The "no-sex" class: disquieting conversations about rape
A funny thing has happened over the last 500 years, at least in Western Civilization. In olden days (and, bitterly, not so olden) rape was considered a crime of property committed not against the victim but against her male custodial guardian (usually her husband or father.) That's an astonishingly offensive perspective by today's standards but the had, well, an astonishingly different perspective back then. While it defies credibility today it was once believed that women were utterly amoral when it came to sex. It was believed that, given the opportunity to get away with it they'd offer only token resistance. Instead it was men who were expected to be the moral and sexual gatekeepers not only for themselves but also for the women in their lives. Now was that true? Well, no more true than the equally stupid contemporary "no-sex" class notion that given an opportunity women leap at any chance to *avoid* having sex.
I don't believe women were consulted before either belief was established.
Anyway, from the old perspective of victims wanting unasked-for sex to the current perspective of victims "asking for" unwanted sex the legal system has evolved to... pretty much keep victims miserable no matter what.
Yesterday in Slate Magazine, legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick writes about a new obstacle raised against victims of rape: a Nebraska judge ruled that use of the words "rape, sexual assault, victim, assailant, and sexual assault kit" can't be used by prosecution attorneys, witnesses, and even the victim because it might be prejudicial against the accused.
Mmmkay.
Lithwick, while not *completely* unsympathetic to the argument that certain words might prejudice a jury to draw "legal conclusions" in the *general* case is pretty unsympathetic in this specific one.
The real question for Judge Cheuvront, then, is whether embedded in the word sex is another "legal conclusion"—that the intercourse was consensual. And it's hard to conclude otherwise. Go ahead, use the word sex in a sentence. Asking a complaining witness to scrub the word rape or assault from her testimony is one thing. Asking that she imply that she agreed to what her alleged assailant was doing to her is something else entirely. To put it another way: If the complaining witness in a rape trial has to describe herself as having had "intercourse" with the defendant, should the complaining witness in a mugging be forced to testify that he was merely giving his attacker a loan?
I'd like to go one step further and point out that the very word "intercourse" -- yet another genteel euphemism for fucking -- implies mutual, consensual engagement. For instance:
in·ter·course (ĭn'tər-kôrs', -kōrs') n Dealings or communications between persons or groups.
Intercourse noun: The exchange of ideas by writing, speech, or signals: communication, communion, intercommunication.
To have inter-course is to run with, to speak with, to *build* with *together.* And no matter how one parses it, whether one is the victim or the perpetrator rape is neither conversation nor trade by other means.
Oddly, this is entirely consistent with both the ancient and modern understandings of women's role in sex -- in olden days believed animally incapable of declining an opportunity, in modern days deemed angelically incapable of accepting one, and so in either case incapable of sexual intercourse in the sense of an autonomous individual exercising free will.
Which brings us to insights on the matter from Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon:
The conservative-sexist model of rape is the same one used to define a foul in basketball. Basically, when sexual intercourse happens, the man team has scored a point against the woman team. Each team is allowed some strategies and disallowed others. In basketball, you’re supposed to snatch the ball from the other team, but you can’t cross certain lines or you’ll get a foul. This explains why rape trolls are so eager to find out what the “rules” are, i.e. when they are permitted to force sex. (”Is it rape if she’s drunk? What if she says yes and changes her mind? Is it okay to bully someone into it, so long as you don’t actually hold her down and force her? Are guilt trips okay?, etc.”) If there’s some ambiguity when the referee calls a foul, your teammates (other men) are supposed to clamor to your defense, regardless of whether or not you actually fouled. If the foul is called, then the woman team scores a point (or a free throw in basketball, but you get the idea). The idea that it’s wrong to have sex with someone unless she really, really wants to do it makes about as much sense as saying that you should only be allowed to get the ball in basketball if the defense hands it to you.
While that's a grimly accurate summary attitudes towards women and sex in general, but of sexual assault in particular: it's not about choice or mutuality, working together, running together, or discourse. There *has to be a defense to beat* or it's no fun! Marcotte prefers to label this the "conservative-sexist" approach. I prefer to call it the "no-sex" class paradigm. (Not least because too many progressives are enmeshed in the paradigm to call it exclusively conservative.)
