Monday, December 05, 2016

"Baby It's Cold Outside" and Consent


I will be going to a really dark place with tomorrow's post, and there will be at least a few more building on it. I didn't want to go right there without warning. Today's post is to intended to move us in that direction but give a little buffer.

I have seen arguments that "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is rape-y, and counter-arguments that at the time it was written it was clearly about a couple conspiring to flout society's rules and do what both of them wanted. Obviously the song is intended to be light-hearted, but that doesn't mean that the criticisms aren't valid.

Now I'm going to bring in a sketch from a conservative show. I'm sure I could find the clip, but I don't want to give it any recognition. They were mocking the process of teaching about consent by calling everything "rape", including a guy just asking the girl if they could have sex. Ridiculous, obviously, but also completely missing the point of what they were mocking. This happens a lot.

Here is a quote from Rush Limbaugh:

"The left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it's perfectly fine. But if the left ever senses and smells that there's no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police."

My first thought is to tell Rush that the rape police are the regular police, but given the statistics we know about reporting, prosecution, and conviction, okay. What is more to the point is how he subtly uses condemnation of immorality to sidestep the fact that if one party in the sex act doesn't want to be there, that is a problem. This happens a lot.

This is where we bring in one of the books from the Long Reading List: Slut!: Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation, by Leora Tanenbaum.

It wasn't a revelation like some of the other books. It was more that it fit into things that I already saw, though with many horrible examples to drive it home.

The slut label is a form of social control. It can be used to by men against women, but it is also used by women against women. One interesting aspect was in how many of the examples, the label came either because of a sexual assault, or because someone told a lie to get revenge. I do not accept a morality where lying for revenge and tormenting victims is superior to people choosing to have sex and then doing so. If their morality had any righteous base, there wouldn't be the double standard where behavior that is applauded in men is punished in women.

So let's go back to the hypothetical couple in the song, and assume that there is equal physical desire, but one of them is held back by social pressure concerns. This includes the anticipation of pressure from all family members. A respectful partner could listen to those concerns and address them, but the song just keeps changing the suspect. I would like a greater level of consideration from my potential partner - especially if the sacrifice is all on my side.

The song makes it all seem like a joke, and the sketch makes it all seem like a joke, but there are real issues there. Just by setting up an eternal conflict where men are expected to pursue sex and women are expected to decline the offer even though they really want it, then it becomes very easy for men to not take the "No!" seriously, and they can keep going and not feel like they did anything wrong. Hence the man may not feel like a rapist - he was just being a guy - but it is rape.

There is not always physical coercion or drugging, but often there is emotional pressure, where a woman may agree even though she doesn't want to. She may do this to preserve a relationship in which she is not respected but because she believes that is normal. She may give in because of guilt, or a feeling that she should never disappoint anyone. There can be a lot of reasons where a "no" that is not respected becomes a "yes". It does not stop the "yes" from being regretted. She let herself down. She surrendered, and put someone else above herself. This can lead to a lot of things, including self-loathing.

It was calling those situations rape that the sketch mocked, but no one is calling them rape. They still belong in a conversation about consent, because it matters. It matters for people to know that they have a right to refuse, and it matters for people to know that others have a right to refuse and that the only appropriate response to that is acceptance. If the types of confusion tend to mainly fall along specific gender lines, there's a lot of tradition that goes with that. It is not tradition that should be respected.

Some men only think about this when they have daughters, and realize that their girls' will now be in the position of all of those other girls. Their standard response is often a hyper-masculine threat to any potential evildoers, because they have guns and shovels available. It's not practical based on the many potential threats, but it also falls into the same culture. Their desire to defend their property merely perpetuates the system where a woman is only protected when she is under the protection of a specific man.

It's important to look at the system. Maybe you would never rape a woman using physical force or drugs. That is something, but then do you blame her when someone else does? Do you think she brought it on herself when maybe her first time drinking she miscalculated how much it would affect her? Do you laugh at the other dudes' stories? Do you assume she's lying because he's a "nice" guy?

Here is an article with some things to think about, even though I kind of hate how much I like some of the examples:

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