The limits of consent
I’ll be posting more on the Aurukun case in a little while. I’m slowly easing myself back into blogging… I have no idea how people with full-time jobs can make time for it, honestly!
But for now I have a bit of a commentary and critique of other things happening in the feminist blogosphere.
Jessica Valenti has announced that she has a new book contract and has put the call out for an anthology on rape culture that she’s co-editing with Jaclyn Friedman.
Co-editors Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti are seeking submissions for their anthology on rape culture, Yes Means Yes!, to be published by Seal Press in Fall 2008.
Imagine a world where women enjoy sex on their own terms and aren’t shamed for it. Imagine a world where men treat their sexual partners as collaborators, not conquests. Imagine a world where rape is rare and swiftly punished.
Welcome to the world of Yes Means Yes.
Yes Means Yes! will fly in the face of the conventional feminist wisdom that rape has nothing to do with sex. We are looking to collect sharp and insightful essays, from voices both established and new, that demonstrate how empowering female sexual pleasure is the key to dismantling rape culture.
Potential essay subjects could include;
* Revamping how public sex education is taught, and to whom.
* The new backlash against rape survivors (i.e., media obsession with drinking, Girls Gone Wild culture being to blame for assault)
* Bringing men back into the conversation, making men leaders in the movement to end rape culture
* Thoughts on “enthusiastic consent”
* Taking Back the Porn: How changing the pornography industry can stop rape
* The power of language (naming rape for what it is, or the new myth of “gray rape”)
* A primer for men on sexual assault
* How good sex (where women’s pleasure is central) can mean an end to rape culture, and how a society that values genuine female sexual pleasure will make it easier to identify and prosecute rapists.
* Rethinking sexual interaction as a private joint performance, as opposed to as an exchange of a commodity or service
* An analysis of the economics of female sexual alienation/oppression, and an economic model for resistance
* Holding the MSM accountable for torture porn, kidnapping crusades and faux feminism.
* Desegmenting the Market: overcoming commercially enforced sexual stereotypes to organize across race, class, gender, and difference
* On pulling out the invisible lynchpin of rape culture: homophobia
* Creating accurate media representations of rape
Women and men, published and unpublished authors, are all encouraged to submit essays. Be creative, be forward-thinking, be funny! Perhaps most importantly, we are seeking essays with a pro-active bent that offer new and insightful thoughts and actions on how to dismantle rape culture. No more “No Means No,” let’s think “Yes Means Yes!”
In general, I’m very supportive of exploring consensuality as an element of rape culture, and some of the proposals in the call-out are exciting to me as a feminist. I think that good sex education ought to be a big priority of feminism, to empower young people to make healthy decisions about their lives and bodies. I also think that sex education can be a life-long endeavour, that adult feminists have a great deal to learn, and young people a great deal to offer, when it comes to understanding sex and revolutionising sexual practice.
However, the way this anthology is being framed seems really limited to me.
I’ve seen pro-consent activism that went into a great deal of depth about the needs of a consent-based approach to sexuality. Groups like worldwithout in Melbourne have some great resources on sexual assault based on ongoing activism they’re doing around the issue. So I’m in no way unsupportive of the stated aims of this project.
But while talking about the IDA for community response to sexual assault, I also heard some criticism of consent-based work on sexual violence because of all the people who experience sexual violence without having the opportunity to give or withhold consent. Indeed, given that the majority of sexual assaults occur in institutions, not within the family or amongst intimate partners, this is a glaring omission.
The use of sexualised violence to dominate and control people isn’t addressed by consent-based activism, and often there’s no legal protection against this kind of assault because it occurs in government institutions or is otherwise mandated by the state. For instance, women in Australian prisons are subjected to daily strip searches and cavity searches, where no hygiene is observed. Evidence shows that these women exhibit similar symptoms to rape survivors. Sisters Inside, a women’s prison advocacy group, have a research paper about it here.
