Yes Means Yes, Part Two

Posted by Sappho on October 5th, 2014 filed in Feminism, Sexuality

There’s a sequel to the story of my unfortunate experience with D’Kora, and this is where I get to another thread on Steve’s Facebook page, this one about a Camille Paglia article, and a comment someone made in that thread involving a quote from Spider Robinson.

All of us have our views about sex shaped by our own experiences, and these are the things I took away from my experience with D’Kora.

First, and most important, I learned something about what people call “gray areas” in sexual consent.

Sometimes I’ve run into people who suggest that actually penetrating a woman while she’s asleep is some sort of a gray area, if she’s done something or other to suggest that she finds the guy attractive. Fuck that noise. If one of the more memorably bad experiences of my life was, not even being penetrated, but simply getting a hand job while I was asleep, then being penetrated while I’m asleep truly sounds like hell. If you think otherwise, you should contract for your preference as an explicit consensual kink, complete with safewords.

There’s another reason, though, that penetrating a woman while she’s a sleep is not any sort of gray area. It’s that we have black and white laws saying it’s a crime. I think that anyone with an ounce of empathy should know not to do this, but what I think actually doesn’t matter, because even if you don’t find that your empathy teaches you not to do this, there’s a clear cut rule that anyone is capable of learning. This has been the law since before I was born (a quick web search tells me that, in the case People v. Craig, a rape case tried in California in 1941, California penal code already contained a provision that included the case where the victim “is unconscious of the nature of the act and this is known to the accused”).

Clear rules that tell people what’s wrong even if they can’t figure it out for themselves are a good thing. Because, maybe only a few men, if following the rule “do unto others as you would be done by,” would make D’Kora’s mistake. Or maybe a whole lot of men would, because, from their point of view, being woken up by sexual stimulation is fun and surprise and spontaneity. It doesn’t matter which of these things is true, because all men are capable of learning the simple rule that, before you wake a woman up by touching her crotch, you and she had better have a clear understanding that she likes this sort of surprise, and gives you an open invitation to supply it. And I think that rule is better, and likely to lead to less hurt all around, than the rule that says you should figured out that you needed to warn the guy ahead of time that you didn’t want this particular surprise. So, let’s make that the rule.

Likewise, “get a clear and unambiguous yes before proceeding” is just as easy a rule to learn as “stop as soon as you hear a no,” and “yes means yes” leads to less hurt all around than “only no means no.” There are, after all, many reasons a woman may fail to say no (ranging from being asleep to being terrified), while yes generally, you know, straightfowardly means yes.

Part of the reason that people are reluctant to agree to this, I know, is that, given that women still get judged for sex more than men do, some women do want the deniability that comes with not too eagerly saying yes, and so you can find women whose initial no really does mean, “persuade me,” and women who fantasize about being wordlessly taken, bypassing the risky process of admitting that they actually want sex. Why am I a killjoy, wanting to deprive men who desperately want sex of finding those women who also want sex, but are afraid to admit it?

Because men aren’t mind readers. In a fantasy, a man “just taking” a woman may work just fine, because it’s a fantasy, and we got to already assume a willing woman and a sexy man whom she really wants. In real life, where most of the people you want don’t want you, and you have to sift through those to find the few who do, not applying a “yes means yes” standard means that, for every woman who really did want you just to read her mind, you’ll have encountered several others who didn’t want you, and are now scared and upset because someone bigger and stronger than them doesn’t seem to be respecting their boundaries. Don’t be that guy.

How do you figure out what the general rule should be, and what the negotiated exception? You ask the set of people who are, in a given situation, the more vulnerable party, and you make a rule that will allow people to actively negotiate what they want if they choose, while still allowing the more vulnerable party not to be scared out of her wits. In the case where one person is asleep and the other is awake, the more vulnerable party is the one who’s asleep, and you make the rule that, if both were behind a veil of ignorance, each would want if she were the sleeper, not the one that looks most reasonable to the party who’s awake (if the two have different points of view). If men and women, on average, disagree about the rule, but each can state a rule that the other is capable of learning, you take the rule favored by the party who is more vulnerable and at greater risk.

There’s another reason, though, that people are uneasy with “gray areas,” and with this reason I have more sympathy. We have an ever expanding sexual offender registry, which in California includes, for life, basically every sexual offense regardless of severity, and which includes, besides public notification, some significant restrictions on where you may live. (I voted against the most recent expansion of these restrictions, but I was outvoted.)

