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Showing posts with label The Scene. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Scene. Show all posts
Taking the Skirt Back
School had a strict rule: girls had to wear skirts. The skirts had to cover the knees while sitting, and they couldn't be too tight. If the skirt had a slit in the back or sides, the slit could not rise above the knees.
If the skirt was too short, or deemed too "immodest" by any teacher, the girl was sent home to change.
The thing was, the school expected the girls to follow the dress codes out of school, as well. Now, if you were caught by a teacher or school administrator outside of school wearing pants, that was frowned upon, but overlooked.
But if you were caught wearing something more immodest, more revealing, like a mini-skirt? That could get a girl into a heap of trouble, not just with the school, but with the other girls. A girl who wore clothes like that was a slut. She was asking for it.
As I'm looking back on it now, it disgusts me to even write those words.
After I graduated and moved away (far, far away) I began my long farewell to my skirts.
First I only wore them if they were comfortable; when they all stopped being comfortable, I only wore them if I was going somewhere where I was required to wear a skirt; then I stopped going anywhere where I was required to wear a skirt, and started wearing jeans all the time.
By the time I met Husband, I hated skirts. Hated them. To me, they represented everything I had walked away from when I left Orthodoxy behind.
For years, I did not own more than one or two skirts.
Then I came into the kink scene. All of a sudden, skirts looked…different. They were long, short, billowy, skinny, bright, dark…but more importantly, they were sexy. They weren't worn to be modest, oh no; they were worn to show off the female figure, and flaunt a woman's curves.
Pants were suddenly modest attire, compared to the skirts I was seeing around me.
And I started buying some.
Now I have a whole collection of skirts again. Some are short, but still cover my knees. Others barely cover my thighs. I have a couple that are very long and wide; I wear those under a corset, with no panties. They are perfect for lifting around the hips for a spanking.
My skirts make me feel sexy. Womanly. Confident.
Ironically, the last thing they make me feel is submissive.
It has helped me realize submission is something a woman must feel within; it is not something a rabbi or teacher can dictate with clothes. Dictating how a woman should dress for modesty's sake is forcing her to don a costume of someone else's choosing. It is an abuse of power.
I am a kinky, submissive woman, and I will wear what I want…even skirts.
Matched Chemistry Vs Time In the Scene
When you see casual play going on between people, especially when it's a group of people, do not assume you can automatically participate. Everything you see—every touch, every grab, every mindfuck, every mode of play—is done by mutual consent. You, the newbie, do not get to assume it's a "free for all" that you can just join in. In fact, you should work under the assumption It Is Not Okay; not until you have permission.
Those people have known each other long enough, have been friends long enough, to play like that. They are well-acquainted, therefore it's okay.
Here's the caveat to that rule: Sometimes you'll know somebody for long enough, and be friends long enough...and it will still be Not Okay.
Not even if that kind of play is obviously okay with them when they're in different company.
Not even if they obviously like playing like that with others.
Not even if you really, really want that kind of play from them.
Being friends, knowing for certain they like to play like that, watching them play like that with other people, even people they don't know as well as you? That does not automatically mean they now have to play like that with you.
Some people think there's this magic clock ticking down somewhere, and once it hits zero, that means they've known someone long enough that they have to agree, or at least submit, to play.
It doesn't work like that.
The interactions, the type and level of play you have with people in the scene, do not depend solely on how long and how well you've known them.
It depends on other things, too.
Personally, I think the biggest factor is chemistry.
There are some people I like to play hard with, because that's the kind of chemistry we have; they make the beast of prey within me rise up to challenge them. There are people I like to play fast and loose with, because they're fun, and they know how to make me feel all soft and yummy inside. And then there are others who I enjoy teasing, because they enjoy the tease, and it becomes a game between us.
And then there are the others I will likely never play with at all, because we just don't have that kind of chemistry.
I still consider them friends. I still share chemistry with them; but it is of a different kind. And the truth is, I shouldn't have to owe them an explanation why I won't play with them.
