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Pluralist of Feministing Community has a really cool post up about the near side of non-consensual “gray area” sex.

What makes it a great illustration is that the sexes were reversed! (Emphasis hers.)

Since November my best friend has been having relationship problems. She is cis and het as is her boyfriend and they’ve been a committed and monogamous relationship for about 4 years now. The whole story is too long to recount, but as of a week ago they began a “break they need in order to stay together”.

Suffice it to say the first two days were hellish as I talked to one of the loves my life breaking down over the phone. But during one of the more lucid moments, she told me that – among a lot of alleged grievances – she had (unknowingly) forced her boyfriend into sex.

Apparently he had said things along the lines of “I’m too tired right now, let’s just go to sleep” and she had continued to proposition him thinking “welll, this will help you sleep better!” My immediate reaction was that there was no way she had coerced or pressured him into sex. After all, he should’ve just said “No really, I don’t want to do this right now” if she kept at it. It was his fault for not stopping the encounter.

And then I realized that had this been a woman in his place – not to mention my best friend – I would never have given this consideration. I was victim-blaming, basing my assumptions in tropes of male hypersexuality and female passivity. She didn’t handcuff him to a heater and force-feed him viagra . She’s a nice girl, she couldn’t have done that!

Read the quote in context here.

I talk a lot more about the paradigmatic social assumptions that women belong to the “no-sex” class — sugar, spice, everything nice, sure, but also possessing no autonomous sexual agency. Unless they’re somehow “broken,” or “damaged goods.” I don’t talk so much about the other side, the equally strong assumption that men are the sex class — obligate, reflexive, indiscriminating, and single-mindedly ready for sex. Unless, again, there’s something wrong with them. But it’s just as big a deal.

Inside the dominant paradigm it’s as unheard of for a man to say “no” as for a woman to say “yes.” Inside the paradigm, with it’s bogus Two Rules of Desire, the ratchet of initiative alway clicks in one direction.

This too has its consequences. It doesn’t just assume women never mind not having sex, it also assumes men never mind having it. One consequence would be Pluralist’s friend assuming her partner was having a momentary brain fart or something therefore his “no” couldn’t possibly really mean no. So she kept trying.

As I said up at the top this is way over on the near side of the “gray area.” A little persistence, especially in a long-term relationship where one partner’s behavior is perhaps uncharacteristic, is an unfortunate failure to recognize that no means no, but not an appalling one.

That said, whereas it’s way over this way verging into “no harm then no foul” territory, as Pluralist hinted and one commenter stated very clearly, however mild-sounding the incident

Obviously, something went wrong in this particular case if the guy is bringing it up as a grievance.

Therefore not “no harm then no foul.”

So if her failure to acknowledge or respect his decision wasn’t appalling it wasn’t benign either.

So there’s definitely still something to talk about.

Jessica Valenti of Feministing says

Where is the article directed at young men in college giving the advice on how not to rape their peers? Where are the warnings to men not to drink, since in so many campus rapes, it is the perpetrator who has been drinking?

Read the quote in context here.

I gotta say this is the really, really, really critical part of any solution for ending sexual assault. Because a heck of a lot of the time it’s not just the victim who’s ability to make competent decisions is compromised by intoxication: chances are extraordinarily high that his or her assailant is also compromised.

That doesn’t mean, by the way, that the only solution is to curtail drinking in men. (It’s a solution, yes, but not the only one. Or the most realistic one. Or even necessarily the best.)

Without recognizing the problem and clearly preparing, warning, and otherwise setting expectations for men and their “wingman” type companions, male and female, when they drink? It’s not going to go away.

That wouldn’t be the end of it, no. Not all sexual assault or violence is drug or alcohol-related. But it would be a good first approximation of an 80/20 benefit. And any increase in awareness of drunken bogosity will bring intentional bogosity into much sharper focus.

Update: I should have done the footwork when I was composing this last night but as Heather points out in comments, below, this isn’t a brand new idea. Resources include

• How you guys, that’s right you guys, can prevent rape (at Scarleteen.com)

• Shayne Austin’s Cool Inversion of the Usual (Victim-Burdening) Rape-Awareness List Could be Taken Seriously

I’m off looking for more links about mitigating sexual assault by intoxicated assailants. If you know of any please leave them in comments.

Hortense, weekend blogger at Jezebel unearths an unfortunate, but unfortunately not uncommon, conceptual error — sort of like the conceptual error that heavier objects fall faster than light ones, or that if you can’t see the teeth of a spinning sawblade they’re not there.

The University’s officials, however, don’t consider it “outright rape.”

“We would consider it date rape,” says University spokesman Richard Rojo, noting that he believes that “outright rape” only involves “a rapist jumping out of bushes and attacking people randomly.”

Read the quote in context here.

Yes, it makes perfect sense to imagine it’s not rape without jumping out of the bushes in sort of the way it makes sense it’s only robbery if the perpetrator wears a black mask and a Tommy gun.

