Old Crow, mydriasis, IPJ:

This is what I said, I'm all about that. However, we should also be dictating to men what the new social contract is.

I did not say this in the context of what an individual woman should say to an individual man whom she wants to date. I said it in the context of discussing whether and how we (as humans) should advocate NMN and/or YMY. NMN is the old social contract. YMY is the new social contract being bandied about. We, as humans, as representatives of society, get to have opinions on the current social contract we hold with one another, and we get to voice these opinions, advertise them, teach them in high school sex ed classes, or shout them to incoming freshmen at university rallies. Those are examples of forums where we should be dictating to men what the social contract is.

Not that a given woman is going to unilaterally tell the man she's interested in dating how he will be allowed to behave. (Though I have nothing against sexual negotiations. I think they're wonderful, but very few people use them. I hope we someday make that step, where verbalizing exactly what you want in bed is as tension-free as discussing what you like in a car, or in movies. But I don't know that people will ever be secure enough to do that - it's fraught with vulnerability.)

@171: While I dislike the term "bully magnet", and don't think it applies to situations of adult sexual relationships in the schoolyard violence dynamic implied by those specific words, I do think there is something useful to realize that if you are going through a series of terrible relationships, the one indisputable constant is you. If you keep ending up with awful guys, you are the one picking them. You should look at why that is.

Also, the real bastards out there aren't going to give a shit about YMY. Your whole idea of "they are even more deserving of protection" isn't going to protect them. The decent guys are already treating them decently, and the cads aren't going to change their behavior.

@208, Gamebird:

"Those are examples of forums where we should be dictating to men what the social contract is."

This really troubles me. We (who is "we" btw?) should not "dictate" men what the new social contract is. If there is a need for a new social contract (and I am not sure there is), then people should discuss with each other. A contract is something mutually agreed upon, not dictated by one side to the other.

And, @208, as this week's letters demonstrate these issues are also relevant in homosexual relationships because women are not always victims, and men are not only aggressors.

199, 200, 201--

I like Nocute's suggestion of "betrayed" as a good word for what we're describing. I don't think one can divorce "rape" from its legal and 2 person associations, the idea that there must be a raper and a rapee.

I do believe it's possible to feel so turned on that one does things in the turned-on state that one wouldn't ordinarily and that one regrets later. I've felt that too. I also agree that it's useful to try to explain to inexperienced people that this may happen. I'm not sure what form the warning would take as it really is a matter of trying to explain the unexplainable, but I believe it's worth a try. I'm also unsure of how useful the whole exercise is for all the reasons being pointed out in this thread.

I'm sure I prefer, and this might be just me, that a guy attempt to convince me to want to have sex with him despite my misgivings by getting me turned on. Better than all that endless wordy argument and convincing I remember from my teens and early 20s.

This might be the crux of the disagreement. I see touching me in a way that gives me enough pleasure that I override my inhibitions and reluctance as a good and beautiful thing. I see rape and everything associated with rape as horrible. I think that if anyone were actually in a rape situation, it would be so horrible that the very least they could do would be to take ordinary steps to say no or to get away from the bad situation.

For that reason, I couldn't imagine someone entwining the good feelings of the sex that comes from getting to the point of wanting to say yes with the bad feelings of not being able to say no (from fear of harm or retribution).

I'm glad for the opportunity to hash out what we mean and what we're saying.

@avast

I understand why you feel that way, but I (and many people, as you can see by the fact that I'm not the only one who raised concerned with YMY) do treat certain aspects of sex a little differently than certain nonsexual aspects. I know admitting sexual and nonsexual situations can feel different is some sort of cardinal sin on SL but I just did it. So sue me.

I think it's amusing you think I have a chip on my shoulder when I say that the way things have worked for me in the past, and will probably work for me in the future is totally fine with me, but I wouldn't appreciate the change for a variety of reasons. Does a chip that only exists in a hypothetical situation even count?

And besides, your metaphor isn't even apt. The point of YMY is that it assumes that you need to be asked in order to establish consent. As someone else said, it is about 'dictating' to people that they must behave in that way. So it's not about "say your boyfriend asked you if you wanted a cup of coffee" its

"say we made it social contract that he has to ask your permission to bring you coffee. And that it would be morally wrong for him to just bring you coffee in the morning without him asking because that's akin to forcing you to drink coffee against your will. The reason we're doing this is because some people will drink coffee they don't even want just because someone brought it to them, instead of saying 'no thanks'."

And no, I wouldn't like that, and neither would he.

To answer your question, if he were to say "hey, do you want a coffee?" that would be a nice thought (and not a problem) but as I said before, I don't view sex and coffee identically. And I can't have coffee anyway.

@ Erica

"maybe I can prevent an actual rape, by letting someone know ahead of time that this loss of control does happen, just as I can warn people not to drink and drive."

You were comparing 'preventing an actual rape' to 'warning people not to drink and drive' so I assumed you meant preventing rape by preventing the actions of rapists. I was unclear as to how your story would prevent someone from raping someone else.

I think I must have missed something there. But again... I don't think you're lying?

I think you're a nice lady and I feel bad that you found yourself in a situation where you felt violated. All I said is that I'm uncomfortable with people using the word 'rape' so liberally - but that's not any comment on you, and I'm sorry if you take it to mean I have doubts about your story. I don't.

@208

I personally don't like having that message 'dictated' on my behalf, but hey. Agree to disagree.

@208: I understood what you meant. I disagreed. I do not interpret the social contract as one which must be dictated to half the population, but not the other half. I always liked Hillary Clinton's take on feminism, that women are human. And so we do not talk about women's rights as a separate and distinct category from human rights. Whenever someone tries to separate things out (leaving out pregnancy and childbirth, which only affect one gender directly) I'm not happy. Whether its the bad old people talking about the rights of man with the understanding that these don't really apply to the special vulnerable class of women, or new bad people talking about how women are less able to speak and think for themselves and thus need special consideration for their perpetual role as victims.

Put another way, if the social contract needs to be dictated to one half of the population, then I can tell right there that it is deeply flawed.

Re 209: I was thinking about the term bully magnet last night, and realized that while I was bullied in middle and high school, it was just in school. Outside groups like summer camp I was just a normal (if still shy and quiet) part of the group. My perception then--that if I could just have changed schools things would probably have been a lot better--now seems very true. Whereas if someone is being bullied in all new situations--where they themselves are the constant--then trying to figure out if they're doing something that plasters "Easy Victim" on their forehead is a practical thought. Leave the blame for the aggression on the aggressor, but maybe the victim would like some practical techniques for being safer in their next new social milieu, rather than just the comfort of moral certainty.

In adult relationships, if you date a string of people who treat you badly, then maybe you need less reassurance from your friends that this is all their fault, and more practical counseling aimed at teaching you some things you can do differently. Not changing where the blame goes, but changing how helpless you feel to do anything other than sit and wait for the next tornado to wipe you out, since the last three weren't your fault, either.

@202(EricaP), I think the strong body-mind dissociation you're talking about is experienced every day by every (supposedly) fat person who starts a diet. Or by every smoker who wants to stop smoking. It's actually a frequent experience, and one that they can usually talk about without rape metaphors (nocutename's idea of using 'betrayed by one's body' strikes me as good, for instance).

Not that I personally have anything against using the word 'rape' for that. Languages change, meanings shift, and it affects all kinds of words; that's why Americans now need a dictionary or good comments to fully understand Shakespeare. Still... you know what the problem with evocative language is: the more frequently it is used, the more it bleaches till it hits irrelevance/meaninglessness. (Look how differently evocative the words 'lord' and 'lady' have become in modern English, despite the fact they started out both referring to members of the lower nobility.) And the word 'rape' is already thrown around in all kinds of situations, to make all kinds of points, some of which are so vaguely related to the actual reality of rape...