No means no.
But it's hard to disappoint your friends. They want to play with you, and they don't understand why you're asking someone else to play, and not them; or they're wondering why you respond a certain way to someone else, and not the same way with them. The hard fact is, there may not be a cohesive, articulate reason to give them.
Except, maybe: the chemistry is just not there.
So if you're a newbie standing off to the sidelines, being told "don't assume you can do that too, you haven't known those people long enough," DO NOT take that to mean once a certain measure of time goes by, you'll get permission to go ahead and join in.
In fact, it's a bad idea to make any assumptions at all. Ever.
When in doubt, ask.
And until a safeword has been negotiated, no means no.
The State of Porn Today
I bought extra tickets, and I won three prizes. (I give all the credit to the "lucky cuffs" I was wearing at the time. My Lady Vicki had bound my wrists together in beautiful and stylish metal cuffs, you see. I think some people got a kick out of watching me claim the prizes with my wrists bound.)
One of the prizes I won was a collection of porn magazines.
I can't remember all the names of them…I remember there was at least one Playboy, a Hustler, a Pethouse, and a Swedish porn magazine. The Swedish one was the worst of the bunch.
I brought the magazines home together with the rest of my loot, laid it all out on the kitchen table, and showed it to Husband.
"Wow, you got Godiva hot cocoa? And Macadamia Nuts?…What's this?"
"I got porn magazines."
"I can see that. Um…they smell weird."
"They're used."
"What?" His lips curled in disgust. "They're used porn magazines? Oh my god. Look at this one, there are pictures cut out of it."
"I guess the person couldn't bear to part with a few of his favorite photos?"
"Oh my god, ew." He dropped the magazine he was holding on the table. "I'm washing my hands."
"That might be a good idea."
"You should wash your hands, too. But first, put those magazines in a bag."
I put the magazines in a shopping bag and washed my hands. Husband finished washing his hands, and scrubbed down the kitchen table.
We eyed the shopping bag of magazines.
"What do we do with them?" He asked.
"Maybe the kids want 'em?"
"You'd give this to our kids? Used porn magazines?"
"They might not care."
"Ask them, then."
I called them both upstairs. Son2 came up; Son1 was in the bathroom.
"Do you want some porn magazines?" I asked.
Son2 sighed. "Let me see them," he said, in a tone that made it sound like he was doing me a favor.
"They're in the bag," I said.
He took one out and started flipping through it. "It smells weird," he said.
"It's used," I said.
He dropped the magazine. "Ew," he cried. "Why would I want this?"
"Because it's PORN?" I said. "Don't you guys WANT porn?"
"Mom, we can get all the porn we want on the internet," he said.
"So you're telling me you DON'T want it?"
"I'm saying, I don't need it. But if want me to have it…fine."
"Well, you have to be normal about this. Hide it under your mattress and pretend I don't know. And don't tell your friends! I don't want to get into trouble for giving my kids porn!"
"Oh I am totally telling my friends about this."
"THEN NO PORN FOR YOU."
"Fine. I didn't really want it anyway."
"Go ask your brother if he wants it."
Son2 went downstairs, holding a magazine in his hands. A moment later, I hear through the bathroom door:
"Wait. What? WHAT? WHAT THE WHAT?"
Son2 trotted back upstairs, laughing. "I slipped it under the bathroom door," he said with glee.
A moment later, Son1 came upstairs, the magazine in hand. "What the hell is this?" He asked.
"Porn," I said. "I won it in a ra—drawing. You want it?"
"It smells, and there are pictures cut out."
"It's used."
"EW OH MY GOD NO."
"So you don't want it, either?"
He gave me the same incredulous look Son2 had given me and said: "Mom, we have the internet now. THE IN-TER-NET. With TUM-BLER. I don't need this."
He slapped the magazine back on the kitchen table.
"God damn it, I just washed there!" Husband yelled.
