Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape (6 page)

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Authors: Friedman,Jaclyn Friedman,Jessica Valenti

BOOK: Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape
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Some of the most common rape-apologist arguments follow from the commodity model. For example, rape apologists often echo Katie Roiphe’s argument from her 1994 book,
The Morning After,
that women who have “bad” sex and later regret it interpret the experience as rape. In fact, the terminology of a transaction is often applied: “buyer’s remorse.” To that way of thinking, women have made a transaction that cannot be undone, and seek a form of refund by calling it nonconsensual after the fact. But it is fanciful to imagine a circumstance in which enthusiastic participation quickly turns not to regret, but to denial that consent existed at the time. This argument works only if consent is simply acquiescence, even grudging acquiescence. Because they cast sex as commodity, rape apologists can easily make the same caveat emptor arguments about sex that one makes in used-car sales: that a deal is a deal, however reluctantly, grudgingly, or desperately one side accepts it.
 
In fact, the commodity model is, at its core, an adversary model (though one might stop short of calling it a zero-sum game, except perhaps in the minds of the most open misogynists). The negotiation is not a creative process but a bargaining process, where each side seeks and makes concessions. Each side wants to get something that the other does not want to give.
 
What naturally arises from the commodity model is a tendency of property transactions: They are often not equally advantageous, and depend on bargaining power. Since some duress and coercion are common, in order for commerce to flourish it is necessary to have rules about when someone is stuck with the bargain they made, even if they regret it or never really liked it in the first place. This is what rape apologists do every time: defend the transaction by holding the unhappy participant responsible, emphasizing her agency, minimizing coercion, and insisting on the finality of bargains.
 
When applied to sex, every feminist knows what this looks like. Rape apologists argue that once consent is given it cannot be withdrawn; that acquiescence under the influence is consent; that women who do not clearly say no assume the risk.
17
 
The Performance Model of Sex
 
Returning to Sally the musician, we do not believe some things to be true of her that the commodity model presumes about sex. The better model for sex is the one that fits the musician: a performance model, where sex is a performance, and partnered sex is a collaboration. Music is an obvious metaphor. (There are others: dance, which is also frequently a two-partner but sometimes a multipartner activity; or sports, which imports a problematic competitive aspect.)
 
The commodity model assumes that when a woman has sex, she loses something of value. If she engages in too much sex, she will be left with nothing of value. It further assumes that sex earlier in her history is more valuable than sex later. If she has a lot of sex early on, what she has left will not be something people will esteem highly. But a musician’s first halting notes at age thirteen in the basement are not something of particular value. Only an obsessive completist would want a recording of a young musician’s practice before she knew what she was doing; and then only after that musician has made her mark by playing publicly, well, and often. She gets better by learning, by playing a lot, by playing with different people who are better than she is. She reaches the height of her powers in the prime of her life, as an experienced musician, confident in her style and conversant in her material. Her experience and proven talent are precisely why she is valued.
 
Because it centers on collaboration, a performance model better fits the conventional feminist wisdom that consent is not the absence of “no,” but affirmative participation. Who picks up a guitar and jams with a bassist who just stands there? Who dances with a partner who is just standing and staring? In the absence of affirmative participation, there is no collaboration.
 
Like the commodity model, the performance model implies a negotiation, but not an unequal or adversarial one. The negotiation is the creative process of building something from a set of available elements. Musicians have to choose, explicitly or implicitly, what they are going to play: genre, song, key, and interpretation. The palette available to them is their entire skill set—all the instruments they have and know how to play, their entire repertoire, their imagination, and their skills—and the product will depend on the pieces each individual brings to the performance. Two musicians steeped in Delta blues will produce very different music from one musician with a love for soul and funk and another with roots in hip-hop or 1980s hardcore. This process involves communication of likes and dislikes and preferences, not a series of proposals that meet with acceptance or rejection.
 
The performance model gives us room to expand comfortably beyond the hetero paradigm. This model encounters no conceptual problem when two men or two women or more than two people have sex. Their collaboration will produce a different performance because their histories and preferences differ, as do all people’s, and the result is influenced (not constrained) by the bodies people have. The performance model even has better explanatory power than the commodity model in looking at a queer man and woman having sex. The commodity model does not differentiate this scenario from that of a hetero couple; the performance model predicts that this union will be different. To stretch a metaphor perhaps too far, the musicians come from different genres and will play music differently, even when they are writing it for the same arrangement of instruments.
 
A performance model is one that normalizes the intimate and interactive nature of sex. The commodity model easily divides sex into good and bad, based on the relative gains from the transaction, mapping closely to conservative Christian sexual mores. Under a performance model, the sexual interaction should be creative, positive, and respectful even in the most casual of circumstances, and without regard to what each partner seeks from it.
 
The performance model directly undermines the social construct of the slut. That is why the music-slut paragraph that begins the essay is so obviously a sex reference. There is no such thing as a music slut, and the concept makes sense only if it blatantly borrows the idea of slut from sex—an idea available to us because we are so used to talking and thinking about sex in a commodity model.
 
By centering collaboration and constructing consent as affirmative, the performance model also changes the model for rape. Forcing participation through coercion in a commodity model is a property crime, but in a performance model it is a disturbing and invasive crime of violence, a kind of kidnapping. Imagine someone forcing another, at gunpoint, to play music with him. It is perhaps a musical act (as rape has a sexual component, more central for some rapists than others), but there is no overlooking the coercion. The fact that it is musical would not in any way distract from the fact that it was forced, and sensible people might scratch our heads at how strange it is for someone to want to play music with an unwilling partner. Certainly, nobody would discount the coercion merely because the musician performing at gunpoint played music with other people, or even with the assailant before, which is an argument rape apologists make regularly when the subject is sex instead of music. B. B. King has played with everybody, but no one would argue that he asked for it if someone kidnapped him and made him cut a demo tape with a garage band of strangers.
 