Again, language change is inevitable. Maybe 'rape' will bleach into meaning 'do something unpleasant to someone'; if so, as Crinoline says, I suppose we'll need some other word to describe the actual crime of (violently) forcing someone into sex against their will. Depending on your personal philosophy, maybe that's no big deal.

@Crinoline, much stranger things have happened in the history of words. "Enthusiasm" used to be a religious term (akin to 'trance'; it comes from Greek theos 'god' and described a trance-like state of ecstasy); it has long bleached out of that. The Spanish word trabajo 'work' comes from (Vulgar) Latin tripaliu, a ghastly for of torture via evisceration. Meaning shift does surprising things, and if the community of English speakers starts using 'rape' for any kind of slight or event that makes them feel bad ('the rain got me soaking wet -- it raped me!'), then it is what it will end up meaning.

Having said that, I do feel bad about the associations that the changing meanigns may make in people's minds -- again, because 'rape' (in various meanings) is so often used to argue points about gender relations. Maybe this particular meaning shift is going to take us places we won't like.

@mydriasis, I'm wondering if the difference between your view and the view of people like Gamebird, IPJ, EricaP et alii doesn't boil down to different life experiences. People who have never been really mugged may think other people's measures to avoid this danger are exaggerated and verge on paranoia, while those who have been mugged two or three times may think very little is done and people should be at least twice as careful. Same reality, same danger level, but different perceptions/interpretations.

Gamebird would feel better with YMY as a social given because she is the kind of person who would take advantage of an offer to speak up to finally voice her discomfort with a situation. She thinks most timid people are like her. You are the kind of person who would voice your discomfort much more strongly and much earlier; and you think most timid people are not like Gamebird ('if they don't say "no" for fear of displeasing their partner, then for the same reason they'll probably say "yes" if said partners asked anyway', etc.).

In the absence of real statistical data, I don't think there's any reasonable way to say which one of you is correct. My personal experience tends to agree with yours, but I'm only a data point.

@219 In the absence of real statistical data, I don't think there's any reasonable way to say which one of you is correct.

Actually, there is real statistical data, but I think it's a matter of whether the people affected by it are considered important. What is it, one in four women are raped in their lifetime? A whole lot more are sexually molested, harassed and threatened? One in four is a lot of people, but that means that three in four live their lives without having been raped. I can imagine that it's pretty easy to be one of those three in four and think that there's something wrong with the victims, to say that it's the victims fault if they happen to run into more than a single bad male, and that this problem of the victim's is something the victims could fix if they'd just try hard enough.

The statistics are there. It just depends on whether you think it's important or worth being concerned about something that only happens to a minority of people. To be honest, it's sort of like how I tend to overlook the male victims of female-perpetrated rape because they're so few compared to the female and male victims of male-perpetrated rape.

I'll leave aside this being one for the file and award a few points:

A point to Ms Erica for a quotation from Shakespeare.

A point to Ms Driasis for being the best manifestation this month of a character of Mrs Woolf's.

A point to Ms Cute for being sufficiently well-read to make a very good guess.

A point to Mr Ank for caring about language.

A point to Mr J for not saying anything in this discussion that would deepen my depression.

And a point to Ms I for understanding the nature of a contract.

In what will probably be a vain attempt to restore the balance, I shall recall something from The Boys in the Band:

"You agreed to your own agreement and then informed me that I agreed to it!"

@ank (219)

I think you were way off the mark with that theory. Also, I've agreed with pretty much everything IPJ says. I don't know why so many people are casting this as me being the only dissenter to YMY.

@222, I'm sorry you think so. No, you're not the only YMY dissenter here, but you're clearly the one who spoke more and who presented the more articulate case. So people answer to you.

I also basically agreed with pretty much everything you've said. Still... I guess people do cross-talk.

Judging by what you and Gamebird said, your life stories and experiences do seem to be different. Maybe I'm wrong in seeing a connection between this and your respective opinions, but if there happened to be one this certainly wouldn't be the first time in human history.

My point here is simply that there are guys who need to be more aware of the fact that their opinion about whether or not the girl they're with wants them to do what they're doing may not be correct. It's not that they aren't asking 'are you OK with this?' questions (which can indeed be pretty silly), they aren't even reading the non-verbal cues. It would be better for them and their partners if they became a bit more literate in that fine art.

@220(Gamebird), I think you're missing the point. The number of women who are raped (and the 1-in-4 statistic is far from being the general consensus; there is some very good research that disputes it and claims the number is really much inferior to that) are not really relevant to the question mydriasis poses.

If I read her correctly, mydriasis is saying YMY simply wouldn't protect most timid people from being forced into sex they don't really want, because the very reasons that made them remain silent would in most cases make them say 'yes' if their partners asked anyway.

If you want to dispute that, you'd have to show stats as to how successful women are in preventing this from happening (i.e., you'd have to show how many of them were not raped) because of YMY, as compared to the kind of assertivity that mydriasis has.

After all, it may well be that you are a rare bird among timid women in that YMY would work for you, but not for most other timid women -- they don't have to be all like you. And as you (I think, or maybe someone else) pointed out to mydriasis, wanting that a rule became general in a society because it benefits you but not most other people is hardly going to solve any social problems.

Hence the need for statistics. How many timid women would really take the opportunity YMY offers to stop a situation they don't like, and how many would not -- how many would say 'yes' for the same reasons they had so far remained silent? Without this stat, I still can't tell whether you're right, or mydriasis is. Maybe she's projecting her impression of what timid women are like, or maybe you are projecting yours, or maybe both of you are. How can one know?

221--

Don't I get anything?

An old Yiddish expression I like: "If you're going to do something wrong, at least enjoy it." Can I get a point for that?

@223

I actually think IPJ presented a much better case - which is exactly why people are challenging me instead. Hers was not explicitly muddied by personal preference like mine was.

I openly admitted that my personal preference for the sexual status quo informed my distaste for YMY which offended people in a different way than the other component of my argument (YMY isn't effective).

Yes, my experiences with sex are clearly different than Gamebird's but not necessarily in the sense that I thought you were implying when you said.

"People who have never been really mugged may think other people's measures to avoid this danger are exaggerated and verge on paranoia, while those who have been mugged two or three times may think very little is done and people should be at least twice as careful. Same reality, same danger level, but different perceptions/interpretations."

As someone who engaged in a lot of extremely risky behaviour at a very young age, I'd have to challenge the 'you just haven't dealt with rape and that's why you don't think it's important' message that I felt that analogy implied. If that's not what you meant then I'm sorry.

I think it goes without saying that people's personal experiences paint their perceptions on all issues. Most of my close friends are female and very heavily socialized in the 'nice girl' school. As far as I know "only" one of them has experienced nonconsensual sex. But I see the ways this socialization hurts them every day (especially in the context of relationships) and I care very deeply about this issue. I don't think it's trivial, I don't think it's 'not a big deal', I don't think the people who try to find solutions are paranoid or overreacting. I just don't believe that YMY is an effective tool to change things. Not in theory, and CERTAINLY not in practice considering how I don't see it catching at wildfire no many how many feminists chant it at freshmen.

@ Crin

If it makes you feel any better, I'm 95% sure mine is an insult.

@Gamebird

I can imagine that it's pretty easy to be one of those three in four and think that there's something wrong with the victims, to say that it's the victims fault if they happen to run into more than a single bad male, and that this problem of the victim's is something the victims could fix if they'd just try hard enough.

Just to be clear - you don't think that is my opinion, do you?

Oh, and - as the posts crossed - a retroactive point to Ms Bird for the concluding sentence of 220. Not everyone would admit such a point openly. I shall spare the assembled company a quotation from "Rumpole and the Actor Laddie".

