance — you just have to be very clear that the method/practitioner you’re working with is the right one for you. It seems to me that you’ve got to get at and heal the core issue, or all this talk is building on weak foundations.
Eric, you express by sharing your story a key concept that people hate: We have to own personal responsibility for everything that happens to us if we are to own any personal power at all. Thriving survivors of any kind of trauma ultimately come to this place. Because I am working on something else, I have not been able to participate in the layers of this discussion all weekend, and the community has created a rich vein of resource … which now comes up number 3 on google search “enthusiastic consent.”
I encountered the concept the first time last fall in a series of Good Men Project articles, which referred to Jaclyn Friedman. She may even have written some of them. I’ve begun to included it in my curriculum around boundaries and communication, in the positive sense — how to cultivate enthusiastic consent. Often there is personal healing work before it’s available to the individual or within a relationship.
I talk to many women whose primary experience of sex in relationship looks a lot like wifely duty: he wants it/needs it and she gives it to him, even though her emotional and erotic needs are not being met most of the time. Even if she would rather go to sleep or sex feels like a chore. This is mostly because of wholesale ignorance and layers of cultural conditioning. Neither party wants sex to be like this, but they have no other model.
I suggest this community take the lead and lay claim to the concept of Enthusiastic Consent and imbue it with everything positive, including the education that makes it authentically possible for individuals and couples to have fulfilling erotic expression. Make any hint of it as a platinum standard for defining rape seem, well, perverted.
Eric the pieces I’ve read about Mr Assange have not made me think he treats women that well – or that women are necessarily people to him: you don’t have to go as far as rape or not with any of these discussions.
I liked very much Chief Niwot’s Son’s references the other day – there is clearly something in our modern (industrial?) lives that makes us dysfunctional, or doesn’t correct (heal, bring to awareness, incorporate and go on), the mistaken or ignorant awarenessess that we have.
For me the discussion is there – what is the way through now from whatever starting position.
Note, I was 100% enthusiastically behind the article — then I watched the video. That is where I started to see through her position. Then I saw the phrase used again in an article intended as a response to something I had written, falsely insinuating I was taken a “blame the victim” approach in my own writing about rape. It would seem however that one cannot write about prevention without being accused of “blaming the victim.”
By today’s standard of rape, I am a survivor, and my approach (at age 23) was not to consider myself a victim or to blame anyone but to understand what had happened and decide that it was not going to happen again; that I would not allow myself to be compromised again. Though it took a few years to work out what happened, there have been no even vaguely close repeat incidents, due entirely to my own choices, since my own choices are what led to the original incident.
Then I saw Ms. Friedman argue in the videos below that because Julian Assange had allegedly not obtained “enthusiastic consent” during the incidents in Sweden, he was in effect someone who had allegedly committed rape. That is when I put the series of associations together, with a bone-chilling feeling.
In fairness, the interview was conducted several years before this article was published. I would have to see her speak to get a sense of exactly where she is coming from today and whether she has un-rigged this conceptual trap, which I perceive as part of the modern feminist strain of thinking that strives to define sex as rape.
In my view, full healthy humanity requires overcoming all “us” vs “them” mentality.
I am a male, yes, enthusiastically.
I think that Jaclyn Friedman makes some very powerful observations about what is perhaps the most complex issue that we as humans have to deal with: how women and men treat each other. Of course she realizes that a lot of the time “enthusiastic consent” is not happening (and I don’t think she says that it must be verbal consent necessarily) and she goes on to discuss some of the larger social reasons why this is not happening, from both male and female perspectives. I found her comments to be very thoughtful, thought-provoking, and balanced in perspective.
The biggest obstacle to sexual liberation is overcoming the “us” vs “them” mentality, which puts everybody into little constricting pigeon holes, whether you are talking about women, men, rapists, sluts, studs, virgins, faggots, dykes, or what have you.
As somebody who came of age in the 70’s it is extremely disappointing to me to see where we have ended up in the 21st century. The hippies had it right: Make Love not War. Today we need more than anything else to remind ourselves that love is not war and sex is way more fun among people who are acting from a place of knowledge, self-awareness, acceptance, desire and free will. And that applies whatever kind of action is going on.
Easier said than done, however. Maybe the 70’s were so much fun because marijuana makes for more congenial relations than alcohol, any day. And maybe that is why the powers that be are so afraid to legalize weed. We’d all be too busy listening to music, eating, and humping to care about whether our SUV had the latest kind of GPS system, onboard video, or cupholders.
However, it would be nice if we didn’t need to rely on any substances to remove our inhibitions and our insecurities about enjoying sex. And it would be really nice to have a discussion about sexual relations that did not devolve into the standard male vs. female arguments. I think Jaclyn Friedman came pretty close to that. But I am a woman. Everybody else who has commented so far is, I think, a man. Eric, I know you are. And I’d bet my left nipple that bodymindalchemy is a man too.
Divide and conquer.
Kreativität ist weit mehr sexy als Kaufware.
This brand of sex-positive-ism easily devolves into a viciously sex-negative mise en abyme.
Okay, I see what Friedman is doing here. By setting the standard of consent as “enthusiastic yes,” then anything less becomes defined as rape. That is insidious because so little of sex involves even verbal consent much less enthused, and along the way there is, I am told, often a lot of alcohol involved.
“Enthusiastic consent” is in the current social environment basically a unicorn. It’s a really, really fun fantasy — one that I could get with. In fact you could easily caricature this as a male pornographic fantasy — the woman who says (not implies), Yes! and I mean it! I am SO happy about this!
It is, now that I’ve seen Friedman reason rather unreasonably, now revealing itself to be a trap.
PART 2 – Naomi Wolf vs. Jaclyn Friedman:
Feminists Debate the Sexual Allegations Against Julian Assange
Democracy Now
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/21/part_iifeminists_debate_sexual_allegations_against
Naomi Wolf vs. Jaclyn Friedman:
Feminists Debate the Sexual Allegations Against Julian Assange
Democracy Now (December 20, 2010)
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/12/20/naomi_wolf_vs_jaclyn_friedman_a