re: #244 EPR-radar

If someone is in no position to say yes or no, then the default has to be NO.

One of the concepts from the Walter Mosley piece:

3. Get enthusiastic about enthusiastic consent. Rape culture relies on our collective inclination to blame the victim and find excuses for the rapist. Enthusiastic consent — the idea that we’re all responsible to make sure that our partners are actively into whatever’s going down between us sexually — takes a lot of those excuses away. Rather than looking for a “no,” make sure there’s an active “yes.” If you adopt enthusiastic consent yourself, and then teach it to those around you, it can soon become a community value. Then, if someone is raped, the question won’t be, well, what was she doing there, or did she really say no clearly enough? It will be: what did you do to make sure she was really into it? Check out this Tumblr page on enthusiastic consent.

I’m not saying that the bar for legal rape should be ‘enthusiastic consent’, I’m saying that as a culture we should endorse enthusiastic consent. There is far, far too much portrayal of female sexuality as naturally reluctant and having to be enticed in some way, and so men often think that a woman who shows only tepid interest in having sex with them just needs to be cajoled or wooed. This way, guys who really aren’t bad people wind up coercing or forcing women into sex.

Women are every bit as into sex as men. If you don’t have a clearly enthusiastic partner, then the sex is not going to be good, and you’re going to feel weird afterwards, anyway. We have all this weird porn out there that’s basically fantasy scenarios of women being coerced and rape, and it’s meta-sick because a lot of the industry producing that porn is so exploitative it is in many ways coercive. I don’t think that represents an actual natural desire of men, I think it represents this hypermasculine, guys wanna fuck all the time girls have to be dragged into bed idea that we’ve got.

These assholes are little bastards themselves, but they didn’t grow up that way as a bunch of bad seeds, they were taught these attitudes by their role models, their parents, their coaches, their older brothers, and by a hell of a lot of our culture with mainstreams the idea of men aggressively coercing women into sex.