Marcotte outlines a brilliant alternative that she chooses to call the "liberal-feminist" model (although for framing reasons I'd rather call it "normal.")
The liberal-feminist view of sex is that it’s not a war or a game, but more of a mutual collaboration, less like a battle and more like playing music. In this model, to be a sexual person is to be a musician and sex is playing your instrument. Sometimes you play by yourself, sometimes you get with others and jam, and sometimes you actually have a band that you have a long-term relationship with. There aren’t winners and losers, but there can be good and bad sex, just like there can be good and bad music. The collaboration model of sex explains why acceptance of homosexuality and kinkiness are generally liberal views. It makes no more sense to call homosexuality immoral than it does to posit that rock is more moral than jazz; it’s all a matter of taste. Homosexuality creates a lot of grief to those who have a fairly strict conservative view of sex because you can’t even tell who’s notsupposed to be the offense and the defense. It’s simply outside of their model, and it creates cognitive dissonance, which often makes the person suffering it want to wipe out the source of the dissonance.
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The very idea that getting someone to play in your band or jam session who is reluctant or openly hostile makes no sense, thus the idea of “winning” in sex by getting a reluctant woman to submit is repulsive to feminists, period. Trying to figure out the rules of when coercion is acceptable and when it’s not makes no more sense than asking if it’s okay to make someone play in your band by holding their kids hostage, threatening to fire them, locking the doors so they can’t leave or simply laying a guilt trip on them. You can vaguely understand the desperation sometimes, if no one will ever play with you, but in the end, it makes no sense. Even if you can force someone to go through the motions, odds are the results are going to suck because they don’t even want to be there. Music is supposed to be fun, so if it’s not fun, it negates the entire point. Same with sex.
Bottom line: I'm not saying that sexual assault will vanish once we discard the stupid "no-sex" class paradigm. I am saying, however, that when we do our relationships will much more closely resemble making music together than attempting to draw fouls. I'm also not saying that after the "no-sex" class thing is history life will be all sweetness and light: we'll still have Celene Dion and most of us will still play oompa music. But at least we'll be doing it *together* instead of one against the other.
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Aside: another reason I didn't care for the "conservative vs. liberal" divide is that even in the music world not everyone can nor wishes to start a band with just anyone walking down the street. Conservatives can still be conservative in that model, without treating pussy as a resource-extraction problem.
Yeah, I had the same sense that Amanda was capturing a real divide with the win/lose game vs. collaboration and making music together analogy, but that conservative vs. liberal was maybe not the best way to describe it. The "no-sex class" paradigm has "conservatives" who think that women should be holding down that gatekeeper role and men should be letting the women civilize them and "liberals" who think that women should be giving it up more easily, and, if a woman who doesn't want to start a band with just anyone walking down the street sees that kind of "conservative" and "liberal" as the main two choices she gets presented, she may well come to see herself as sexually "conservative," even if she quite likes sex, and much prefers mutual sex to resource-extraction-style sex.
One difficulty with both "conservative" and "liberal" as words is that they have so many different layers of meaning to them; I still see them as useful in political discussions, but prefer to either avoid or carefully qualify them in discussions about more personal choices.
[The liberal/conservative demarkation is Amanda's, although I suspect she'd prefer to emphasize the sexist/feminist parts instead. My experience of men's "no-sex" class paradigm is that liberals are every bit as susceptible as conservatives. And I'd say that even the sexist/feminist divide is a little shakey since way too many progressive men who would rather not be sexist still completely misread Malvina Reynold's old "We Don't Need the Men" nursery rhyme. Oh yeah, and finally, we gotta get over this notion that "liberal" means "more sex." And utterly pre-empt the idea that kicking the "no-sex" class paradigm will just be "girls gone wild" with pinkie-fingers extended. Because it just... won't! And for the record, pretty much the only people who actually use the word "liberal" in a sexual context seem to be politically-conservative-leaning pornographers who use it as a short-hand for "gullible" or "lacking values." Thanks, Lynn. --fl]