You can even make some kind of case, I guess, sort of that “stranger rape” is different from “acquaintance rape” because the police response would necessarily be different if the attacker is identified vs. unidentified (e.g. for unidentified you start a man-hunt, heighten security, start riffling databases of potential perpetrators, blah, blah, blah, versus walking down to the lockerroom and taking the three named, known-to-the-victim perpetrators in for questioning, arrest, booking, trial, etc.

All you have to do is look at it from the perspective of…

...every single other person except the victim.

One imagines victims are rarely comforted by the fact that their assailant was known to them. In fact one could imagine something more like the opposite. Oh wait! Why imagine when answers are easily found?

There is no evidence the university in question, University of the Pacific, means they take acquaintance rape more seriously than “outright rape.” Which, would still be egregious hair-splitting but at least an error in their favor. Instead they appear to be making the same kind of “natural,” but devastating error that leads birds and drunks to collide with plate glass.

Bird-brained mistakes we can excuse. Drunken errors we can at least comprehend. Similar mistakes by nominally functional University administrators, though? Not so much.

Photo “Women at work, Battle of Britain memorial” by Flickr user davepatten. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution reviews, or at least views, someone named F. Roger Devlin’s” Sexual Utopia in Power (pdf, sorry), originally published by William Regnery II’s paleoconservative Occidental Quarterly — text in italics are Cowen’s quotes of the original article. (Italics are Cowen’s)

Yes, men are also, to their own detriment, continually surrounded with images of exceptionally attractive women. But this has less practical import, because—to say it once more—women choose.

Or:

The decline of matrimony is often attributed to men now being able to “get what they want” from women without marrying them. But what if a woman is able to get everything she wants from a man without marriage? Might she not also be less inclined to “commit” under such circumstances?

This essay is not politically correct and at times it is misogynous and yes I believe the author is evil (seriously).  The main behavioral assumption is that women are fickle.  So they are monogamous at points of time but not over time; Devlin then solves for the resulting equilibrium, so to speak.  The birth rate falls, for one thing.  The piece also claims that the modern “abolition” of marriage strengthens the attractive at the expense of the unattractive.  Some of you will hate the piece.  I disagree with the central conclusion, and also the motivation, but it does seem to count as a new idea.  If you’re tempted, read it.
Read the quote in context here.

Devlin’s very disapproving article claims that sexual utopia for women is choosing the best possible man with the result that if they can’t hook up with James Bond (his example) or maybe Donald Trump then no other men will have sex unless a) she chooses, no doubt resentfully, to “settle” for less or b) he resorts to date rape. Oh yeah, and all that con-sarned emancipation just makes things worse, including requiring more date rape, because men are deprived of all those more traditional, genteel economic forms of extortion.

The semi-predictable comments are peppered with people asking what exactly Cowen might consider evil. I’m not sure of that but I think the guy’s evil in Hannah Arendt’s sense that actions taken from banal assumptions can lead to horrific results. One banality he adheres to is mistaking for “instinct” or “genetics” women’s perfectly rational partnership decisions in the face of traditionally and often legally-mandated economic distortions… or that men’s equally rational (though more odious) decisions made from the traditionally up-hill side of those market distortions should be mistaken for unconscious and uncontrollable biological mandates.

It seems to me that the real “sexual revolution” derives from three points beginning back maybe 250 years: a) medical advances, especially the discovery of hygiene, leading to lower death rates among women and children with the result that b) women have more time in terms of diminished child care and more predictably long life span to take advantage of education leading to c) increased social productivity and overall higher standards of living. The resulting virtuous cycle leads to all sorts of other innovations such as markets for brute-strength-mitigating automation, demand for unnecessary-pregnancy-reducing medical advances like contraception instead of once extremely risky after-the-fact abortion**, and then finally the simple, innovative question that started becoming unavoidable in the late 1950s or 1960s: why should a man and a woman working side by side producing the same output be paid differently?

In economic terms the answer to that last question is “there’s no good reason at all.” Devlin answers that women have to be paid less than men, preferably far less, because otherwise men won’t have the kind of leverage we need to get laid. Except for James Bond and, I guess, Donald Trump.

I’m not an economist but I’m guessing an economist like Tyler Cowen would say anyone who thinks we should return the entire social organization of the economy to the productivity levels of the 1950s just so Devlin can get laid is evil.

Also, wow does Devlin have a low opinion of men or what? Virtually none of us will never be interesting to potential partners without some form of bribery, fraud, extortion, or force? Really? Sh’yeah and people say feminists are the problem!

Point: surprising how even highly libidinous women are interested in men who are so busy trying to bribe, extort, defraud, or force them to do something they’d… enjoy doing with someone who wasn’t being an asshole. Maybe the trick, therefore, isn’t to make it easier to be assholes, it’s to stop being assholes.

Point: You don’t have to read very far into Devlin’s paper before he pretty clearly articulates the conditions that impose the “no-sex” class designation on women. What’s less clear is why he so thoroughly approves of this in the face of all the misery he fairly accurately describes for both women and men.

[** This doesn’t mean abortion is bad, wrong, old fashioned, or anything else. Just that before contraception there wasn’t much alternative. —fl]