This data reminds me of some of Bfp’s writing about women’s experiences of sexual violence when crossing the US-Mexico border, women who are raped by border guards or in immigration detention facilities…
And I think that this kind of blatantly non-consensual sexual contact, which can either serve the purpose of sexual pleasure or not, occurring in institutional contexts has to be considered when defining the term ‘rape culture’ and deciding what “the key to dismantling rape culture” really is.
I don’t think that the call-out for the anthology deals with systemic and institutionalised sexual violence very well, and it seems to privatise the issue, so that partner and acquaintance rape is central to the understanding of ‘rape culture’ being employed.
So if “female sexual pleasure is the key to dismantling rape culture” in a world in which women are far from equal to each other, then which women’s orgasms are “the key to dismantling rape culture”?
That’s a very strong claim to make, and I have serious doubts that an anthology framed as it is in the call-out will be able to live up to that claim.
I think that this call-out is implicitly centralising certain kinds of women and certain kinds of rape by crowding-out many other kinds of women, and other kinds of rape. And I thought feminism, and Valenti, had learned enough from “identity politics” to realise how problematic that is.
And in that case, I don’t think it’s advisable to claim to “fly in the face of the conventional feminist wisdom that rape has nothing to do with sex” or to frame a pleasure-positive, consent-based sexual politics in opposition to an oversimplified caricature of older feminisms. For one thing, older feminists such as Betty Dodson have done ground-breaking work in promoting female sexual pleasure as a means of empowerment; for another, this newer work wouldn’t exist without that older work.
In fact, the only means I have of making sense of daily cavity searches in women’s prisons, or of friends telling me about the humiliation and fear they experienced when being strip-searched, is to divest myself of any concept of sexual consent and to return to the older feminist catchphrase: “rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power”.
This is a great post, as always. You’re questions and analysis are always spot-on. Thanks for sharing.
This “Yes Means Yes” framework definitely doesn’t help define my own experience. He was my professor and a so-called community leader. I said yes. The situation was pretexted with “we could make this work” and not to mention the “I think we should ‘publish’ something together”’s or the “I’m so crazy about you”’s used to manipulate. The very next day it happened he came with “this can’t work.” Power was a central role in my case. The fact that he was a professor, male, a trusted and highly regarded member of the community, and that my mentor was his best friend, all were exploited in that moment. After finding out he was a long time continuous perpetrator, it was even clearer that he exploited that power, fooling students into “consent” or attempting to do so. He had also exploited his power by having his young female assistants carry out his research for him, among other things. I’m with the old school definition. I think looking at institutional power as the context for controlling bodies is key here.
Well put. I share your skepticism. More and more recently it has seemed to me that in order to say something “new” and marketable supposedly progressive people are seriously limiting their vision and narrowing the discourse. I actually think that’s one of the major pitfalls of trying to make feminism marketable…it forces people to pretend that there is one feminist discourse on rape and that this is an exciting innovation…instead of being honest about the multiple histories. I agree that it feels very limited, exclusive and even insulting to those of us who are committed to creating a world free from sexual violence to suggest that it is as simple as yes means yes.
I am also confused about how that framing reflects on our forecloses some of their bullet points, and I think I may just disagree about the economic politics of sex here…because a “desegmented market” that allows people to organize across races/classes whatever is still a “market”. Maybe this is because my vision of feminism is explicitly anti-capitalist and this one tries to reconcile feminism with capitalism…or to sell feminism in an existing market.
Anyway I just want to affirm your statement here that rape is about power….which is not to say that it has nothing to do with sex….but is to say that sex…like everything else is implicated in the matrices of power that we face differentially.
All this is to say…thank you for this post. The conversation you start here is very very crucial.
great post firefly.
GReat post firefly
Preach!
Thanks so much for this – I’ve been reading some comments about this book and I’ve been frustrated both with those comments and also with the call for papers, and I haven’t been clear in my own mind about what’s bothering me with each. Your post helped me sort it out.
