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.