California’s new “yes means yes” law has nothing directly to do with the sexual offender registry, since it concerns what penalties universities are expected to impose, rather than criminal penalties. But this same concern fuels criticism of the law. If any offense of sexual aggression, regardless of severity, is supposed to mark the offender for life, then we get the argument that it has to be the woman’s responsibility to say no sufficiently forcefully, full stop, because we don’t want to punish for life a man who might not be enough of a vicious predator to deserve it.

After all, even expulsion from, say, Stanford (not saying I wish D’Kora had been expelled from Stanford, especially given that we were both acting under different rules, but that’s what people seem to be arguing about here) is not really life ruining in itself. I know of people who have been expelled from a college for one thing or another, gone on to graduate later from a less name brand school, and done just fine. Wearing a scarlet letter for life as a sex offender, no matter what the size of your offense, is another matter. It’s not clear to me that all current “sex offenders” even committed crimes with actual victims, and, of those who did, is pubic safety really served by treating all of them, whatever their offense, as equally dangerous, decades after the fact? As it is, elderly sex offenders may have difficulty finding retirement homes that will take them, even if their offense doesn’t indicate a high level of risk to residents or visitors at the home, and what are they to do when they become frail enough to need assisted living?

But what a rule should be is a separate question from which deviations from that rule actually deserve tagging someone for life. I can, and do, say that a clear “yes means yes” is the right standard for sex, without saying that everyone, however young, and whatever the relative severity of his deviation from that “yes means yes” standard, deserves a lifelong badge of shame that may make it hard for him to live and work normally.

Second, a word about “hanging out and hooking up”: Some people have wondered why I’m so impatient with the suggestion that today’s college women are trapped in some sort of powerless position, in which they get stuck hooking up over and over, when hookups only make them unhappy and they want something else.

It’s not because I’m all, yay, hookups! Liberation!

And it’s not because I don’t understand that sex can be disappointing and heartbreaking when one person wants more commitment than the other.

Rather, it’s because when you truly find an experience unpleasant and alienating you don’t repeat it. Not voluntarily. Not unless there’s something else wrong in your life.

As Steven Barnes likes to say, the first mistake is a freebie. We all make them. But then, for the really bad experiences, the ones with no redeeming qualities, we look at the experience, and we say, no way am I doing that again.

I learned from Krakor that if you meet a guy with too many red flags for you to sleep with him, and you know (as I knew with Krakor) that he has too many red flags for you to sleep with him, and he’s still hitting on you, you don’t want to keep him as your friend, because he says he’s your friend, and because you want to be nice, and because sometimes he’s nice to you and apologizes for the times when he’s not so nice to you. You put him out of your circle. “The friend zone,” as people call it, is the place for guys who like you and respect your boundaries, even if sleeping with you might have been their first choice, and whom you like as friends but don’t find sexy. Because if a guy says he’s happy to be my friend and acts it, it’s not my job to say he’s wrong, because some completely different guy says “the friend zone” is an unacceptable place to be. But guys who keep pushing your boundaries in small ways should be shown the door, before they push your boundaries in big ways.

I learned from D’Kora many things. That kissing frogs doesn’t turn them into princes, so I should hold out for princes, because otherwise I’m neither doing myself nor the frogs any favors. That if a guy has shown any sexual interest in you, it’s probably not a good idea to decide too hastily that he’s dropped the idea, because you have, and that it’s probably wise to have a care how close you get to him, physically, so as not to give him the wrong impression. Don’t hug him because it’s only friendly; don’t go to sleep near him because he should understand you’re just a pal.

And it wasn’t especially hard to learn those things, and not make the same mistake twice.

So, if you don’t like hookups, don’t repeatedly have hookups. I seriously doubt that continuing to do things you dislike is the normal state, for men or women.

Do people make the same mistake over and over sometimes? Sure. But when they do, generally they make the same mistake over and over because there’s actually a pay off for them, even if the choice is not good for them in the long haul. There may be women who keep having hookups because they’re horny and the hookups are hot, but aren’t happy with the hookups afterwards. There may be women who don’t keep having hookups, but do keep overestimating how committed their lovers are to them. But I seriously doubt that there are tons of women having way too much casual sex with men and getting nothing out of it, just because they think they need to please the men. If there are, I say to those women: for heaven’s sakes, get a backbone!

Do people sometimes, finding the sexual marketplace not to their liking, make deals that they wouldn’t make if they thought they were in a better bargaining position? Sure. But only if they actually think they’re getting something from the deal. We all have hands (and those of us who want them have vibrators). If you don’t actually like the sexual relationships that are on offer better than you like masturbating (however much less you might like them than you’d like your ideal), then you’re not likely to have sex. So, in general, I think that women who repeatedly have hookups, however unwise you may find their choices, must be getting some pay off from the experience.