So there you have it. Neither one of my older boys wants a collection of porn magazines. They can get their porn safe and sound on their smartphones and computers, hassle-free, mess-free, evidence-free. I don't know what this means for the state of porn today. All I know is, things are a lot different from when I was a kid, hiding magazines in my closet.
Anyone want some used porn magazines?
Sexual Assault, Things We Do, and Who We Are — A Guest Post
This is not an article written by me. This article was written by Cos, on his live journal account. However, I think it is so well written, and says what I want to say so articulately, I thought I'd share the original post here. Cos wants people to share it. That being said, if you have any comments on it, please do share them with him, as this is his article.
*****
I considered locking this to friends-only, but I think it's important and I want people to link to it and re-share it and that's not going to happen unless it's public. Please read it, and share it?
I'll start with a story, something that really happened though I changed the names and some details for anonymity. Ella was good friends with a couple, Bob and Cate, and they flirted and kissed. Sometimes they attended the same sex and BDSM parties and scened with each other. One time, years ago, at such a party, Ella was having sex with someone and Bob came over. While she was giving the other guy head, Bob went down on her after what he thought was a nonverbal okay from her to join in. Ella actually would've rather he didn't, but she didn't think she minded much and she was having too much fun to interrupt what she was doing and tell him to stop, so she just enjoyed herself and let it go. Later, however, she realized that it was more of a problem for her than she knew at the time, and it made her feel icky and a little bit violated. Wanting to keep her friendship with Bob healthy, she told him about it. Not only did Bob get defensive, but Cate really freaked out. She seemed to interpret this as an attack, an accusation that Bob was a bad person, and she knew he wasn't! They weren't able to reconcile this and the friendship fizzled.
It's been on my mind lately, partly due to attending the "Addressing Sexual Harassment in Our Communities" panel at Arisia and the hours of fascinating post-panel conversation with a few people. Not long after Arisia, a friend told me about finding out from someone close to her that, a long time ago, she'd had sex with the person thinking it was consensual when actually this person did not want to and wasn't able to tell her so and just went along with it. I've long known that it's possible that I've done something like that sometime in my past, despite trying to be very careful never to do so, and I might've really hurt someone, and if it has happened, I may never know. In fact, after that post-panel discussion, I told one of the people I'd been talking about one instance where I worried, after the fact, that I might've made a mistake and crossed someone's boundaries even though the interaction seemed good while it was happening. It's on my mind because I know that any of us - including most of you who read this - may possibly have done this to someone, and may never know for sure.
My reason for writing this post is my belief that our very efforts to combat harassment and assault and rape are exacerbating this aspect of the problem, and I want to explain why, and what we can change to stop doing this. Here's another anecdote to help me illustrate what I'm about to say...
A guy I know, Ian (again a pseudonym), is thoughtful and gregarious and well liked in his group of friends. Once, someone new in that social circle told someone else in that social circle about getting into a conversation with Ian at a party, where due to his body language and mannerisms, he effectively backed her into a corner where she felt she could not easily get away, and it made her feel uncomfortable and a bit scared. Although he responded well upon finding out, and apologized, and said he didn't intend that and would pay more attention in the future to try to avoid making someone feel trapped at a party like that, getting the message from her to him was challenging. In the ensuing discussion, I noticed and pointed out an element that I thought was problematic: the use of the term predator, and the idea of identifying someone who did something bad as "someone who does bad things". I made the analogy to the way conservatives like to label "someone who crossed a border without authorization or who overstayed their visa" with "an illegal" - it's not about a thing they did, it's about who they are.
Now I want to be clear: there are sexual predators. They exist, and talking about them is important. We have studies and surveys that begin to help us understand some things about them, and one piece of the emerging picture is that while predators are a relatively small subset of the population, they repeat what they do so often, and are able to get away with it so easily, that they account for a very large proportion of assaults and rapes. So we do need to pay attention to them and figure out ways to disarm them.
