Consent Might Be Complicated If…

I’m re-blogging this owing to the whole “grab her by the pussy” thing. Not because of Donald Trump’s words, exactly, but because of the defenses made on his behalf.

I’ve seen things about supposedly hypocritical pop-starlets who grab their crotches being “offended” by it – because touching yourself and someone else touching you are obviously the same thing.

I’ve seen “but I thought liberals were about sexual liberation”, because, of course, liberation meant liberating ourselves from silly little things like consent.

And, of course, countless things about it being how “real men” talk. Now, that has numerous layers of bullshit, but suffice to say that if “real men” are supposed to casually ignore consent, we’ve got a serious problem.

Do I think all of those comments are spawned entirely by ignorance of consent and culture? Broadly, yes. I think there are shades between ignorance and malice, and rarely do you find one without a bit of the other propping it up. Ultimately, what the people defending “grab her by the pussy” demonstrate is that they literally do not understand the concept of consent, and that it’s foreign and alien to them. We can debate why, but it’s pretty clear they don’t understand it – to them, it literally does not compute.

Spherical Bullshit

I really like this post on consent, and it seems to have had a massive surge in popularity, and for good reason. As one of the later paragraphs concludes:

Do you think this is a stupid analogy? Yes, you all know this already  – of course you wouldn’t force feed someone tea because they said yes to a cup last week. Of COURSE you wouldn’t pour tea down the throat of an unconcious person because they said yes to tea 5 minutes ago when they were conscious. But if you can understand how completely ludicrous it is to force people to have tea when they don’t want tea, and you are able to understand when people don’t want tea, then how is so hard is it to understand when it comes to sex?

It’s a testament to the power of analogy (and logic, in fact) that something can seem…

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