In a perfectly lovely, long post on complications of our casual understanding of the term “casual sex” Lynn Gazis-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones shines a bright spotlight on what’s got to be the biggest source of wariness about it (italic emphasis mine, bold emphasis hers.)

But before I get to sex, I need to talk about not-sex, because that has a lot to do with my visceral reactions to what people call, variously, “casual sex,” “one-night stands,” “hookups,” “flings,” “no strings attached,” etc. In particular, I’m thinking of a particular kind of not-sex: the stream of not particularly welcome overtures, from people not particularly willing to care about my response, that started with the obscene phone call from an apparently adult man when I was just a kid, including the guy who tried to grab me on the street when I was still not quite legal, the shouts in the street from groups of men, the drunk at the swimming pool whose wife kept apologizing for him, etc. Because the thing about these unwelcome, uninvited, boundary pushing approaches is that, though the men making them were very much a minority among the men I met in general, they were a much larger set of the men who were approaching me for no strings sex.

You’d probably enjoy reading the whole thing, here.

Mild-reflex reservations aside (reflex says it sounds like she’s stereotyping, reflection says not) I think this is the $64,000 problem. There really are at least two types of people interested in “casual sex” and one of those two types is very different from the other one.

Fairly or unfairly, it’s very, very easy to see how involvement, even glancing involvement, with individuals from one group could make you wary about the whole approach.

Lynn really crystalized the difference.

The flip and/or “sex positive” solution is to say stuff like “well, it’s unfair to judge my intentions by the actions of of others.” This is perfectly true — thus my mention of reflex reservations, above.

It’s also, unfortunately, 100% victim-blaming.

So it occurs to me that if you enjoy the idea of casual sex then it’s your responsibility to challenge, aggressively and consistently, the actions and intentions not of the victims but of the perpetrators.

You see a guy cat-calling someone from a window? Hear a guy in a dorm, frat, office, or party talking about spiking the punch with odorless/tasteless PGA, let alone roofies? You hear someone saying “cash, grass, or ass, nobody rides for free?” You see someone with a “shut up and suck” t-shirt? You see someone not taking no for an answer whether out of cluelessness, drunkenness, eagerness, privilege, arrogance, impatience, or barely-suppressed rage at the entire class of people they’re sexually oriented towards? You hear someone running someone else down for their weight, or for their body parts, or their (real or hypothesized) sexual behaviors or proclivities, someone referencing another strictly in terms of their sexual utility instead of their humanity? You see or hear any of that you’re not just seeing the oppression of their intended victim. You’re seeing your own oppression.

By convention you don’t have to do or say anything when you see that kind of oppression. But don’t imagine it has nothing to do with you.