However, another piece of the emerging picture is that the large majority of people who assault - not necessarily the majority of incidents, but the majority of people who do it - are not repeat predators. Many of them, and possibly even most, are clueless, or naive, or even good thoughtful people who made a mistake that one time. It's them who I'm writing this post about. By which I mean, it's us who I'm writing this post about.
While some people avoid the issue or don't think about it much, some of us want to make an active effort to prevent this from happening - and we can. We can learn, and pay attention, and adjust how we act, and greatly reduce the probability of hurting someone in this way in a sexual or intimate interaction, or violating their boundaries. We can't reduce it all the way to 0, though. And worse: there's an obstacle that many of us put in our own path towards preventing: Our dichotomy of predators vs. good people.
In this dichotomy, those who rape or assault or harass are the bad ones, the predators, the creeps; those who are good, who are working to prevent rape and assault and harassment, they don't do it. Ergo, if someone does it, they're in that first set - it's not something they did, it's how we identify them.
chaiya rather powerfully presented at the Arisia panel the dissonance and conflict caused when one of our friends is revealed to have done something like that, and we feel like we have to mentally reclassify them into the bad set in order to deal with it. That is why it was so hard to tell Ian about the relatively minor mistake he made at that party, and why the discussion around it was so fraught.
Bob and Cate got caught in this trap. They didn't hear Ella telling them about a mistake Bob made, so that he'd know and correct for it; they heard Ella accusing Bob of being a creep and a rapist, and they recoiled. They strove to redefine what happened rather than redefine Bob. Since Bob and Ella had a pattern of sexy play together, and she seemed inviting at the time, and she could easily have objected and he certainly would've heeded her objection, it couldn't have been a serious transgression, right? Lost on them was the fact that Ella actually wasn'tclaiming it was a serious transgression; she accepted it as an honest mistake by a well meaning person who she wanted to remain friends with, but they didn't seem able to see that. Our dichotomy of goodguys and predators doesn't leave any room for something being both "unwanted sexual contact" and "honest mistake by well meaning person". Since those two things cannot overlap, Ella's insistence that this was in fact unwanted sexual contact was a horrifying accusation they rejected wholly.
Which is a common and understandable reaction, and possibly the biggest reason why Ella was the exception; most people in her situation don't tell. Whether they understand this reason for it directly or not, they know on some level that telling isn't likely to lead to anything good, most of the time. It'll be awkward, possibly scary; they'll offend people, and they'll lose friends, and they won't be easily believed. Someone who hears this kind of thing needs to be skeptical of the complaint in order to avoid being forced to think of themselves or their accused friend as a creep or a predator. The way we talk about these issues forces that choice on them, one or the other: either your friend (or you) are a monster, or the complaint has to be minimized and dismissed.
You can see how this makes it harder for us to improve. Harder for us to learn how to better prevent making mistakes that hurt other people. When we're not ready to hear about what we've done wrong, and about what our friends and colleagues have done wrong, we coerce those who know - those who've been hurt - into not telling people about it. Then we don't learn from it, and we're more likely to do it again, and still not realize it.
Another anecdote. Recently in a group discussion, a friend commended me in everyone's hearing for the time that she and I were in bed together, turned on and both wanting each other, and I told her that I would not have sex with her because her consent seemed ambiguous to me, and I was not convinced that she knew how to say no. It's something I've done a number of times with a number of potential partners, actually. In telling people about it she was sending a few messages to the group. Among those messages, intentionally, she was letting them know that I take extra care about consent and that I'm safe. [Edit: another overt message is "here's something you too could do", a way of both praising and describing good practices.] Unintentionally, she was making it even harder for anyone to whom this message spread to ever tell me, or any of my friends, about any occasion in which I didn't take enough care and got it wrong. Because they know that other people may perceive me as safe and good to a greater than normal extent, they also know that it's even less safe to make accusations about me to people who have that impression. People who will go further to protect their idea of me, by attacking someone who says something that would redefine me. In other words, I'm in a position of power - part of it unsought and mine by default, and part of it legitimately earned through actions and effort over time - and that position of power stands as an obstacle that can prevent me from finding out the very things that would help me improve.
