Quotulatiousness

May 6, 2015

“No means no” but apparently sometimes “Yes” also means “no”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Losing your bearings in the “rape culture” debate? You’re not alone. Even some of the active participants seem to be losing their bearings, too. Katherine Timpf reports:

When it comes to consent, it’s not enough to teach that “no means no” or even that only “yes means yes” — because sometimes “yes” can actually mean “no.”

At least that’s the point of view expressed in an op-ed written by Jordan Bosiljevac for Claremont McKenna College’s student newspaper, the Forum.

In the piece, Bosiljevac explains that she and her friends even came up with a phrase to describe someone having sex with you who you didn’t want to have sex with even though you told him that you did, which they apparently consider a form of rape:

“We coined the term ‘raped by rape culture’ to describe what it was like to say yes, coerced by the culture that had raised us and the systems of power that worked on us, and to still want ‘no,’” she writes in the April 30 article, titled “Why Yes Can Mean No.”

[…]

She does, however, clarify that you can actually be a person in one of these groups, or, as she explains it, “a person oppressed in these systems of power,” and still be capable of having “empowering consensual experiences.” Yep — even if you’re a female, you’re still capable of maybe actually wanting to have sex and enjoying it sometimes! Glad she clarified. If she hadn’t, I would have never imagined such a thing could be possible.

So what do we do? After all, there’s no way to tell if a woman is actually wanting to have sex or just saying that she wants to have sex even though she doesn’t because she’s a helpless victim of male oppression that makes it impossible for her to use the right words. Lest you think Bosiljevac is just complaining, she does offer a solution:

“First, we have to realize that all oppression is connected, and all rape is racist, classist, ableist, patriarchal, hetero and cissexist,” she writes. “We cannot make consent available to all if we are not simultaneously disrupting these structures.”

2 Comments

  1. Utter drek. What is the world coming to? That last quoted sentence… my God. What a mess.

    Comment by Dwayne — May 6, 2015 @ 21:34

  2. Well, it does nicely pull together all of the current “rape culture” memes in one place … if you ever start feeling good about yourself, one or more of those will quickly batter you back into a state of guilt and shame. Or they would if you were on the social justice warrior side.

    Comment by Nicholas — May 7, 2015 @ 06:46

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