I’m Not “A Prude” For Championing Consent
And you sound like an idiot when you say that
From time to time I get told that I’m a prude for valuing consent and believing that a women’s body autonomy should be respected (everyone’s body autonomy) but the main objection seems to be with women’s. Initially, this makes me laugh, and then it makes me really angry. This is not an academic debate: it’s my fucking real life and the real lives of most women.
It makes me laugh because I’m about as oppositive from a prude as you could ever hope to meet. I write erotica and regularly discuss my fairly adventurous sex life in explicit detail in public. I’m pansexual, polyamorous, sex-positive, and write a lot of stories that use current research to dispel old myths about female sexuality in particular. So, when someone tries to shame my position on consent as being disempowering to female sexuality and somehow Victorian, I first want to laugh, and then I pretty much want to punch him.
Telling a woman she’s frigid and prudish for advocating for active consent and thinking that respect is both vital and attractive, is pathetic, but it’s also trying to make her feel uncomfortable enough to stop talking. It’s a form of splaining — explaining a woman’s own life and experiences to her because after all, you know better… She should just hush now. It’s really OK for these types of outrages to continue because they don’t really hurt anybody. Stop overreacting! But they do hurt.
If you can look at a picture like this of Creepy Uncle Joe leering over the body of a young woman who looks like an animal caught in a trap and claim that he’s not really doing anything wrong, you are a person who either overtly or subconsciously believes that women’s bodies exist for the pleasure and enjoyment of men. It doesn’t matter whether or not he’s got sexual intentions. He believes he has the right to invade her body autonomy for his own ends, whatever they may be — and that’s a problem. She, on the other hand, looks like she’s trying to dissociate in order to deal with a situation she can’t otherwise escape.
But when I’ve pointed that out, I’ve heard from more than one man that I was being unreasonable. “In previous times, such behavior was considered natural and normal. In our more puritanical times, his behavior is no longer acceptable.”
This has never been acceptable. It’s simply been tolerated at a different level in the past. Rich, white men are the top of the dominance hierarchy. In the past, they were largely allowed to get away with whatever they wanted to. To some extent, they still are, as evidenced by Donald Trump’s famous “grab ’em by the pussy” comment. The only people who find this kind of non-consensual touching natural or normal are the men who want to maintain the right to keep doing it.
But there’s such a thing as decency and respect — this whole “that’s how I connect” in the case of Joe Biden is a complete red herring to allow him to continue to behave in the inappropriate way that he wants to because he feels entitled to do so. You aren’t connecting with someone when they look like they want nothing more than for you to stop touching them and leave them alone. Touching people you don’t know well in invasive ways when they have not invited you to do so is wrong and Biden has been made aware of that but yet he keeps doing it. That’s the problem. He’s not unaware — he just doesn’t know how to stop because he’s entitled.
“God, what a rampant pile of prudery! Your comment makes Victorians look like nudist sex maniacs. Don’t you understand the difference between sensuality and sexuality? By cramming your personal sense of prudery into feminism, you degrade and weaken feminism. A feminism that judges and attacks sensuality is cold, bleak, and ugly.”
One of the ways that I knew this spate of bombastics was meant to shame me and shut me up is that non-consensual sensuality between strangers is not appropriate either. The dictionary defines sensuality in this way: the enjoyment, expression, or pursuit of physical, especially sexual, pleasure. He was trying to sound artsy and erudite but telling me that I’m a prude with a Victorian outlook because I think it’s out of line to violate a woman’s right to consent is just a weak and kind of ridiculous ploy. And since when is being against sexual assault and rape a purely feminist stance?
Most men don’t think this way, but for the ones who do, some of them seem to truly have no shame with this stuff. This was one of the comments on a piece I recently wrote about storylines in movies and books where a man forces himself on a woman until she decides that she actually does like it after all — and how that really needs to go.
“Wow, I’m confused. Now you are censoring the very story lines women of my generation, wrote and read. Seems like another attempt to make women feel bad about their sexuality, just as women have complained men have done for so long. The younger liberal generation appears to want a new society where everything we think, feel, say and now fantasize about is controlled.”
No, I’m not censoring anyone’s fantasies or sexuality — that’s really reaching for it. I had specifically said fantasies of being sexually overwhelmed are common for women, and I have no issue with that, but what separates those from actual depictions on the screen and in books of women having their boundaries disregarded is that the woman having the fantasy has already given consent in her head for that fantasy.