I certainly didn't always know that when someone initiates sexual activity and says "yes", and I really want to have sex, it's possible that she is conflicted and following through would hurt her. It's something I learned, as an adult, after I'd already had sex many times with several people. I'm glad I learned it, and I know it has helped me prevent harm, but learning it also lets me understand how I might have caused harm in the past in situations where I would not have understood that it was even possible. What's more, I'm still learning. I'm still getting better at this. Which means, I'm quite sure, that there are things I don't yet know.
Going on this learning journey requires understanding that we all have some power, to varying degrees, to harm people, and that our responsibility isn't to be innocent. What we actually want to do is connect with people, and have sex, and have powerful and positive sexual and intimate interactions, and at the same time prevent to the best of our ability the harm that we risk when pursuing those things; harm both to ourselves and to others. We need to learn what our power is, and what it can cause, and strategies for mitigating risk and preventing harm. We can't do that if being innocent of wrongdoing is our goal, because the only way to be sure to be innocent is to be ignorant.
For the past few paragraphs I've been talking about people who actively want to learn, and the obstacles that this predator/goodguy dichotomy causes for such people. But it's the people who aren't actively trying who are at much higher risk of harming their partners and others, and the obstacles we're creating are much higher when it comes to getting through to them. Innocence through ignorance is the common defense against being a creep, predator, or rapist, when it comes to people's personal identity. If they don't know their power and they don't understand what mistakes they might make, they can keep their self-image on the good side of that hard line, the side where they've never done "it", where the monsters are other people.
People go to great lengths to protect this innocence through ignorance, and I believe that's the main reason why there's so much resistance to education about sexual assault and rape, and to many related parts of feminism as well. Particularly when it comes to gender relations (though not just when it comes to gender relations), a lot of this is about the power men have and how it hurts women. In order to accept this, men have to accept the idea that they do have this power - even though they didn't consciously seek it - and the possibility that through this power, they have in fact hurt women, though they may not have intended it. Going down that path leads to the thoughts I talked about above, and they're not comfortable. If you're steeped in a predator/goodguy dichotomoy, going down that path is not possible, because you'd have to re-classify yourself as the predator. Most people will never do that. So they have to defend themselves, just as Bob and Cate did, and as Ian's friend's struggled with, and for a lot of people, that defense means rejecting the whole cluster of associated ideas.
To put it another way, if my goal is to be innocent, and someone tells me I violated someone's boundary when I didn't think I'd done that, my priority is to dismiss that claim, because I know I meant well and I know I'm good. Hearing what I did wrong will threaten that image of myself. It's only when I know that I can mean well and be good and still fuck up and that doesn't create a new identity for me, and when my goal is not to be innocent but to learn how to do better, that I can hear what they're telling me and learn from it and adjust accordingly for the future.
If we want to move forward, I believe we must reorient how we talk about these issues, not only to accept that someone who does a bad thing isn't automatically a predator, but to actively encourage the thought that most people who do these bad things are good people who need to hear constructively about what they did and how to avoid repeating it. At the same time, we need to still be clear that some people are predators, and they repeat these actions without changing, but that it takes more than an occasional mistake to cross that line of identity - it takes a pattern. We need to create space, both in ourselves and in our communities, to welcome hearing about these mistakes, apologize for them, learn from them, and change what we do to avoid repeating the same ones... without that preventing us from calling out actual predatory behavior. We've been focusing a lot on the latter, and it's understandable, because it's been a hard thing to do; predators have a lot of social support. But while working hard on improving one side of the problem, I think we're making the other side worse, so let's think about how to integrate our approach and move forward on both.
Edit: Several commenters are getting from my post ideas about there being a range rather than black/white, and that's part of it, but my real emphasis is the distinction between talking about actions and how to change them, vs. labeling people and treating actions as identity.
