Male Submission Art

Let’s get one thing clear: Predator Alert Tool is not run by nor does it support sadomasochists.

maymay:

birdsy-purplefishes:

Seeing a “predator alert tool” for social media sites run by kinksters is like seeing a henhouse guarded by foxes. I have absolutely no trust in the intentions of people who hurt people for pleasure.

I strongly second this sentiment.

And I want to clarify a few things, because I know there is a LOT of intentional, propagandistic misinformation being spread about the Predator Alert Tool project.

So, first and foremost, the Predator Alert Tools are not “run” by anyone. They can’t be. That’s an intentional part of their design.

• The best example of this is also the most famous of the tools, Predator Alert Tool for OkCupid. There is no central authority, no one person, no group of people who can “run” the tool because the tool exists in your browser. This is what’s called an “unhosted“ app. It’s not being “run” by anyone except the people who install the tool, and the tool does not interact with anyone other than you and OkCupid.
• The canonical copies of the hosted tools, such as Predator Alert Tool for Facebook, are “run” by someone (me, though we are exploring unhosted solutions for these, too), but if what you are concerned about is my loyalties to sadomasochists, I can assure you, I have no such loyalties. (More on this in a bit.)

Secondly, if you read the “debates” about Predator Alert Tool, what you will find is that the BDSM’ers and others closely affiliated with sadomasochistic subcultures are far and away the most vocal opponents of the Predator Alert Tools. In no uncertain terms, people who self-identify as into BDSM show themselves through their words and their actions to be, generally speaking, consistently against tools designed to empower rape survivors:

• BDSM’ers have launched cyberattacks to counter the effectiveness of the tools with the explicit intention to silence yet another space where survivors are speaking out about their experiences. They have focused their attacks on Predator Alert Tool for FetLife, the tool designed to support survivors of sadomasochistic rapes, because FetLife is where they usually organize and prey.
• BDSM’ers have also been the only people to sustain an anti-Predator Alert Tool propaganda campaign questioning the tools’ design and promises with regard to how the various implementations’ privacy features work. My co-creators and I have spent enormous amounts of effort clarifying and countering this bullshit, but as you may know, it takes an order of magnitude more effort to counter bullshit than to create it.

In case you need examples of this, have a look at the following cases.

When the Predator Alert Tool for OkCupid was released, there was immediate and vociferous pushback from the BDSM crowd about “the choking question” included in the Lisak and Miller set:

Although PAT-OKC has gotten a HUGE positive response from OkCupid users, a small but vocal subset has expressed concern about the choking question and another similar Lisak and Miller question: “Have you ever punched or kicked or repeatedly slapped with an open hand (e.g., two or more times in a single incident) someone who you were in some kind of intimate relationship with?” Their critique is that these activities — choking, punching, and kicking a partner — can be done consensually and that it is therefore unfair of the PAT-OKC code to tar consensual chokers, punchers and kickers with the same brush as people who commit domestic violence.

The conclusion some of these concerned users seem to draw is that PAT-OKC’s author, Maymay, “appears not to be very friendly towards the BDSM community.” Those making this critique seem to be missing some important context. (At least, some of them do. Others are very familiar with Maymay’s position within BDSM culture and appear to be simply concern-trolling.) Of course, there is a long history of consensual BDSM being conflated with abuse by antagonistic outsiders. Maymay, however, is themself a long-time practitioner of BDSM and, most importantly, a radical supporter of the rights of submissive-identified people. Within BDSM, submissives and many others are harmed by a cultural hierarchy that privileges dominant identities and dominant behaviors above all others. In other words, Maymay is not a BDSM outsider who’s attacking “kink”; they are an insider who’s fighting domism.

PAT-OKC is, first and foremost, a tool for fighting rape culture. Forced to choose, then, it makes sense for PAT-OKC to prioritize getting as much information as possible to potential rape victims over potentially mislabeling some dominants as “predators.” Especially given that the answers to any red-flag questions are displayed prominently at the top of a user’s profile where that user can address them.

When Predator Alert Tool for FetLife was released, there was a swift backlash among rape-supporting BDSM’ers to try and overwhelm the tool with “spam” and “griefing” reports. This was summarized well by a Tumblr user here:

Okay this is long, highly technical and kind of unwieldy, but is also very fascinating. While it is talking a about system used to report abusers (of the sexual nature) or untrustworthy members of a BDSM social network site, it is very relevant to any internet communities and social groups in general.

What is interesting, and might be of interest to those of you who have an interest in analyzing the not-so-unique group mentality to rise up to protect a person (sometimes rightfully) accused abuse within a community. 

We often see this mob-like behavior in fandoms whether the party being “protected” is innocent or guilty the activity of the righteous mod quickly obscures the issues with trolling behaviors. In this instance it was done by group of the alleged abuser’s friends spamming the reporting system with false, frivolous complaints. 