On 2nd thought, the quote isn't worth a point unless I give you the original Yiddish:

As me est chazzzer, zol rinnen fun bord.

Now I should get on the score board.

@mydriasis, who wrote:

As someone who engaged in a lot of extremely risky behaviour at a very young age, I'd have to challenge the 'you just haven't dealt with rape and that's why you don't think it's important' message that I felt that analogy implied. If that's not what you meant then I'm sorry.

Indeed it is not what I meant, but I think I see how you thought that: you thought I was saying you were lucky (either by having led a protected life or by simply never having been in the wrong place at the wrong time), when in fact I was trying to say you had been successful with your strategy. What you're doing has worked for you. It's not that you've never been in clear danger of being badly raped, or even never actually badly raped (which I don't know), but you're clearly satisfied with your strategies for dealing with these situations -- no matter how frequent or unfrequent they are/were in your life.

Whereas, I think, Gamebird and a few others are clearly dissatisfied with their strategies -- she thinks adopting YMY or making it generally accepted would improve things for her, and possibly for other timid women as well. I make no claims about absolute numbers of situations in which either you or she felt uncomfortable, but clearly you think things are OK the way they are in your life whereas she thinks some changes in her strategies or in the general attitude of men would be beneficial.

Personally, I'm all in favor of assertiveness, so I think people -- men and women -- should adopt methods more similar to yours than to YMY in order to deal with situations they aren't comfortable with. But since I don't know if most timid women would react the way you described under YMY conditions rather than the way Gamebird says she would, I can't tell if you are right or she is. Maybe YMY would help, maybe it wouldn't. But I do agree that the final goal should be more personal assertiveness so that YMY isn't necessary (and ultimately I think Gamebird would also agree with that, I think she's claimed once that YMY is a way for timid women to develop this assertiveness, like sidewheels on a bike when you're learning to bike).

My apologies to Ms Crinoline. I gave you a point yesterday, but I didn't want to mention it because it would be going too far backwards. Yours was actually the original point.

@ Ank

I believe we're mostly on the same page, except just to be extra clear. I think things need to be improved. I don't think things are 'fine' - but

a. YMY would not benefit me

b. I think we should look for other approaches that would benefit ALL women, not just timid women (assertive women can be victims of rape too) and not just the specific subset of timid women who cannot bring themselves to say 'no' to sex they don't want but can so 'no' upon request.

@ankylosaur and mydriasis:

I don't think YMY could ever prevent rape. Because the guys (and girls) who are addressed by that aren't rapists. They are the ones who'd be shocked and surprised to find out that their willing partner of the night before hadn't been as willing as they had thought.

Yes, they can cause great harm, but without meaning to. On the other hand, rapists (be it the ones who get off on hurting their victim, or be it the ones who just don't care about the feelings of their "partners") will be bothered by YMY even less than by NMN.

Ms Driasis - I have far too high a regard for Mrs Woolf. Perhaps I ought to have specified that it was a major character. Of course, there is no requiring you to have the same taste. If you thought it an insult because I did not specify the character, that was not directed at you at all - I was convinced that Ms Cute could guess, and wanted to give her the opportunity.

I was about to start a post yesterday directed towards post 176, but had to leave. You wrote:

[There's a chance that the LW's friend/partner/whatever she is now might have been immune to this socialization (like yours truly!) but that doesn't mean that gender is irrelevant or that commenting on the gendered nature of this problem is heteronormative (though some people did take it in that direction).]

I was going to agree with everything but the conclusion - it plays so readily if not eagerly into heterocentricity that there's no practical difference. I can live with a disagreement.

Crinoline@212: "the good feelings of the sex that comes from getting to the point of wanting to say yes"
That time, I never wanted to say yes. I never said yes. I did not enjoy the sex. I never changed my mind. My mind was determined not to have sex, my mind stayed determined not to have sex. I have no idea if my body enjoyed the sex; it certainly didn't orgasm, because at that point I wasn't orgasming without a vibrator around. Can you understand that sleeping (when driving) can happen, without one choosing to do so? It's not a good thing when that happens, when the body makes its own decisions. And yes, we can warn people that they really may fall asleep while driving if they get in the car while sleepy. And we can warn people that they really may end up having sex they really don't want (not just regret later), if they allow themselves to get turned on. And, yes, if the other person also wants to keep it to a light make-out session, they may end up ignoring that person's 'no,' and hence becoming, in legal terms, a rapist of the other person.

my@214 "preventing rape by preventing the actions of rapists."

Yes, exactly. In my scenario, I was lucky that my friend was happy to have sex with me. Since I wasn't in control, my body might just as easily have raped him (had I been able to overpower him). Crinoline was trying to come up with a ridiculous example, but I do think (as in the sad example @184) that it's possible and something to warn against.

Also, to bring this all back to the point of the larger conversation:
I disagree strongly with Crinoline@212 that it's
"a good and beautiful thing" to use one's skill at foreplay to turn on someone you know didn't want sex beforehand, and who will regret the sex later. Legally, that's not rape, but it's horrible. Just like it would be horrible to use a person's bodily hungers to persuade them to override their religious objection to bacon. Or to persuade an alcoholic to have just one drink.

People are weak, and their friends shouldn't try to set their bodies against their minds. That's horrible.

Following up myself @236... my reference to 184 suggested that this kind of strong dissociation only happens to women; I didn't mean to say that. I think that a man who intended not to have sex might find himself so turned on that he loses control. Legally, that's no defense if he rapes someone. But if I were his friend, I would listen to his story.

232-Vennominon-- Go ahead and mention yesterday's point by number. I'm off work today, bored, couldn't find it, and fishing for compliments.

218-anylosaur-- I totally get that words change meaning. Though I never get tired of the subject, I don't think that's entirely what's going on here. In this case, I believe there's an attempt to change the feelings associated with an act by muddying the meanings of the words. Instead of opinions being changed, confusion results. I believe that's why we go running to legal definitions. At least that's something solid to hold on to while we try to figure out what anything means anymore.

I like your expression of bleached out evocative language. Here's another way of putting it: Inflation causes devaluation. It would be easy to make everyone in the U.S. a millionaire by printing money. But then the money would have no value, and people's material goods and comforts would remain the same. It is easy to say that 1:4 children have been sexually abused or that many more situations constitute rape than are really rape, but when you do that, the words lose their meaning, and people conclude that childhood sexual abuse isn't really any big deal, and rape isn't that bad.

Okay.
I'm not going to get into the YMY v. NMN and all its attendant brouhaha that mydriasis, IPJ, migrationist, Gamebird, Crinoline, avast206, ankylosaur and others are engaging with.

I need to choose my battles and marshal my strength. I really didn't want to do this, partially because it seems I'm always arguing with EricaP, but the "rape" thread is interfering with my sleep, and I guess I have to jump in.

To begin: EricaP, I don't think you're lying. You had some sort of experience in which you felt that you had no control over what your body did even though what your body did was contrary to what you planned to do or wanted to do. Although to me, that sounds like a woman who intends to only drink coffee and finds she has eaten a lot of pastry, I'll not challenge your own understanding of your own experience, and concede that the sexual experience you are talking about felt significantly different, stronger and more upsetting, that that analogy could ever approach.

But.

Rape is different. And no, ankylosaur, I'm not talking about academic discussions of gender relations.

I know close to a dozen women who've been raped, and I'm not part of a support group or anything. Just lucky I guess. Some of these are date/acquaintance rapes (wherein YMY might have helped in theory, had the rapists cared to respect the wishes of the women they raped, but probably would have been policies as ignored as NMN was by the rapists), and some are violent rapes committed by strangers.

