Via Anna Lekas Miller of Gender Across Borders, the Sexual Assault Voices of Edmonton "Don't be that guy" campaign is taking an approach I've endorsed in the past: don't just tell men not to rape, tell them how. The first sentence in the following quote hints at why that's radical rather than, say, self-evident.

Typically, sexual assault awareness campaigns target potential victims by urging women to restrict their behavior. Research is telling us that targeting the behavior of victims is not only ineffective, but also contributes to how much they blame themselves after the assault. That's why our campaign is targeting potential offenders - they are the ones responsible for the assault and responsible for stopping it. By addressing alcohol-facilitated sexual assault without victim-blaming, we intend to mark Edmonton on the map as a model for other cities.

"Don't be that guy"

"Don't be that guy" will be launched on November 22, 2010. Our posters are available to download, below. Please feel free to print and distribute as you like. Just click on the image for a high resolution PDF.

Source: Sexual Assault Voices of Edmonton

In this context it's not quibbling to say we could but shouldn't spend all day debating whether most date rapists know exactly what they're doing, or instead know what they're doing but have radically impaired judgment, or are just so fucking indoctrinated to the bogus Two Rules of Desire fueled status quo that it simply never occurs to them that what they're doing is raping their impaired or unconscious dates.

It's not quibbling because the campaign's message targets the behavior, not the motivation. Even better (or worse from the date-rapist's perspective) it clearly identifies cases that make people "that guy." You can argue that it might provide desperately needed clues to the clueless perpetrator but won't stop intentional predators.

Maybe not.

But the beauty of the campaign is that it doesn't just warn you not to be "that guy," also it clearly warns your peers to recognize when you're being "that guy." As opposed to, say, identifying you as "lucky," or "good with women."

In other words by identifying what "that guy" behavior looks like the campaign helps erase most of the "gray" in those infamous "gray area" cases both predatory and clueless perpetrators are most comfortable operating in.  The benefit there is twofold: first, when there's no ambiguity the merely clueless don't perpetrate, which in turn leaves the genuinely predatory with no "but everybody does it" protective cover.

The best thing about the campaign, though, is it's implicit message that most men really aren't "that guy!" Even better it acknowledges that most men don't and never will want to be "that guy."  Not even accidentally.   The beauty of it is that nobody wants to be "that guy."  And the campaign helps clearly define how not to be one.

So.  Summary: Not automatically blaming the victim? Check.  Not automatically blaming all men either?  Check!  Clearly identifying the problem though? Check!  Framing it in a way that makes date rapists familiar characters?  Check.  Framing it in a way that makes date rapists look really lame to their peers instead of glamorous or macho?  Check!  Making it sound like no, you really don't want to be "that guy?"  Or even mistaken for him?  Check.  Best of all?  Making men part of the solution and not just the problem?  In a way we can go along with instead of object to resent?  Check.  If inadvertently or on purpose you ever were "that guy" does it give you a clear idea how to stop being one?  Check.

I love this kind o

Via Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper here’s a cool discussion about alcohol and consent from an organization called SAFERCampus. There’s a lot of good stuff in a single paragraph so I’m slightly reformatting it for clarity.

[T]here is so much defensiveness about alcohol and consent, as though it’s a really really complicated thing. And ya know, I think that for people who are aren’t raised to think about sex as a shared experience in which two people are actively, positively participating, it can actually seem that complicated.

But the reality is that it doesn’t have to be. Having sex with an incapacitated person should be widely understand as rape.

Two drunk people having sex should be aware enough of the other person to have a sense of what is or isn’t consent because they’ve been raised to respect other people, and it’s second nature to them to check and make sure their partner is involved.

I understand this is reductive; that it’s real nice to think about this sexual utopia where things are simple, but perhaps not a realistic picture of how things are now so what’s the point. But I think that we overcomplicate consent; people say that defining consent is making something natural more complicated than it needs to be, but really isn’t something only complicated when it’s unclear?

Wouldn’t the actions themselves be less complicated if we had the complicated conversations beforehand?

Read the quote in context here.

It kills me that it’s not obvious that sex is a shared experience between active participants! For all the talk about heartfelt-edness and intimacy and ultimate-icy our actual expectations of sex are barkingly unilateral. And it doesn’t just go one way — not only does institutional thinking from the original Code of Hammurabi to, say, Details Magazine encourages men to be insecurely selfish in their expectations about heterosexual sex, institutional thinking represented by, say, Cosmopolitan Magazine encourages women to be… insecurely selfless about their expectations! No hilarity ensues.

Once you get it that that’s the status quo, though, a heck of a lot of other stuff about “date rape” and “gray area” rape starts to make sense. Particularly the parts about “too unconscious to say no means yes.”

Matthew Yglesias has a serious, legitimate beef with an NPR piece on campus rape researcher David Lisak. Yglesias says the piece (which I haven’t heard) first covers men who admit having sex with women against their will and then… maybe out of some perverse j-school “to be sure” reflex… brought up another professor, Stetson University law professor Peter Lake, who says naah, a lot of college students just drink too much, engage in risky behavior, and then regret it later.

The two concepts are not a good combination in a single piece. Says Matt, emphasis his:

It’s seems incredibly pernicious to me to be running these things together. Lisak’s question specifically posits that the victim “did not want to” have sex, but was “too intoxicated … to resist.” What Lake is talking about conjured up an imagine of a young woman with impaired judgment doing something while drunk that she later regrets. Obviously, that does happen. But it’s quite a different situation from an encounter where even the perpetrator acknowledges that the victim was unwilling.

He said it here.

That sounds right.

You wanna know something else about the mentality that brings us the bogus Two Rules of Desire? If you’re convinced it’s simultaneously intolerable and inconceivable for women to have sexual desire then of course you’re going to believe they’re going to claim rape ever time they have a drunken hookup.

In fact most people who have drunken hookups just say “oh well, that was dumb.” You know who tends to claim rape instead? People who were actually raped.

Just a thought.

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.