What strikes me the most about what this data shows, which is really just electronic proof of what many of us have seen in our respective communities, is that this reactionary defense is so very common and a strong indication that this kind of group is likely to be more permissive of whichever type of abusive behavior the person they’re protect is being accused of.

In other words, that this knee-jerk defense of an alleged abuse is a strong indication that the group doing the defending is the perfect hiding place for a real abuser.

(Emphasis mine.)

When this “griefing” tactic didn’t work to neuter Predator Alert Tool for FetLife’s effectiveness, BDSM’ers on FetLife organized a more technical Denial of Service attack, carried out by a healthcare worker (of all people!) named Caroline Tyler, which caused Predator Alert Tool for FetLife’s input mechanisms to be rendered inoperable. Today, Predator Alert Tool for FetLife will still alert you of predatory behavior reported in the past, and it will still automatically scan FetLife user’s profile pictures against the United States’ national registry of convicted sex offenders, but you can not report a new consent violation.

The Predator Alert Tool for FetLife has consistently been the target of openly malicious attempts to silence survivors of sadomasochistic rape and abuse, and the attackers have brazenly admitted this and been applauded for doing this by the rest of the BDSM community. The creator of Predator Alert Tool for FetLife and the programmer of all the other tools to date (me), has a long history of hostility with FetLife that is perhaps well documented on the feminist blog Disrupting Dinner Parties here and the online sexuality magazine the Slantist here (as well as on my own blog, of course, such as here and the tag page here). The Slantist also recently published an extremely long and comprehensive overview of the Predator Alert Tool project, worth your time, here. An excerpt:

A group of hacker activists are developing a suite of tools to strike back at the culture of silence and isolation that surrounds harassment, coercion and assault. There are currently seven such tools, each of which focuses primarily on a dating site or social network (which, face it, most of us use as dating sites), though some target apps. Depending on the website or app that the tool is designed for, it has a different capability.

[…]

Earlier this year, developers connected several of the PATs to CreepShield.com. Now, when using PAT-OKC, PAT-ChristianMingle, or PAT-FetLife, every profile picture a user encounters will be scanned using facial-recognition software from CreepShield and compared with mugshots from the Sex Offender Registry to render potential matches. As with so many aspects of this tool suite, many of the developers involved in this project do agree that the Sex Offender Registry has serious issues, but they don’t think these issues mean access to that additional information should be denied to the users of their tools.

“There is no good excuse for not building sexual violence prevention tools into every social network on the Internet,” writes one of the PAT developers. “The Internet industry is in a unique position to effect arguably the most sweeping resistance to systemic sexual violence in history. Moreover, it wouldn’t even be technologically complex, or expensive. And we’ve already proved it’s possible.”

The total budget for all seven tools remains zero. The ten or so people participating in development, beta-testing, and documentation does so on a volunteer basis, and they welcome feedback and help from others. As mentioned, every tool is released into the public domain, meaning that anyone can take the code and alter it to suit their needs, or build on it to cover another aspect of the internet.

If this is not enough to convince you that the people who designed, programmed, advocate for, and evangelize Predator Alert Tools for social media are not loyal to the corrupt rape-fetishizing scum that is the BDSM community, then consider reading two of the core developer’s blogs posts:

• 8 colorful Venn diagrams that show how BDSM is, by definition, abuse, by maymay
• Stop Enabling Sociopathic Abusers; Your Kinks Are Not BDSM, by unquietpirate

Finally, I would like to point out that, yet again, we see a dialectic in which the Predator Alert Tools are deemed “unsafe” by anti-BDSM’ers because they think BDSM’ers created and advocate for them, or they are deemed “unsafe” by BDSM’ers because people who are anti-BDSM created them. If this does not strike you as totally absurd then you are undeniably ignorant of what is actually going on, and I suggest you find the time to read up on what is actually happening before you speak too much about the subject. I hope this helps clarify some of your concerns.

P.S. It would mean a lot to me if other people who are already knowledgeable about this call out the misinformation, gently if possible and when there seems to be a genuine misunderstanding rather than an intentional effort to sabotage and silence the tools, whenever and wherever they see it. Thank you.

(via maymay)

Dear friends, please help. I am asking you for help.

maymay:

Yesterday I posted Professor Kevin Westhues’ “Checklist of Mobbing Indicators,” and, as if by clockwork today I was mobbed on Twitter in a thread that matched 13 of the 16 indicators, point for point.

I’ve been the target of what Westhues describes as mobbing, which is evidently a sociological term that sometimes also gos by various other terms in other contexts like “bullying,” “group think,” “epistemic violence,” “gaslighting” and so on, for going on 3 years, now. As others & I have stated time & again, these mobbers’ unwillingness to examine history, and to re-write history so it begins at whatever most recent retaliation or refutation I make, is a constant theme. I’ve been discussing this on-and-off for as long as it’s been happening, but mostly in a detached, academic way. Others, notably unquietpirate, have written much more deeply personal accounts of the impact this has had on them, as well as on me.