Finally, a word on Spider Robinson, and a correlary to what I just said about hookups.

On Steven Barnes’ Camille Paglia post, someone commented:

it reminds me of this quote: “Darling, all men think about rape, at least once in their lives. Women have an inexhaustible supply of something we’ve got to have, more precious to us than heroin… and most of you rank the business as pleasant enough, but significantly less important than food, shopping or talking about feelings. Or you go to great lengths to seem like you do—because that’s your correct biological strategy. But some of you charge all the market will bear, in one coin or another, and all of you award the prize, when you do, for what seem to us like arbitrary and baffling reasons. Our single most urgent need—and the best we can hope for—is to get lucky. We’re all descended from two million years of rapists, every race and tribe of us, and we wouldn’t be human if we didn’t sometimes fantasize about just knocking you down and taking it. The truly astonishing thing is how seldom we do. I can only speculate that most of us must love you a lot.

Of course my first response to this was, hell, if men have to love me a lot simply not to rape me, maybe I don’t want to be anywhere near those men.

But setting aside (with difficulty) the creepy talk about all men thinking about rape, which I can only hope Spider meant as hyperbole, here’s the problem I have with this quote.

Women have an inexhaustible supply of something we’ve got to have, more precious to us than heroin… and most of you rank the business as pleasant enough, but significantly less important than food, shopping or talking about feelings.

It’s amazing, the number of men I run into (online, anyway) who insist exactly this about women. Amazing, because this is not at all my experience of sex. It’s true that I know that a few people (they call themselves asexuals, or “aces”) really are as indifferent to sex as this quote suggests “women” are (“Sex is great, but have you ever had garlic bread that just came out of the oven?” asks a post on the Asexuals United Facebook feed). But it’s not at all the female norm. Trust me, I didn’t feel that sex with B’Togho rated below food, shopping, or even talking about feelings (though talking about feelings is great!). Sex with D’Kora, on the other hand? Yeah, I’d prefer chocolate. Or even an apple.

Obviously, why I prefer who I prefer is going to be baffling if you’re D’Kora. But that’s pretty much true if you’re a woman who discovers that the man you want prefers someone else, just as much as if you’re a man who discovers that the woman you want prefers someone else.

What is true, though, is that after a bad experience or two you learn that, for all that sex is, for women as well as men, a precious thing that we’ve just got to have, avoiding bad sex turns out also to be a precious thing, that we’ve just got to have. And I suggest that, if you’re a guy in the position of the guy in that quote, wondering why many of the women you meet want to “charge all the market will bear,” in the coin of “talking about feelings,” before they’ll have sex with you, this just might be part of the reason why.

True, not every woman wants more talk about feelings (or longer acquaintance, or more commitment, or more monogamy) than the average man. (So, if you’re a man who wants “no strings” and not much talk, you can always keep looking till you find women who actually agree with you.) And true, one may not have to talk about feelings all day to have good sex. But a little bit of willingness to listen to and talk about your feelings is one of the ways (though not the only way) that you can get some hope that the sex will be good, rather than something you want to forget.

In other words, if you find women amazingly choosy about sex, it might mean that you’re just not that attractive a man (and other, more attractive men are finding women not all that choosy), or it might mean that most of the women you’re pursuing find sex a riskier proposition than you do, and therefore want to check you out further before they trust you that far, but, trust me, speaking as a woman, it seriously doesn’t mean that most women find shopping more fun than sex, and therefore find sex more useful as a barter item than for their own pleasure.

But, yeah, I think we may on average be more motivated to avoid bad sex than you are. There are probably fewer men than women who have been on my side of the D’Kora experience.

Besides, pretty much every good sexual experience I’ve had has been with a guy who, at least sometimes, was willing to discuss his feelings and listen to mine. Da’Ka literally cried on my shoulder once, over his ex, before he and I had our own sexual encounters. Keth, as I’ve said, confided in me his worries about his father’s health. B’Togho shared his poetry with me.

Discussing feelings isn’t everything. There are manipulators who are both great at discussing feelings and great at pushing boundaries in their own way. There are people who are willing to talk about feelings, who turn out to have irreconcilable differences with you. And there are people who can talk plenty about feelings but just aren’t that hot, for other reasons. But I’ve never personally known sex to go well without that willingness to talk and listen.

And the guys with whom I did talk? They may not all have loved me. I may not always have been wise. I may sometimes have wound up disappointed. But the sex was hot.