*****
Powerful article, no? Debates about consent, consent violators, and predators have been all over Fetlife lately. And they ARE debates; some people have very different opinions, and believe strongly they are right.
The thing is, a lot of the time, both people can be right. It depends on the circumstances.
I will probably touch upon this issue again soon…after my next book is out.
*****
I considered locking this to friends-only, but I think it's important and I want people to link to it and re-share it and that's not going to happen unless it's public. Please read it, and share it?
I'll start with a story, something that really happened though I changed the names and some details for anonymity. Ella was good friends with a couple, Bob and Cate, and they flirted and kissed. Sometimes they attended the same sex and BDSM parties and scened with each other. One time, years ago, at such a party, Ella was having sex with someone and Bob came over. While she was giving the other guy head, Bob went down on her after what he thought was a nonverbal okay from her to join in. Ella actually would've rather he didn't, but she didn't think she minded much and she was having too much fun to interrupt what she was doing and tell him to stop, so she just enjoyed herself and let it go. Later, however, she realized that it was more of a problem for her than she knew at the time, and it made her feel icky and a little bit violated. Wanting to keep her friendship with Bob healthy, she told him about it. Not only did Bob get defensive, but Cate really freaked out. She seemed to interpret this as an attack, an accusation that Bob was a bad person, and she knew he wasn't! They weren't able to reconcile this and the friendship fizzled.
It's been on my mind lately, partly due to attending the "Addressing Sexual Harassment in Our Communities" panel at Arisia and the hours of fascinating post-panel conversation with a few people. Not long after Arisia, a friend told me about finding out from someone close to her that, a long time ago, she'd had sex with the person thinking it was consensual when actually this person did not want to and wasn't able to tell her so and just went along with it. I've long known that it's possible that I've done something like that sometime in my past, despite trying to be very careful never to do so, and I might've really hurt someone, and if it has happened, I may never know. In fact, after that post-panel discussion, I told one of the people I'd been talking about one instance where I worried, after the fact, that I might've made a mistake and crossed someone's boundaries even though the interaction seemed good while it was happening. It's on my mind because I know that any of us - including most of you who read this - may possibly have done this to someone, and may never know for sure.
My reason for writing this post is my belief that our very efforts to combat harassment and assault and rape are exacerbating this aspect of the problem, and I want to explain why, and what we can change to stop doing this. Here's another anecdote to help me illustrate what I'm about to say...
A guy I know, Ian (again a pseudonym), is thoughtful and gregarious and well liked in his group of friends. Once, someone new in that social circle told someone else in that social circle about getting into a conversation with Ian at a party, where due to his body language and mannerisms, he effectively backed her into a corner where she felt she could not easily get away, and it made her feel uncomfortable and a bit scared. Although he responded well upon finding out, and apologized, and said he didn't intend that and would pay more attention in the future to try to avoid making someone feel trapped at a party like that, getting the message from her to him was challenging. In the ensuing discussion, I noticed and pointed out an element that I thought was problematic: the use of the term predator, and the idea of identifying someone who did something bad as "someone who does bad things". I made the analogy to the way conservatives like to label "someone who crossed a border without authorization or who overstayed their visa" with "an illegal" - it's not about a thing they did, it's about who they are.
Now I want to be clear: there are sexual predators. They exist, and talking about them is important. We have studies and surveys that begin to help us understand some things about them, and one piece of the emerging picture is that while predators are a relatively small subset of the population, they repeat what they do so often, and are able to get away with it so easily, that they account for a very large proportion of assaults and rapes. So we do need to pay attention to them and figure out ways to disarm them.
However, another piece of the emerging picture is that the large majority of people who assault - not necessarily the majority of incidents, but the majority of people who do it - are not repeat predators. Many of them, and possibly even most, are clueless, or naive, or even good thoughtful people who made a mistake that one time. It's them who I'm writing this post about. By which I mean, it's us who I'm writing this post about.