Here's my rape: I was 18, visiting a male friend I'd known for about a year. There was a "real" rapist in the area, composite police sketches of whom were plastered everywhere, and so the policy of my male friends who lived in that apartment was to walk all female guests to their cars and see them safely inside at the conclusion of a visit. We used to say, "Okay, I'm leaving--walk me to my car so I don't get raped and murdered."
I'd come to visit my primary friend, someone I'd known for several years, to do some writing together, but he wasn't home, and so I hung out with his roommate (whom I'd socialized with a lot over the past year) and the roommate's girlfriend. We played cards and listened to records--on vinyl!--and then I asked to be walked to my car. He walked me to my car, and got in the passenger side (which was odd), and started to fondle and kiss me. I said no, forcefully and immediately.

This wasn't a date or a situation in which I had been flirting. And there was no alcohol involved. I tried to suggest he was kidding; I squirmed and moved his hands away. I said things like "stop it." But I was a good girl, and he was my *friend.* This became crucial. I realized that he wasn't going to stop and that I had a decision to make: I could treat this as a "real" rape, that is, scream, and fight as hard as possible, and try to break his nose or gauge his eyes, or I could let him do what he was intent on doing and get out of there. I was thrown by the fact that he was a friend--I couldn't treat him as a violent attacker; I acquiesced. I squeezed my eyes shut and gritted my teeth and waited grimly for him to be finished with it. It hurt. There was no element of fun, or pleasure whatsoever. I felt erased, negated. I felt humiliated. It was clear that what I wanted to happen to me and my body had no authority with him. The rape was the ultimate expression of someone's regarding me as not an equal participant.

It isn't my place or my right to talk of other rapes, like that of my student, raped by a stranger with whom she had been flirting in the parking lot of the bar she and her friends went to to celebrate her 21st birthday, or another of my students, gang-raped by a pack of men as she crossed a (different) college campus at night on her way back to the dorms after studying at the library. She ended up in the hospital, with a shattered pelvis and a skull fracture. Or my friend, raped at 10:00 in the morning in her own home, as her three-year-old watched a video in the next room. Or my daughter, sixteen years old, sleeping in her room (as I slept obliviously in my room), when a stranger broke into our house through her unlocked window, choked her, threatened her with death, and raped and sodomized her.

For the last 2 nights, she has slept in that room, alone again, the first time since November, 2010.

This is rape. You cannot rape yourself. Rape is the negation of a person's autonomy or agency. Rape says, "you don't count; you don't matter."

I'm all for playing with language and redefining words, for reclaiming words like "queer," and 'slut." I'm a believer that a YMY policy might help a few people, and that if people listened to NMN, a fair number of rapes wouldn't happen. But ultimately, rape means that the rapist knows that the victim isn't consenting, and doesn't care. In its most benign sense, it's coercion, but it isn't something which was consented to or initiated by the "rapee" who later had qualms about it.

I'm getting fucking sick and tired of hearing "rape" used to describe regretted sex. If both people (or at least the one penetrated) agreed to the sex or wanted the sex in the moment, it isn't rape.

I see that EricaP posted about how she felt and how her body reacted as I was composing my post.
So for what it's worth, EricaP, I will agree that what happened to you was unpleasant in the moment, and not akin with regretted sex. It sounds confusing and upsetting.

But I still wouldn't call it rape.

Also, for the record, Crinoline: people historically thought that if a woman displayed arousal, then she wasn't raped. But we've learned that: "A woman's physiological response to sexual contact is involuntary. In some cases, women can become physically aroused, produce natural lubrication, and even experience orgasms against their will during rape" (Wiki)

If you ask someone who is in the middle of orgasming if she wants the sex to continue, her body will probably make her scream yes. Still rape though, if the sex was brought about by force.

Oh - I can't believe I left out the most important point of all! In mitigation, the tennis has put me a bit off today.

In fact, I shall give Ms Eirene two points for giving me the idea of periodically tackling problems from the point of view of only trying to help lesbians and any benefit derived by non-lesbians would be a bonus. My qualifications aren't the greatest, but it's worth the experiment.

Ms Crinoline - I believe it was #132.

nocute, I don't want to compete with your family's history of rape. Yours are worse. But I've been raped twice, and both times the guy thought he was doing me a favor, and probably to this day thinks that I could have enjoyed it if I hadn't been so uptight. So I get "you don't count; you don't matter." And that's how it felt with my body in charge. It felt like I didn't count, like I didn't matter. Believe me or don't. The history of rape is full of people telling others that their rapes weren't really rape.

@238(Crinoline), what you say here is in part true. But language tends to have repair mechanisms that take care of that; and this, basically, because language, no matter how often it shifts, still has to be useful, i.e., it has to be able to express our thoughts and feelings and to mediate communication. So when certain words (say, rape) bleach so much that they become useless in their original sense, something else -- another word or expression -- jumps in and takes the original meaning of the bleached term (not because words are living beings that can 'jump' -- but because people continue to have communicative needs, and if they still have to talk about real rape then they'll find some way of making clear that this is what they mean, with some new word or expression). Which is why, even though many words don't mean what they used to mean in Shakespeare's times anymore, it is still possible to say the same things people used to say in those days -- except now we use other words.

I do agree that the uses of this particular word -- 'rape' -- are often emotional, and that, in the current socio-political climate (gender, class, etc.), there certainly are groups who are trying to do exactly the kind of emotional manipulation/engineering with this word that you mention. But then again (nothing new under the sun...), this has happened before with other words. In the olden days, when religion was a 'big deal' for society, the meaning of religious terms might conjure up enough emotion to initiate wars ('kill the heretics!'). How much blood was spilled because of religious semantic/lexical questions like the filioque or homoousia vs. homoiousia (is Jesus similar to, or the same as, his Father? etc.)? And yet this passed, and is no longer really important.

The language will change, but always in a way that still allows anything to be said, albeit with different words than before. So I don't care so much about 'rape' changing meaning. But I do care about the people who are consciously using the word 'rape' for non-legitimate purposes (emotional effect, etc.), as opposed to the guy you mentioned whose car had been broken into and who used 'rape' to describe how he felt. I feel uncomfortable about the manipulators and their intentions -- why are they interested in associating certain emotions with certain themes? (cf. those who call abortion doctors 'baby killers'). In the end, it's always other people, not the language, that is doing something to us.

@nocutename, who wrote:

Rape is different. And no, ankylosaur, I'm not talking about academic discussions of gender relations.

Neither am I, nocutename. I never did. Some academic groups do, some university action groups do, some politicians do, but I most emphatically don't.

To me, rape is a crime, pure and simple. And one quite worthy of the adjective 'heinous'.

But I believe the contention here is semantic. Since there are heinous situations (like the ones you described) usually referred to as 'rape', is it, or is it not, a good idea to use 'rape' to refer also to other situations, as EricaP did? Or to use it metaphorically for non-rape situations, as Crinoline's male friend did?

My point is, regardless of whether it is 'good' or 'bad', this kind of use happens. Not only with 'rape', but with all kinds of emotion-laden words. People will do that, it will happen, regardless of legal or dictionary definition, so that the word will eventually change its meaning, including also in the dictionary or in law.

This of course does not change the fact that the situation you described is indeed very different from the situation EricaP described.

I think people, will always find some way of expressing the difference between the situation you described and the situation EricaP described. Even if it won't be by means of the word 'rape' anymore, some other way of doing that will be found. That's how words and languages change. As long as there's a communicative need, people find a communicative solution.

So I don't worry so much about the fate of the word rape, and its uses and misuses in Academia and outside of it. I worry much more about the people who want to blurry the difference between the situation you describe and the situation EricaP describes. I worry about their reasons for doing that, and their agendas. Therein lies, I think, the problem.