Under a performance model of sex, looking for affirmative participation is built into the conception. Our children take their conceptions of sex from their parents first, and from the wider culture. If our boys learn from their preadolescence that sex is a performance where enthusiastic participation is normal and pressure is aberrant, then the idea that consent is affirmative, rather than the absence of objection, will be ingrained. In such an environment, many kinds of rape that are accepted, tolerated, and routinely defended would lose their social license to operate.
 
If you want to read more about IS CONSENT COMPLICATED?, try:
• Beyond Yes or No: Consent as Sexual Process BY RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL
• Reclaiming Touch: Rape Culture, Explicit Verbal Consent, and Body Sovereignty BY HAZEL
/
CEDAR TROOST
 
 
If you want to read more about MANLINESS, try:
• Hooking Up with Healthy Sexuality: The Lessons Boys Learn (and Don’t Learn) About Sexuality, and Why a Sex-Positive Rape Prevention Paradigm Can Benefit Everyone Involved BY BRAD PERRY
• Why Nice Guys Finish Last BY JULIA SERANO
 
 
If you want to read more about SEXUAL HEALING, try:
• A Woman’s Worth BY JAVACIA N. HARRIS
• A Love Letter from an Anti-Rape Activist to Her Feminist Sex-Toy Store BY LEE JACOBS RIGGS
 
 
If you want to read more about THE RIGHT IS WRONG, try:
• Offensive Feminism: The Conservative Gender Norms That Perpetuate Rape Culture, and How Feminists Can Fight Back BY JILL FILIPOVIC
• Purely Rape: The Myth of Sexual Purity and How It Reinforces Rape Culture BY JESSICA VALENTI
 
3
 
Beyond Yes or No: Consent as Sexual Process
 
BY RACHEL KRAMER BUSSEL
 
 
 
WHAT DOES IT MEAN to say to someone, “Fuck me?” Or, to put it a little more delicately, “Touch me?” To tell them exactly how you want to be kissed, licked, petted? Or to tell them just what it is you want to do with them? For one thing, it means that you are taking the bull, as it were, by the horns. You’re letting your lover—and yourself—know what you’re looking for, rather than leaving it up to the imagination. You’re giving them explicit instructions and thereby saying “yes” so loudly, they have to hear you.
 
The issue of “consent” encompasses the ways we ask for sex, and the ways we don’t. It’s about more than the letter of the law, and, like all sexual issues, at its heart is communication. Without our speaking up and demanding that our lovers do, too, we don’t ever truly know what they are thinking, which impedes us from having the sex we could be having. The infamous sexual consent rules at the now defunct Antioch College reached such a zenith of ridicule that the school’s very name came to be associated with these policies.
1
The basic idea behind the policy was to end “sexual violence while fostering a campus culture of positive, consensual sexuality.”
 
The main objectors didn’t argue that people should not be getting consent from their sexual partners, but quarreled with the idea that “each new level of sexual activity requires consent.” This policy was widely interpreted to mean that if you touched someone’s left breast with permission, you then had to get permission to touch her right breast. The broader implication that, say, you may be up for making out and heavy petting, but not full-on intercourse (or might start out with the intention of having intercourse and change your mind once it became imminent), got lost in the ridicule, culminating in a
Saturday Night Live
sketch.
 
But we do everyone a service when we recognize that consent is not simply a legal term, and should encompass more than simply yes or no. Say a woman agrees to have sex with her boyfriend, fully giving legal consent, but really she’d rather be off with her friends or at home in front of the TV. She agrees because it’s what’s expected, their routine. She’s bored, and he might as well be having sex with himself. Or maybe she doesn’t like having the same kind of sex they always have, but doesn’t know how to bring up her own fantasies.
 
The kind of consent I’m talking about isn’t concerned just with whether your partner wants to have sex, but what kind of sex, and why. Do you want to be on top, do it against the wall, doggy-style, missionary? These are questions good lovers ask of one another. When we passively respond or assume we know what the other person’s thinking, we could very well be wrong. By not speaking up or waiting until the other person can share their desires, we are simply guessing. There are exceptions, of course. Some people get off on having one person take charge and set the tone, pace, and position for sex. That’s fine,
as long as this is spelled out at some point in advance and isn’t simply assumed.
I don’t mean that you need to probe your lover’s every thought; I mean that getting some insight into what turns them on will fuel the sexual chemistry for both of you.
 
Try this: the Yes, No, Maybe chart. (A sample one can be downloaded.
2
) The concept comes from the BDSM (kinky) community but can be adapted to any sexual act. Here’s how it works: Write down every sexual act you can think of, and categorize them into things you enjoy/would like to do, things you don’t ever want to do, and things you’re not sure about or might try under certain circumstances. Your partner also fills out a list, and together, you see what you have in common. Both interested in spanking? Great! Curious about what it’s like to give (or receive) a lap dance? Go for it. Neither of you into butt plugs? Cross that off your list. One of you wants to go to a sex party, the other would never do it? Either cross that off your lists or negotiate how the person interested can check it out on their own. Even downloading such a list online and reading it over can spark ideas you may have never considered. This is especially useful for BDSM acts that may be new and confusing to both parties; how do you know whether you like, say, hot wax being poured on you if you’ve never done it before? What if you fantasize about it while you’re alone but don’t know if the reality would be all it’s cracked up to be? That’s why there’s a “maybe” on the list.

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