While some people avoid the issue or don't think about it much, some of us want to make an active effort to prevent this from happening - and we can. We can learn, and pay attention, and adjust how we act, and greatly reduce the probability of hurting someone in this way in a sexual or intimate interaction, or violating their boundaries. We can't reduce it all the way to 0, though. And worse: there's an obstacle that many of us put in our own path towards preventing: Our dichotomy of predators vs. good people.
In this dichotomy, those who rape or assault or harass are the bad ones, the predators, the creeps; those who are good, who are working to prevent rape and assault and harassment, they don't do it. Ergo, if someone does it, they're in that first set - it's not something they did, it's how we identify them.
chaiya rather powerfully presented at the Arisia panel the dissonance and conflict caused when one of our friends is revealed to have done something like that, and we feel like we have to mentally reclassify them into the bad set in order to deal with it. That is why it was so hard to tell Ian about the relatively minor mistake he made at that party, and why the discussion around it was so fraught.Bob and Cate got caught in this trap. They didn't hear Ella telling them about a mistake Bob made, so that he'd know and correct for it; they heard Ella accusing Bob of being a creep and a rapist, and they recoiled. They strove to redefine what happened rather than redefine Bob. Since Bob and Ella had a pattern of sexy play together, and she seemed inviting at the time, and she could easily have objected and he certainly would've heeded her objection, it couldn't have been a serious transgression, right? Lost on them was the fact that Ella actually wasn'tclaiming it was a serious transgression; she accepted it as an honest mistake by a well meaning person who she wanted to remain friends with, but they didn't seem able to see that. Our dichotomy of goodguys and predators doesn't leave any room for something being both "unwanted sexual contact" and "honest mistake by well meaning person". Since those two things cannot overlap, Ella's insistence that this was in fact unwanted sexual contact was a horrifying accusation they rejected wholly.
Which is a common and understandable reaction, and possibly the biggest reason why Ella was the exception; most people in her situation don't tell. Whether they understand this reason for it directly or not, they know on some level that telling isn't likely to lead to anything good, most of the time. It'll be awkward, possibly scary; they'll offend people, and they'll lose friends, and they won't be easily believed. Someone who hears this kind of thing needs to be skeptical of the complaint in order to avoid being forced to think of themselves or their accused friend as a creep or a predator. The way we talk about these issues forces that choice on them, one or the other: either your friend (or you) are a monster, or the complaint has to be minimized and dismissed.
You can see how this makes it harder for us to improve. Harder for us to learn how to better prevent making mistakes that hurt other people. When we're not ready to hear about what we've done wrong, and about what our friends and colleagues have done wrong, we coerce those who know - those who've been hurt - into not telling people about it. Then we don't learn from it, and we're more likely to do it again, and still not realize it.
Another anecdote. Recently in a group discussion, a friend commended me in everyone's hearing for the time that she and I were in bed together, turned on and both wanting each other, and I told her that I would not have sex with her because her consent seemed ambiguous to me, and I was not convinced that she knew how to say no. It's something I've done a number of times with a number of potential partners, actually. In telling people about it she was sending a few messages to the group. Among those messages, intentionally, she was letting them know that I take extra care about consent and that I'm safe. [Edit: another overt message is "here's something you too could do", a way of both praising and describing good practices.] Unintentionally, she was making it even harder for anyone to whom this message spread to ever tell me, or any of my friends, about any occasion in which I didn't take enough care and got it wrong. Because they know that other people may perceive me as safe and good to a greater than normal extent, they also know that it's even less safe to make accusations about me to people who have that impression. People who will go further to protect their idea of me, by attacking someone who says something that would redefine me. In other words, I'm in a position of power - part of it unsought and mine by default, and part of it legitimately earned through actions and effort over time - and that position of power stands as an obstacle that can prevent me from finding out the very things that would help me improve.
