Consent Culture

Men Need Clear Instructions — A #MeToo Conversation

How women can help good men — and how this will make it easier for us to spot bad men.

Unpopular opinion of the Day:

While it’s valid and needful that we talk about transgressions against us women, and our need for -and right to- body autonomy, and the need for men to respect women’s boundaries, there is another conversation worth having.

Men need better guidance, better instructions, better permissions for gendered conduct. They need a new framework. They need to shed some gender-normic expectations that were so heavily heaved upon them.

For generations men have been conditioned to believe that women are not empowered to openly say “Yes!” to sexual overtures. That women will be coy, vague, ambiguous. That women cannot be relied on to clearly indicate whether we want the sexual moment happen, and that a man could miss the subtle, arcane “clues” of a woman being open to sex. This gets men in trouble.

For generations men have been conditioned to believe that it’s up to them to create the sexual moment. That a woman might go along, might not — but she won’t create the sex container — she won’t facilitate the sexual moment. This, combined with the peer pressure of performing according to gender expectations, (i.e. “scoring”) puts men in the ineffectual and ungraceful position of constantly vying for the opportunity, for the hint in body language, the “did she just…?” tenuous possibility she might be open to sex. This gets men in trouble.

For generations, women before us have not been clear nor direct with their wants, their position, their sexual needs. This is fueled by a society still steeped in slut-shame — a society that judges harshly the “loose woman”. It is also fueled by a complacency and an assurance that the man will inevitably drive the sexual moment. This gets men in trouble.

Maybe it’s a virtue of being “of a certain age” that my candidness and directness is usually met with delight and relief — never judgment. Men like clear instructions.

None of this excuses sexual assault.

What I’m saying is that we want to do better at separating the wheat from the chaff. If we’re direct and uncompromising in forwarding a culture of open, informed consent — a culture that says “fuck you” to slut-shame, a culture where a man can rest assured that we WILL say “yes, I want to have sex with you” in unmistakable ways (in other words, that we can be counted on, be accountable for, our share in creating the sexual moment), then good men will be less clumsy, less blind, less lost in our signals. And good men will ask. They will respect. They will listen to us, and believe us.

And when good men get used to doing that, the bad men (and the not-so-good men, and the clueless men) will stand out like a sore thumb. We’ll easily see who and what they are.

DISCLAIMER/APOLOGY: Pardon the binary narrative — this post is written in a #MeToo framework, and that frame is primarily focused on educating cisgender heterosexual men. Also: I write in a binary manner because we’ve been living in a binary society and we’re socialized in binary thinking — and this post is specifically about that socialization. If this text made you invisible, please accept my apologies and try using “men” to define the agent in any socio-sexual context. Please use “woman” to describe the target in a socio-sexual context. And yes, I realize -and endorse- the fact that our culture is changing/has changed, and that women can be the agents or there can be co-agency. YAY! for that. This post refers to the constructs I witnessed growing up — and is largely aimed at pre-Millennials.