Firefly-
I’m really glad I came over here to read more, because I didn’t understand your critique in the comments at shrub, but now they’re perfectly clear to me and hard to argue with.
As I said at tekanji’s, I really regret the language about “flying in the face,” etc. You’re all right that it’s falsely oppositional and erases the great work that has come before ours, without which we would not be able to do our work.
As for the critique of the limits of consent-based prevention work, yes. And we should have acknowledged those limits in the call as well: this is only a piece of the work. A limited (though still important) piece of the work. And, that said, there are obviously some ways we can make it less limited than how it is currently framed, and we’re going to work on doing just that. I hope you’ll consider submitting something — maybe about the limits of the consent-based focus of the book?
Honestly, this is my first time working on such a public project, and, while I would’ve told you I was already very careful about choosing my words, I’m learning what a long way I have to go. The cat’s kind of out of the bag with the call for submissions, but I’d like to look into issuing a second version that incorporates all this feedback to make clearer what we intend and don’t intend.
This is a great post, but I wonder if both points of view can be linked. For example, is the ‘traditional’ view of sex that sex is power, and if women are treated as ‘conquests’ it’s because men wish to demonstrate their power over women?
So if “female sexual pleasure is the key to dismantling rape culture” in a world in which women are far from equal to each other, then which women’s orgasms are “the key to dismantling rape culture”?
Bingo.
Can you tell me what the source for this statistic is?
Ampersand,
That statistic was quoted to me in the referenced conversation about the IDA for community response to sexual assault. I tried finding an online source for it, but I wasn’t sure where to look.
Thanks for bringing it up — I did worry about posting that unattributed stat when I wrote the post.
I think the post can stand on its own without that stat, though. Institutional sexual violence is a huge problem regardless of the precise comparative proportion of institutional to acquaintance rapes. What do you think?
Oh, I definitely agree with you about that. I pretty much agree with all of your post. I don’t have a problem with the subject of “Yes Means Yes” — I think it’s actually quite important — but the way they framed it, in the call for submissions, is just wrong.
I was just curious about where that stat came from; I haven’t been able to find a source for it, either. Thank you for looking.
I call “bullshit!” I’m sorry, this whole “Yes means Yes” just sounds like an idea that wasn’t very well thought out. Of course, that’s par for the course with Valenti.
Stumbly, I couldn’t agree more with you. Especially because an Australian woman, Kath Albury, put out (so to speak) a book with exactly the same name a few years ago, and it has very similar politics and similarly few critical analyses from feminist perspectives like yours.
Here’s the other thing about sex vis a vis power (here via Feline Formal Shorts’ link roundup on this proposal btw) – and that is for all the (unjust, unlettered) slamming of Dworkin for supposedly saying “all sex is rape” – that statement, taken at face value, is simply an acknowledgment of what is embedded into the English language (and many others too).
–Every time we say, “Fuck you!” – we are saying that All Sex Is Rape, in our minds.
–Every time we say, “We’re so screwed” – we are saying that All Sex Is Rape, in our eyes.
–Every time we say, “Bend over!” to indicate metaphorically that bad times are in store for someone, – we are saying that we believe that All Sex Is Rape, at least for the penetratee.
Which is to say, the one who “plays the woman’s part,” to use a euphemism that was old slang in the Iclandic sagas (where it was a deadly insult among Vikings.)
Who exactly thinks that All Sex Is Rape? Not “feminists” but mainstream, het-male-dominated culture, by our base assumptions. (Pun alas intended.)
bellatrys,
I have no intention of engaging in a discussion about this with you since you have not contributed anything which is strictly relevant to the issue at hand. It is your responsibility to read the commenting policy before posting a comment like the above.
However, I have chosen to publish your comment, with the part about the Kama Sutra removed. It is completely inappropriate and disrespectful of you to come to my space and speak like that about my culture.