@244(EricaP), I think the main point is semantic. It turns out that several people here (including apparently nocutename) wouldn't call what happened to you twice 'rape', but something else; but not because they don't think what happened to you wasn't unpleasant or that they want to refuse sympathy for your plight, simply because they think the word 'rape' should be reserved for certain kinds of situations and not others, for certain crimes and not others. I.e., they would (I think) argue that not everything that made you feel like you didn't count, like you didn't matter, deserves to be called rape.

And this is not exclusive to the story of rape. I'm sure one could find similar discussions about all kinds of crimes ('what is "murder"?'), and then you might say the story is full of people telling others that what the murders they witnessed weren't really murders.

It's all just people wondering whether or not some situations are similar enough to deserve the same name, whether calling them the same name is a good or a bad idea. (With me not caring so much what they call each situation, as long as they understand their differences and similarities.)

@244(EricaP), correcting a little mistake: in my last-but-one paragraph, '[...] you might say the story is full of...' should be '[...] you might say HISTORY is full of...'. Sorry.

@208: Individual relationships would be equal because women as a group are dictating to men as a group, not as individuals? Really? In a traditional patriarchy, the rules on relationships are dictated by the authorities, not the individual men in the individual relationships. (If the Catholic Church has real power in a society, contraceptives and abortion are banned by the government consulting with the C.C., not by individual husbands, who have no more choice about it than their wives.) I don't know anyone who considers that to be an example of equal partnerships.

As for YMY, I think YMY is a situationally useful tool that complements NMN nicely, but replacing NMN with YMY would be as foolish as BDSM practicioners deciding that since they negotiated the scene beforehand (YMY) they don't need a safeword (NMN).

I don't think YMY is new: I think it's new jargon for something that's as old as the hills.

I think the comment thread has pretty much gone willy nilly, since the whole concept of YMY isn't to prevent rape, but to discourage "grey area sex".

There's actually a feminist book on the subject titled "Yes Means Yes" that you can find on scribd for free that I admit I never bothered to finish (my internet sucks). But what I take away from the book and the general message Yes Means Yes, is that the policy isn't JUST about finding out if your partner wants to have sex, but also making sure YOU communicate your desire to engage in such activity strongly. The idea is to make women more assertive by becoming more comfortable asking for and engaging in sex in the first place.

Rape in general is such a more complicated issue, that no single catch phrase could really tackle the complexity of it. Especially since, as nocutename has very bravely pointed out, it can take a wide variety of forms; with some stating the most common is actually marital rape (one text book I had in a college course on deviant psyhcology actually compared marriage to prison in terms of sexual assualt and rape).

@226 I have trouble understanding this "nice girl" school comment. Or socialized to this and that. In theory it seems to make sense, but somehow I doubt universally adopting a policy of socializing men and women in exactly the same way would actually do any good.

I know this sounds odd, but I'm going to compare it to how I raised to treat the elderly. If I'm somewhere sitting down and there are no seats left, I get up and give them mine. I hold the door for them, I offer to let them go ahead of me in line, I pick something up if I see them drop it, if something is being offered they get first choice & etc. No one would lecture me on how being kind to the elderly is some enormous burden on me, yet if I were to apply any socialized routines to my relationships to men (cooking for them, them holding a door for me & etc) a label must be applied and my position in the culture debate decided regardless of whether I agree with any side. I say this as a self identified feminist who fears not the diaper or the candy thermometer.

Plus, I find women are actually VERY assertive; they just have different ways of expressing it that sometimes get missed by some who aren't careful picking up social cues since they tend to be more subtle. So it seems the real debate should be; do we find a way to encourage people to bone up on their social and nonverbal communication or do we ritualize a way of communicating to avoid misunderstandings?

@213 Oh, and I believe avast was addressing the fact you suggested any man who didn't trust his ability to read your nonverbal cues and had to resort to verbally asking as "inept" and "insecure", and then the later comment that checking in verbally after the initial consent would be "infantizing" you. Can't remember the exact comment numbers, so excuse me for paraphasing. I hate to bring it up, but the difference between his reply and your rebuttal was rather jarring.

@gash

I do not self-identify as a feminist and I do not think men and women should be socialized the same way (as you can see from my posts above saying that I like the men-as-aggressors status quo)

But if a woman allows someone to do something to her sexually that makes her uncomfortable solely because she lacks the assertiveness to say no, then I believe that's a problem.

If this happens a great deal, then I believe that's a problem that likely has to be addressed at a societal level. As I said before, people are born with the ability to object. It is socialized out of all of us to a varying degree. I personally believe that the degree this is done with women is excessive.

As for women being VERY assertive, that hasn't been my experience, but noted.

I'm pretty sure I never used the term infantalize, though several others did. I think I skipped the women-as-children metaphor entirely. I just said I found it to be kind of offensive stereotyping.

I found avast's post jarring: "you annoy the fuck out of me", "you have an attitude problem", and the bizarre accusation that I have a "chip on my shoulder". But I think I'm confused about what you mean about the difference between his reply and my rebuttal. Could you explain please?

Thanks Eirene! That's just it. :)

@nocute

I agree with you.

@256 I agree with you regarding someone allowing a sexual event to occur by virtue of lack of assertiveness is a problem, but I do not endorse the "status-quo". I also sharply disagree it's because women are socialized to an excessive amount. Men are socialized to an excessive amount as well. I find this focus on women to be half the problem with discussing this issue since it instantly puts the other half of the population on the defensive. Men’s education starts VERY early, for example by age two to hold a crying boy is to "cuddle" him and soften him from manhood. The focus of this and much more IS to make him aggressive in a very specific way. Just as you say you've seen women encouraged to become submissive, I've seen boys pushed into overly aggressive and sexual roles. As an older sister and a cousin to two seven year old twin boys, this deeply troubles me. So no, the status quo disgusts me. And no, I don't care if being a stereotypical man gets you laid more, when I get a kid I'm hugging the hell out of them regardlesss of gender. I kind of wish we taught men to be more self reliant sexually so they wouldn't feel obliged to chase anything with a rack and a skirt.

But what I want most is for our gender to be addressed rationally without becoming the defining characteristic. "Yes, you are (blank), and that means you do have some specific social obligations and that some experiences will by default be alien to you. But what sort of (blank) you are will be defined not just by how you meet society's expectations or how you treat those different from yourself, but also how you respect and love yourself."

As for the difference between avast's comment and your reply; he was taking offense with how you portrayed the way you viewed the man who would use YMY, not your argument against YMY itself as your reply suggested. Now I don't remember how he feels about YMY itself (this comment thread is long). I just know from his comment he saw the use of verbal communication as a demonstration of consideration and that you would suggest such an action (presumably made for your benefit) as a clue they were weak (or as a clue they thought you were weak) as offensive.

The "chip" thing I would liken to the girl who huffs when a guy holds the door open for her (I did that in my teens).

BTW, sorry avast for talking on your behalf without your blessing! I just hate to see people get taken down for something they didn't say.

@ gash

WRT: status quo/hugging/etc

Yeah, I have two brothers. I know what you're talking about.

And I agree that men should be socialized differently as well. But I wouldn't take it all the way to 'let's wipe agressiveness out'. But again, this is a personal preference. Some men love aggressive women, some women love aggressive men. Diversity is a beautiful thing, IMHO.

WRT: avast

I did address the main point he was making by way of analogy (he disliked my view of men who need verbal confirmation and thought it was wrong) by saying that what gets me going sexually is not identical to what I like in platonic situations. (Which is why I don't care if someone opens the door for me) If you reread what I wrote you'll see that it's right there. Twice, actually.

Then as an aside I commented on why I felt it wasn't the best analogy to describe my objections to YMY because there are several. I didn't "take him down", jeez.

