So, the thing about waves is, the aren't exactly the most controlled of forces. The ocean does not care what you had planned, and waves will wash over everything in their paths. Waves will over reach. What I'm trying to say is, it was inevitable that we would get to this point, where we'd have to have a reckoning between the folks who said, "yes, obviously, Harvey is a monster, but.." and the folks for whom there is no but.
And I think we're here.
Stuff is continuing to come about about less egregious forms of sexual assault, harassment, and dysfunction. Grey areas are being wadded into, uncomfortable truths are emerging, and everything has gotten a whole lot more convoluted. Most recently, or not, since I am by no means the most up to date, Aziz Ansari and James Franco have been pulled in for somewhat more complicated offenses.
And, to me, the crux of the issue comes back to a favorite winter song, Baby It's Cold Outside. If you've never heard the song, hop on to youtube for the original, or any of the many, many, many, updates and remakes of the classic song. I'll wait. It's a lovely, controversial, date-rape-y song. Recently, I was online in the midst of kitten videos etc. when I stumbled onto a more uplifting take on the song's origin. The argument was that the song was not, in fact, date rape-y, but a woman making excuses to stay the night with a man she liked. See, in the not-so-good-old-days, women lacked the freedom to make sexual choices on their own. They were the brakes, and men were the gas (and everything was hetero-normative as hell....sorry about that). Women were responsible for maintaining their chastity against the hoard of sex hungry, uncontrollable men that were their friends and neighbors. Essentially, we pretended that everyone had the sexual norms of cave dwellers, but in snappy 1940s and 50s attire. And we didn't talk about it.
But people are people, and sexual appetites vary, and some women, even back then, just wanted to get laid or fool around with the guy they liked, so they'd have to come up with a guise of being too drunk to go home, to play the part of unwilling but unable to fight prey, so that they could maintain their social standing to some extent. Basically, the argument is, Baby It's Cold Outside is actually a ladies' anthem for repressed sexuality; she's playing the game with him, making excuses so she can spend the night. Which is a much more pleasant subject for a song.
BUT.
Here's the problem.
We don't know if that's true, because she never gets to say, "hey, by the way, I want to stay, I am just playing this dumb game." Because she's not allowed to because of social constraints on female sexuality. Social constraints that persist to this day. And this is the real problem we are all struggling with now.
Without women and men (and people of all genders) growing up in a nonjudgmental space of sexual expression and enthusiastic "Yes!" and "No!" responses to sexual advances, we can't even really know our partner's take on our own sexual encounters. Women (at least from my not-that-long-ago, born in 1980+ generation) are still growing up with the idea that sex is something inherently gendered with roles on predator and prey. I know I grew up with potent images of the romanticism of sexual dominance and violence, to the point where i fantasized about it with my friends as a child. If you think you didn't grow up with the same images imposed upon you, thing about everyone's hero, Harrison Ford, who makes his way through Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises kissing women by force, against their will, until they submit, admitting it was all an act.
How the fuck are we supposed to learn about consent from that?
We didn't. And Harrison Ford is just an easy target; think back to other movies, whether women say no when they mean yes, how violence is portrayed around sexuality. One of my favorite dumb movies, Mr. and Mrs Smith, starts out with a battle to the death between spouses, and ends in a bloody sex scene. Complicated. I find myself searching media now, for signs that the people being kissed, trust upon, are actually into it. It is a disheartening exercise.
Herein lies the problem. We have completed trained ourselves to not expect female consent. All of us. I feel like this piece of writing articulates the complication of it all very well. And maybe it's changing, but these things take time. Aziz and James are close to my age, so I assume they grew up with something similar to my cultural milieu, and I can tell you I've had tons of sex I didn't really want. Bad sex, unpleasant sex. Sex I had because I thought I was proving something to someone, or because I thought it meant something. But for a very long time I had a lot of bad sex because I thought, truly, that I *should* say yes to every offer that came my way. I was never cool, I never considered myself pretty, but I was funny and had big boobs, so I would attract some guys some times. It took me a while to put my finger on it, but I didn't always feel like I had the right to say no, because who was I? Who was I to turn these guys down, who were cool, or bought me beers, or seemed funny at first, or didn't care that I was on my period. Who was I to say no?
If you've read the New Yorker piece Cat Person, you know what I'm talking about. There are so many fine, grey lines in between what we all want for everyone, which is joyfully consented to enthusiastic sex, and what we are used to expecting. I might be alone in the way I valued myself in my early twenties, but I know I am not alone in what I am seeing echoed throughout the world lately. Scores of women have had sex they didn't want. Sometimes, because they were forced, coerced, drugged, tricked. And that is rape. Sometimes, they had sex they didn't want because they felt it had gone too far to stop, or they didn't no how to say no, or their partner didn't think to seek an enthusiastic yes. Sometimes someone screams no in their head, but smiles, and goes along with it, because that's what you do. Because if you say no, it could go from a bad sex story to a terrible rape story, to a beating, to some other more heinous act that you can already imagine. At least if you don't say no, you are holding on to some facet of control in the face of the looming culture that demands that women be the source and substance of sexual gratification for all, without necessarily taking too much of it for themselves.
What I'm trying to say is, it is complicated. And we are all to blame. If I had said no when I meant it, I would have brought the world a little closer to the enthusiastic yes that I believe we all deserve. That is SEXY AS HELL. But it took me a few years to learn that I was worth the no and the yes, and that both were part of my feminism and my sexuality. As a society I see more enthusiastic "Yes!" moments in movies and tv, which is important. We learn a lot from media. We need to teach ourselves and the next generation that sex is great for those who want it, and great to not have for those who don't want it. That it is a complicated mismatch of flesh and feelings, and that respecting the other person you engage in it with is the most important thing. We need to find a way to talk about this without jumping on each others' perceptions and experiences, and come at some of these situations with some empathy.
And we are talking about it, so that's a start. We need to keep talking, and listening, and questioning. Especially things that make us uncomfortable. That's how we get out of this quagmire of grey.
#imho
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