And the real difference between a woman having that fantasy and seeing it portrayed as normal behavior in media is context.
- 25% of college guys admitted to engaging in sexual coercion by the end of their fourth year. Those are the ones who admitted to it and realized they were doing it. How many more would a truly accurate accounting involve?
- 1 in 16 women say their first sexual experience was forced or coerced. Some 50% of women surveyed said the perpetrator was larger or older. More than 46% of the women were held down. In 56% of the instances, men used verbal pressure. Men used physical threats more than 26% of the time and caused physical harm in more than 25% of the instances. Some 22% of the women were drugged.” CNN Health
- 1 in 6 women will be raped and 1 in 3 have been the victims of some kind of sexual violence. But those are just the official statistics.
- I’ve never met a woman of any age, political affiliation, geographic area or any other demographic who hasn’t experienced disregard for their body autonomy multiples times throughout their life, from both strangers and men that they know.
In the face of all that, continuing to reinforce in the media that lack of consent is sexy and something that a woman secretly wants, is incredibly irresponsible. Besides, at 56, I’m hardly the “younger generation” and I’m not trying to control anyone, least of all female sexuality in all of its multi-faceted splendor. In fact, I spend a great deal of my time writing about ways to encourage and support that, so once again, this is just an absurd kind of histrionics designed to shut down any talk of actually having to treat women in the way that they’d like to be treated and not the way that you’ve been sold by Hollywood and patriarchal narratives as sexy.
This man actually mentioned the wild popularity of the 50 Shades of Grey franchise as proof that women want these kinds of stories, where the man is dominant and sometimes overrides the woman’s No (which she secretly wants, according to him). The missing piece is, they only want it in their fantasies that they have constructed and have control over. Women are still so societally sexually repressed, that in the case of the 50 Shades stories, having the chance to openly read and watch a very sexy “romance story” rather than a work of erotica, which is less mainstream, was liberating.
And maybe for some women, there was an element of their fantasy involved, but it was presented in a way that was tainted. It’s irresponsible not only because it represents the complete opposite of what the kink community actually stands for but also because it depicts problematic behaviors as sexy. It’s taking authentic desires for passion and excitement and corrupting them with disempowering elements.
If Fifty Shades is your guilty pleasure, that’s fine. But if it’s inspiring you to explore BDSM, keep in mind that long-time practitioners — or players, as they call themselves — largely criticize author E.L. James’s depiction as woefully inaccurate. More than once, Christian refuses to listen to Anastasia’s “no,” but the community has put big efforts into prioritizing consent for many years. And, advocates say, since sexual consent is a critical topic everywhere from postsecondary campuses to criminal courts, a better understanding of BDSM could probably help society at large.
“He is a powerful, rich man with a lot of social power and he uses that to manipulate her and coerce her into a relationship that he wants,” says podcast host Dawn Serra about Fifty Shades. “Nothing about the agreement is about what Ana wants, nor does he ever acknowledge how his power automatically makes her agreement questionable.”
On her show, Sex Gets Real, Serra often discusses the importance and practicalities of two core BDSM beliefs about consent: that all acts should be safe, sane and consensual, or SSC, and that everyone should practise risk-aware consensual kink, or RACK. “The goal is ultimately the same,” says Serra, who lives in Salt Lake City, Utah. “That everyone involved in an activity understands the potential risks and has taken the necessary precautions for their required level of safety, and that everyone involved has the ability — mentally, psychologically and socially — to choose for themselves whether or not to engage in this activity.”
No one would be happier than me to see real-life kink and adventurous female sexuality portrayed more often in the mainstream media, but only if it’s depicted in ways that support and empower women having agency and autonomy over their own bodies. Selling people on passion and excitement paired with outdated concepts about the inherent power dynamics between men and women isn’t something that anyone should be defending because it’s not just about fantasy — it’s about real women’s lives and how they may be impacted by normalizing disempowering stories.
And no, I’m not a prude for thinking that. Consent and respect for body autonomy are real issues that impact pretty much all women (and a lot of other people as well) in very serious ways. Making light of that — trying to shame people who care about it — that’s what rape apologists do. And besides, it sounds idiotic to intimate that someone who wants everyone to have control over their own person is undermining healthy sexuality or feminism or anything else.
Expecting our media to not foster rape culture, expecting our leaders to show respect for people with less power than they have, that shouldn’t be a crazy thing to ask. Trying to tell me I’m Victorian for wanting that says a lot more about the speaker than it says about me, the kinky, poly, pansexual erotica writer.