Ms Driasis - Are you drifting into heteronormativity? I hope you don't think that ALL males should be socialized exclusively to be aggressors simply because the majority of women who sleep with men (if it is a majority, which doesn't seem of paramount importance) prefer chauffeured limousine rides. Not to grudge you or anyone a system that works or to insist on a change that favours fewer people, but it is hard enough on my people to have to overcome being socialized towards exclusive heterosexuality without having to undo aggressor-only training. Not that there's any easy answer.

Ms Gash, I was all set to give you a point for your eloquent opening paragraph - and then those last six words. Sorry.

Ah - 260 and 261 crossed.

@228 Gamebird said: "I can imagine that it's pretty easy to be one of those three in four and think that there's something wrong with the victims, to say that it's the victims fault if they happen to run into more than a single bad male, and that this problem of the victim's is something the victims could fix if they'd just try hard enough."

Mydraisis said: "Just to be clear - you don't think that is my opinion, do you?"

No, I don't. I believe it was IPJ who had the posts which read to me as thinly or not-so-thinly veiled victim-blaming, with the statements about how if someone had several bad experiences with men, that this indicated a likely fault in the victim, and the victim should get professional assistance or counseling. Said counseling would not be to deal with the fallout and trauma from the bad experiences, but instead to assist the person in not recommitting whatever error was committed that "caused" the bad experiences.

I found that a very offensive suggestion, especially since my pool of men to have interactions with has been very small, and is so is easily skewed by a few bad apples. If I interact intimately with ten men and five of them are bad actors, that might seem to me that an overwhelming number of men are scary and dangerous. However, if someone else interacts with fifty men (including those same ten!) and they only have those five bad actors, then they might feel that by and large men are okay blokes and you just have to keep an eye out for the problems ... but that the problems aren't a big deal.

By the way, thank you for the civil and enlightening conversation.

xxx

Aside to EricaP - What you're describing sounds to me like it's either traumatic dissociation or BDSM subspace. I say 'traumatic dissociation' because in my studies of DID, PTSD, rape and trauma recovery, the dissociation has always been presented as a by-product/reaction to a traumatic event. While the rape-by-your-body sounds like it was traumatic to you, it also sounds like that event itself was the trauma and not anything leading up to it. Unless I'm reading the situations wrong?

But now that you've mentioned it, it occurs to me that the same loss of control is mentioned in BDSM. I had a man tell me that he considered his boyfriend to have raped him because they both agreed there would be no sex that night; they went to the club and he (the man telling me the story) became revved up from being flogged; and the boyfriend took him home and fucked him. Although he eagerly consented in the moment, he ascribed his consent to the endorphins and likened it to being so drunk or stoned that you can't give any informed consent. He said that was the purpose of the carefully negotiated agreement before the play - there would be no sex, because he knew his inhibitions would be shot, his boyfriend knew that, and then his boyfriend took advantage of it. They broke up.

So I wonder - is that a situation more analogous to what you're relating?

@ Ven

Ah so you saw what I meant with "Some men love aggressive women, some women love aggressive men. Diversity is a beautiful thing, IMHO."

@256: re: "you annoy the fuck out of me" It seemed like you had turned someone trying to do something caring for you into an excuse to deem him seventeen brands of loser and dump him. You are all but saying that trying to be nice is synonymous with feckless sociopathy. That sort of Alice-through-the-looking-glass illogic is what annoyed the fuck out of me.

re: "attitude problem" and "chip on your shoulder": again, taking someone's attempt to actively make sure you are happy with the situation to represent some sort of dismissal of you as a weakling or a demonstration/confession of base ego needs requires you to willfully choose the worst possible interpretation of his actions and character. It makes me think that at best, you don't actually know the difference, and at worst, you are taking your philosophical stand on choosing the worst possible interpretation, whence "attitude problem" and "chip on the shoulder."

@254: it doesn't even have to be about the person not trusting his ability to read your nonverbal cues. Being solicitous of your partner's feelings doesn't need to mean that you think they are weak, nor that you need your ego propped up. It is sufficient that your partner's happiness is important to you. It makes my head explode to think that wanting my partner to be happy reflects poorly on me.

I humbly suggest that there will be more happiness to be found in interpreting a nice gesture on my part to mean that your happiness is important to me than that I think you can't stand up for yourself. I probably should have said it that way in the first place.

@249 Eirene: I was responding to the specfic component of YMY that requires one to do a verbal check-in at each physical escalation. (would you like to hold hands, would you like to kiss, would you like to take off your shirt, et cetera.) I thought that specific activity was unlikely to produce a lot of extra protection in the context of a given encounter. The ones who would use it don't need it, and the ones who do need it won't use it. (Save the small minority who neurologically can't read body cues, but they are probably using it as a tool anyway.)

Regarding the broader social issues -- setting behavioral expectations in general, more societal condemnation of transgressors instead of the current wink-and-a-nod, setting up social narratives that respect people as autonomous beings, etc) I think we are on the same page.

@263 Thank you, that's very helpful. My second rape was much like that, only with passive submission instead of "eager consent."

The event we've been talking about reflected my inexperience with my body. I was very upset that I'd had a penis inside me that I hadn't wanted there. (Only my second penis ever...and no conversation about stds or birth control...) In the fallout, even though I didn't blame him, I hurt my friend and lost that friendship. The whole thing was awful, and, yes, traumatizing.

@236, EricaP:

The situation I tried to describe @184 was very different to the situation you describe. I didn't feel betrayed by my body or went farther than I intended. Unfortunately, I went further than my partner intended because I was unable to read his clues. I was probably under the impression that if a guy wants to kiss and make out he also wants to have PiV sex.

@avast

Again, diversity. I consider it to be a good thing.

Some people think that a person checking in is considerate and attentive and wonderful. Some people think the kind of guy I like is controlling/offputting/etc. Personally, I like it.

To be honest, I don't know why you had such an emotional response to my personal sexual preferences. Why should it matter to you who I dump or why?

1. I've never had a guy do this to me so it's moot
2. If I dumped a guy for that reason, don't you think he'd be better off?

But let's cut to the chase.

You said this: It makes my head explode to think that wanting my partner to be happy reflects poorly on me.

It seems to me, you're taking this personally. Look, if someone here went on about how he/she would hate to sleep with a submissive woman and finds it to be a turnoff when she wants to be in the passenger's seat I'd think "oh hey, I'm clearly not his/her type". I wouldn't try to argue that he/she shouldn't feel that way because it's "illogical" (preferences are seldom logical).

Sorry if that was kind of bitchy. I don't know if there was a better way to put that.

I'm sure you're even less of a fan of me now.

@260 You miss the point and take it to the extreme of the other direction. I'm not calling for the end of agressiveness. Just like I enjoy some stereotypical activities and behaviors, it doesn't bother me a bit to see men enjoy theirs. I want the end of one size fits all thinking. It just seems we're quick to call for a simple fix, when all it takes is finding out were the other stands as an individual on a case by case basis. Even in simple relationships there's multiple avenues for aggression, affection, and all the rest of the emotional spectrum.

I see avast is back and will politely leave you two to it.

@261 Thank you none the less. I often end things on a crass note to relieve tension in discussions of personal ideas, but I get how off putting it can sound. If you met half the crazy women I have (including my mother) who are involved with making the men you care about miserable (here I exclude my father, he totally deserved it) you'd know I was holding back.

@269, I apologize. I certainly didn't mean to suggest that you raped that guy; only that it is possible for women to rape men, including women in a dissociating state.

@273, I also didn't mean to suggest that you were dissociating, but you were drunk, and thus your rational mind was not necessarily in complete control of how far the situation went.

That's to migrationist @269 again, of course.