I certainly didn't always know that when someone initiates sexual activity and says "yes", and I really want to have sex, it's possible that she is conflicted and following through would hurt her. It's something I learned, as an adult, after I'd already had sex many times with several people. I'm glad I learned it, and I know it has helped me prevent harm, but learning it also lets me understand how I might have caused harm in the past in situations where I would not have understood that it was even possible. What's more, I'm still learning. I'm still getting better at this. Which means, I'm quite sure, that there are things I don't yet know.
Going on this learning journey requires understanding that we all have some power, to varying degrees, to harm people, and that our responsibility isn't to be innocent. What we actually want to do is connect with people, and have sex, and have powerful and positive sexual and intimate interactions, and at the same time prevent to the best of our ability the harm that we risk when pursuing those things; harm both to ourselves and to others. We need to learn what our power is, and what it can cause, and strategies for mitigating risk and preventing harm. We can't do that if being innocent of wrongdoing is our goal, because the only way to be sure to be innocent is to be ignorant.
For the past few paragraphs I've been talking about people who actively want to learn, and the obstacles that this predator/goodguy dichotomy causes for such people. But it's the people who aren't actively trying who are at much higher risk of harming their partners and others, and the obstacles we're creating are much higher when it comes to getting through to them. Innocence through ignorance is the common defense against being a creep, predator, or rapist, when it comes to people's personal identity. If they don't know their power and they don't understand what mistakes they might make, they can keep their self-image on the good side of that hard line, the side where they've never done "it", where the monsters are other people.
People go to great lengths to protect this innocence through ignorance, and I believe that's the main reason why there's so much resistance to education about sexual assault and rape, and to many related parts of feminism as well. Particularly when it comes to gender relations (though not just when it comes to gender relations), a lot of this is about the power men have and how it hurts women. In order to accept this, men have to accept the idea that they do have this power - even though they didn't consciously seek it - and the possibility that through this power, they have in fact hurt women, though they may not have intended it. Going down that path leads to the thoughts I talked about above, and they're not comfortable. If you're steeped in a predator/goodguy dichotomoy, going down that path is not possible, because you'd have to re-classify yourself as the predator. Most people will never do that. So they have to defend themselves, just as Bob and Cate did, and as Ian's friend's struggled with, and for a lot of people, that defense means rejecting the whole cluster of associated ideas.
To put it another way, if my goal is to be innocent, and someone tells me I violated someone's boundary when I didn't think I'd done that, my priority is to dismiss that claim, because I know I meant well and I know I'm good. Hearing what I did wrong will threaten that image of myself. It's only when I know that I can mean well and be good and still fuck up and that doesn't create a new identity for me, and when my goal is not to be innocent but to learn how to do better, that I can hear what they're telling me and learn from it and adjust accordingly for the future.
If we want to move forward, I believe we must reorient how we talk about these issues, not only to accept that someone who does a bad thing isn't automatically a predator, but to actively encourage the thought that most people who do these bad things are good people who need to hear constructively about what they did and how to avoid repeating it. At the same time, we need to still be clear that some people are predators, and they repeat these actions without changing, but that it takes more than an occasional mistake to cross that line of identity - it takes a pattern. We need to create space, both in ourselves and in our communities, to welcome hearing about these mistakes, apologize for them, learn from them, and change what we do to avoid repeating the same ones... without that preventing us from calling out actual predatory behavior. We've been focusing a lot on the latter, and it's understandable, because it's been a hard thing to do; predators have a lot of social support. But while working hard on improving one side of the problem, I think we're making the other side worse, so let's think about how to integrate our approach and move forward on both.
Edit: Several commenters are getting from my post ideas about there being a range rather than black/white, and that's part of it, but my real emphasis is the distinction between talking about actions and how to change them, vs. labeling people and treating actions as identity.
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Powerful article, no? Debates about consent, consent violators, and predators have been all over Fetlife lately. And they ARE debates; some people have very different opinions, and believe strongly they are right.
The thing is, a lot of the time, both people can be right. It depends on the circumstances.
I will probably touch upon this issue again soon…after my next book is out.