I've never before felt a need for a wrap-up before the new column comes out today. For nocute, anything I say sounds weak and stupid, but I'm afraid that ignoring your post in 239 would be worse. For everyone who has been through horrendous sexual experiences involving force, I'm sorry. We live in a world with a lot of pain and misery, and not acknowledging it makes it worse.

Good talk, guys. Good talk.

:P

@263: I would characterize it not as blame the victim, but if I've been a victim, what tools are in my arsenal to try and avoid it in the future? (Beyond 'hope like crazy it doesn't happen'.) Sometimes there are none: I absolutely believe that.

But if you are the victim of the same thing over and over again, then yes, there are probably some cues somewhere that you are missing. If your Uncle Joe loses a bunch of money to a scam artist--and then to a second scam artist, and then a third and fourth--at some point you probably sit Uncle Joe down for a hard talk about spotting these people and being more cautious, come up with a list of signals and cross-checks he needs to apply, try to change how trusting and accommodating he is of people. It doesn't make the scam artists innocent: they're still scum who prey on the vulnerable. It recognizes that trying to change what Uncle Joe is doing is likely to help him more than trying to change all the bad people in the world.

If someone has had only one or two experiences with a partner, and one of those was awful, then it can certainly be bad luck. The five out of ten you give is getting into a reasonable statistical sample. Because of the way bell curves work, if 10% of partners are bad apples then choice by random sampling will put some unfortunate women out on the end with a high proportion of bad partners.

But it is really not unreasonable to ask if the reason you (generic you) wind up with bad partners over and over and over again--especially if they're all exactly the same KIND of bad partner--is that you are somehow picking them. And that is a more complex question not amenable to one-line advice like 'so stand up for yourself' and more to asking whether you're hopeless at reading social cues (a few autistic posters) or are replaying an early bad relationship trying to write a better ending, or a dozen other scenarios that require more effort than 'so pick better people' to change. But they at least require looking at the romantic relationships you wind up in over and over and over again as something somewhat within your control. Say your partner comes home drunk and mean and scary on Saturday. "Horrible Saturday night was his fault, not mine" and "why did I wind up with this guy, exactly?" are not mutually exclusive positions to hold.

@IPJ

Thanks again for putting something so well that I have a hard time explaining.

Because victim-blaming is such a problem and most good-hearted people are on the lookout for it, we're all afraid of saying what you just said (even though it's 100% true) because some people take it to mean 'it's your fault'.

@279 Thanks.

There are many times when people can't help being victims, when the advice comes down to "if you had taken the next street over, the texting pickup driver wouldn't have hit you." And even then, I think a normal response can include trying to figure out if there were, for example, signs of erratic driving you didn't weight strongly enough, so you could apply that in the future and feel safer. The closest I ever came to a car accident someone decided to spontaneously drive the wrong way in my lane: had the trees come all the way up to the road at that point, as they did for most of its length, there is nothing I could have done differently beyond choose never to leave the house. Sometimes you are helpless.

If there's a pattern, if you're a victim of the same thing over and over again, then it's worth looking at whether there's something within your control that could change. For kids, often there isn't: that lack of control over your choices is a very real and scary and vulnerable-making part of being a kid.

As a kid I learned to hunker silently if someone took out their bad day by yelling at me. As an adult I recognized that that was not the way I wanted my adult interactions to go, and changed my response. (Gradually, and imperfectly.) That doesn't mean I accepted that it was okay for people to take their bad mood out by yelling at me, or felt that I had done something to make them do it. I accepted that it was something I hated, that it was going to happen from time to time, and that I wanted to deal with it in a way that made me feel less helpless and victimized, more like an independent adult who wouldn't take that crap.

@Crinoline: Nothing you say is weak or stupid! I appreciate what you bring to the discussion, and thank you for your expression of sympathy/solidarity. The good news is that people heal.

To be clear, I think that rapes happen on a continuum, from being too drunk (or otherwise impared or compromised) to be able to give meaningful consent, through pushy insistence coupled with overly-polite demurral, to violent assaults. They take place between strangers, acquaintances, friends, dates, established partners.

And there is definitely a grey area where consented-to-in-the-moment-but-later-regretted sex and some of those kinds of rapes overlap (especially those involving alcohol or other judgment-impairing or inhibition-lowering substances or conditions such as parties, generally heightened atmosphere, and people who don't know one another well and who may have been flirting).

The problem for me is that while I can agree that a sexual encounter fueled by so much alcohol that true consent is not possible, after which a participant feels violated qualifies as rape (albeit a sort of "rape lite," perhaps), I think that too often people who want to absolve themselves of responsibility for bad choices they made (perhaps while judgment isn't very clear) which they regret later jump on that description.

This not only absolves women (and men who do this, though there are less of them) from taking responsibility for their actions and behavior, but I see it as insulting "true" unambiguous victims of rape, even rapes like mine. (Not me; I'm pretty resilient, and that happened a looooong time ago, but other women who, although not violently raped by a stranger, nevertheless played a less ambiguous role in their rape.) It does this because it suggests that non-violent rapes by acquaintances are somehow results of poor judgment and are just sex agreed to in the moment and regretted after the fact.

I'm not making any sense this morning, and I can't seem to get it any clearer. So I'm sure I've insulted someone, and that wasn't my intent. Apologies.

@278(IPJ), it is a pleasure to see such a well-written variation on something so many people (me included) have tried to say on a number of occasions without being understood.

There is victim-blaming, and there is victim empowering. Some of the things that victims can do to avoid being victims again are most definitely not attempts by advice-givers to shift the blame to them, but attempts to empower them and help them heal by making them see that they are not just at the mercy of chance and luck as to whether or not they'll be victims again. That some people should confuse that with victim-blaming always seemed more than sad to me.

And that, while fully agreeing that there are also situations in which there is nothing you can do.

I wish people weren't so quick with throwing names and assumptions around. It would make discussions much more enjoyable.

@nocutename, one of the problems with rape becoming an emblematic word in gender relations is that everybody wants to absolutivize it ('rape is rape is rape!') and immediately jumps to the conclusion that any classification of rape types or any claims about degrees of seriousness is tantamount to supporting victim blaming ('she was asking for it!').

I understand there are sensitive people, often unfairly so -- some people went through horrible experiences, and who can do that without his/her perspective and judgment skills being affected?

Still, I think the only way to solve problems is to consider their causes dispassionately. If gray areas and not-really-rape situations are conflated with rape, I fear not only that the real victims of real rape are being insulted, or that the idea of rape is being cheapened so that it doesn't seem to be a big deal anymore... but that the problem itself is being misunderstood, its causes mythologized rather than researched, and that as a consequence it won't be solved (solved? maybe not even correctly addressed). Like trying to cure cancer with holy water.

@nocutename, well, I want to cross out that "everyone" in the first paragraph of my last post and replace it with "distressingly many people".

@Eirene

If you think "stat rape = rape" doesn't bring up gray areas....

The new Tunnel's ....name could be "The Geoduct"....in honor of replacing the Via-duct....our good old trusted friend, retired in tact, no earthquake beat it down, Oh ya! operators with machines are taking her to a good spot.....a friend of mine told me he heard that from a seagull in a dream or something.

South Park is on Board and G-Town is up for anything...what say You CapHill?...Ballard? P-Square, let's hear it Aye!

Seattle Rocks, rolls and Oh ya! uh -huh! definitely! go tribe:) (just right of G-Town before Boeing field uh ha! :))))

@270: I often use "I" and "you" as literary shortcuts. Possibly a bad habit, but I think it makes the prose less convoluted than the kind of gyrations necessary for non-specific actors in hypothetical situations. I use too many words as it is.

Were I in that situation -- and I'm not -- I would find that to be a Catch-22 evaluation by that hypothetical partner. Catch-22s annoy me. (Hypothetical ones annoy me hypothetically. I can be hypothetically annoyed for purposes of discussion.) Better?

I agree that your personal preferences are not very germane to the general discussion. As long as I'm in the mood to be agreeable, I also agree that constant check-ins during an encounter could easily elicit eye-rolls, even face-palms if taken to an extreme. (Though I do think that a laugh and "Yes, yes, already, now shut up and take my shirt off" ought to not spoil the mood that badly, if he takes that and runs with it.) I also agree that going with body language should be sufficient when possible: that leaning in for a kiss at the end of a pleasant evening should be a reasonable way of asking for a kiss, that kissing back, helping out, etc., should be taken as an emphatic Yes. I also agree that the folks who are most likely to need YMY check-ins as a tool are the ones least likely to use it, so I expect it is going to be of limited effectiveness as a campaign. (I'm not talking about the folks who genuinely can't read body social cues, as they are likely using such a thing already.)

I am one agreeable bastard, ain't I?

@my:
usually I'd agree, but 13 and 42 isn't gray anymore

@282: The scenario you present in your first paragraph boils down to poor planning. Which we all do, and is perfectly understandable. I'm just having difficulty grasping how it would be any better to have had that sequence include all the verbal clearances: "Yes, you may kiss me; yes, you may touch me; yes, you may (help me) take my clothes off; yes you may climb in bed with me; OH SHIT, OH SHIT, CONTRACEPTION, WE HAVE TO TALK." Srsly?

The one thing that the expectation of a little discussion adds is that it makes it a more likely that contraception will be discussed at a more appropriate moment -- that is, earlier on, where there is less passion, more clear-headedness, and less embarrassment. Maybe the first clearance ought to consider the ones that follow. If you tell the person, "We're making out, but no sex tonight" that is both permission for what can happen (which sweeps out the need for all the intermediate clearances) and a clear directive on what not to try. If he pushes that boundary, he's being disrespectful; pushing hard enough makes him a rapist.

@ Avast

You definitely are agreeable! Honestly I pretty much agreed with everything you said except where it was a matter of personal preference rather than fact.

I was a little confused by your use of Catch-22, I either misunderstood you or you misused it?

re contraception:

Honestly, this is so foreign to me.

The first few people I was with I never had conversations about contraception with. Why? Because it goes without saying. You have sex, you use a condom. That's the default. (I was also on the pill but condoms were my birth control every single time. No matter how drunk, no matter how high) It wasn't until later when I was in a long term relationship that the subject of me being on the pill and having sex without a condom came up. We also both got tested.

When I was in highschool I did a project that included a sex-survey. It was an admittedly small sample that found that kids in my highschool were sexually adventurous and used condoms near-universally.

Were you guys unlucky enough to grow up in those American States that teach "abstinence education" or is it some other factor.

@291

I tend to agree with you but the nature of grey areas is that they're black and white on the ends. I just mean that if we're making the decision that something is rape due to the ages of the people and not whether or not they feel they consented (and sometimes they both do), it is a mighty big grey area.

@survivor, who wrote:

Got it. Mine doesn't count because yours was worse.

No. Yours does count. But if mine was worse, this also should mean something. And if we pretend yours and mine were just the same, we're doing a disservice to both of us.

Or do you disagree?

@Eirene, who wrote:

And I hate the term "gray area" anyway, because it is so very often used to describe situations that bloody well ARE rape (look at the Roman Polanski case, where just FOR STARTERS a 44-year-old having "sex" with a 13-year-old is BY DEFINITION rape, and it only gets worse from there).

This is part of the reason why I keep insisting that it's not words but people who should be blamed for evil.

The fact that some (many?) people may be using the term 'gray area' to manipulate other people or misconstrue situations and generally create more evil in the world does not mean that this is the only use this word has. There is such a thing as 'gray area', not because it's about rape, but because the world is full of continuums (some say the whole universe is a continuous flux) and our human strategy of trying to divide this flux into categories and things works only to a certain extent.

(That's why, for instance, laws tend to become so complicated. There are always so many cases, subcases, sub-subcases, mitigating factors, etc. in everything: crime, duties, obligations, taxes, inheritance, fraud, immigration law, marriage law... Gray areas and confusing circumstances make simple definitions very difficult.)

I don't know Mr Pervocracy's arguments about gray areas in sex, but I can say that there is a very large (and very old) body of philosophical literature about how not only sex, but everything in life, is full of gray areas -- some of it written by some very smart people who came up with some very good arguments. I wonder how he would deal with them.

I certainly agree that there are people who misuse the idea of 'gray areas,' but don't you think that there are people who misuse any ideas -- freedom, capitalism, socialism, equality, terrorism, duty, rights, feminism, etc. -- to advance their personal agendas? 'Gray areas' is hardly an exceptional word in that respect.

@291, 295: besides, this is far from being a universal. To the Indians I work with, girls start marrying when they're 10. And one of the favored stereotypical marriage pattern is SD, i.e. sister's daughter (meaning that an 'ideal' marriage pattern, comparable to 'single unrelated opposite-sex people of the same age range' in our society, is between a man and his sister's daughter).

Gray areas in our society may look definitely black and/or white in others, and vice-versa. It's another way in which they are (transculturally) gray.

@mydriasis @294:

What do you mean? Did no-one ever try to convince you to sex without a condom by saying "Don't worry, I pull it out three times a week; never anything happened!" ?

And no, that wasn't the US, it's Europe.

@298

Yup. Although my understanding of Mr. Polanski's case is that he used a date rape drug on the girl? I'm fairly certain that's frowned upon in most cultures that have any concept of rape (even if what he did isn't considered rape).

@299

Oh my no.

@Eirene

Even before I was sexually experienced I knew that I didn't want to get pregnant, or get an STI. I knew that using a condom was the best way to prevent those bad things from happening. Therefore: unprotected sex was a non-option for me. Not exactly rocket science.

And if I had've gone for inexperienced guys (I wanted my first time to be pleasurable and get me off so I went for someone who did have experience thank the lord) and they had've tried to skip the condom I would've said 'uh, hey buddy, you're forgetting something'.

@301: Did you read the rest of that comment? I basically agree with you.

If you get as far as "OMG, wait, wait, wait" then you did it wrong. If you get as far as "OMG, wait, wait, wait" while granting explicit verbal permission each time there's an escalation in the interaction, you're doing it just about as wrong as is possible. Is this person incapable of predicting 15 minutes into the future, given the current progression of events?

You say you want to get people to think. Great. So do I. Problem is, the person who does it the way I just described ISN'T thinking, they're just reacting.

I'm totally on board with 'talk early, talk often." It makes a lot more sense to lay out the plan for the next hour up front than it does to open those gates one at a time, at ten minute intervals.

Frankly, granting one permission at a time, then stopping at the one where you are uncomfortable proceeding, feels a lot more like leading someone on. Everything seems to be going fine, and then suddenly you are up against a hard limit with no warning? Feels like something went badly wrong. By contrast, if you say up front, "Tonight I'm comfortable with anything up to where we take off clothing" then your partner can hardly say they were taken by surprise when two hours in, you assert that limit.

@ Hunter

Ohh. Thanks for the clarification. The way I had heard the story, probably someone said he 'drugged her', so I assumed she was unaware she was taking it. My bad.

@ Avast/Eirene et al

Honestly, this is the thing "okay let's plan in advance what we're doing tonight" or "okay I'm going to check in periodically" none of that sounds fun or sexy or exciting to me. I'm willing to admit that I could be wrong about the effectiveness about YMY (although no one has been especially convincing) but I stand by my personal feeling that it's not a lot of fun. To be clear though, I'm not trying to convince you to feel the same way.

I just count myself lucky that I haven't been with someone who tried to do that.