Reading Westhues’ descriptions of the traumatic effects mobbing behaviors have on targets resounds very deeply and very painfully. But it is also an enormous relief. Finally, I can name this specific abuse I’m enduring with terms endowed with the magic cultural legitimacy of the academe, and even though I think academics are classist hogwash, I’m hopeful using the sociological term and framework may convince more people to step outside their “not my problem” bubble and pro-actively support me against this rather than remain uninvolved bystanders.

So, I am asking you for help.

1. Please read about mobbing. I’ve just begun to do this, too. Maybe we can help educate each other. I’m currently going over the “Virtual Mobbing” article. It’s long and dense but obviously specifically relevant to my “workplace,” the Internet.)
2. Help me find answers to “What to do about it”, which is a topic I’ve found mentioned but only briefly at the end of, “At the Mercy of the Mob.” If there are no solutions provided by the texts, help me imagine possible countermeasures and think through potential solutions, mitigations, harm reduction tactics, and so on.
3. Send me notes of encouragement, tell me what you like about my work, about me, speak kindly to me, and perhaps even more importantly, speak kindly about me and do so in public. Here’s a simple example of how to do this.

I want to highlight number 3, in the list above, because this is one the things that people still don’t seem to understand about the Internet. One of the unique characteristics about “Virtual Mobbing” is that the Internet enables a kind of plausibly deniable stage whisper. This kind of talking about someone but not necessarily to them is one of the most pernicious and common tactics of cyberbullies and virtual mobbers, because of the scale, speed, and confusion at which the Internet amplifies fearmongering.

The fact of the matter is, I can hear anything and I do in fact hear everything that is said about me (or my work) on the Internet, if it’s said in a public venue. A Twitter conversation from an unlocked account is not private. A public Tumblr post is not private. If people are talking about me, I know about it, usually within a few days.

Most of the time, when people speak ill of me to others, they are doing so under the false belief that these other people who don’t know or even care who I am are “lauding” me, and this makes the mobbers feel “uncomfortable” because they, personally, believe that I am only worth contempt and must be punished for my many mortal sins. A perfect example of this from just the other day is @cythesomething here on Tumblr.

I responded on Twitter:

@CyTheSomething FFS, you shitstain, ppl aren’t lauding me, they’re welcoming the addition of a survivor support tool. http://t.co/bJdtg7PFtU

— maymay (@maymaymx) November 17, 2014

As I’ve said numerous times before, turning discussions of survivor support tools and other such anti-abuse technology that I work on into a discussion about me, personally, is harmful to survivors—it is most harmful to one survivor in particular (guess which one), but it is also harmful to all other survivors. Taking actions motivated by the impulse to get helpful information to survivors is one thing. Taking actions motivated by your discomfort at seeing the work of someone you dislike welcomed by others who say that work is valuable to them is quite another.

It is no coincidence that this mobbing behavior intensifies at the very same time as the Predator Alert Tool is signal boosted. This has always been the pattern, from the very beginning. Had it happened only once, I might have called it a misunderstanding. Had it happened twice, maybe I could have dismissed it as a mistake. That it has happened more than three times makes clear, these are intentional mob assaults.

This got long, but I hope you’ve taken the time to read it anyway. For now, if you don’t have it in you to slog through academic material (it’s time consuming and exhausting, I know), then consider simply reblogging this. Maybe add a nice thing about me or, even better, the work I’ve been doing lately. Then, some time from now, please don’t forget that this is still happening, like a slow-motion bashing, and remember that this is the context of what’s happening when you see me bashing back.

I’ve been on the receiving end of this mob’s hatred for more than 3 years. I don’t expect it will stop anytime in the next 3 months just because I asked for help. In fact, it’s likely going to get worse. (See Westhues’ checklist, item number 15, “Outraged response to any appeals for outside help the target may make.”)

So, if all you can do is send me a nice ask once in a while, I will really appreciate you for that, too. Thanks.

(Source: maymay.net, via maymay)

Aladdin was rolequeer

spiralred:

rolequeer:

maymay:

rolequeer:

Earlier you said you’d be “into doing some Queer Theory meets Media Studies stuff.” On that note, if you think about it, the relationship between Aladdin and Genie in Disney’s 1992 animated eponymous classic is a rolequeer one. Early on, Aladdin—a poor street urchin—unwittingly becomes Genie’s master:

Aladdin: Wait wait a minute. I’m your master?
Genie: [gives Aladdin a mortar cap and diploma] That’s right! He can be taught!

Meanwhile, Genie is absurdly powerful, and “consents” to be subordinate to Aladdin, but only because he has no other option:

Aladdin: So, three wishes. I want them to be good. What would you wish for?
Genie: Me? No one’s ever asked me that before. Well, in my case. Ah, forget it.
Aladdin: What?
Genie: No, I can’t. I.
Aladdin: Come on, tell me.
Genie: [sigh] Freedom.

Aladdin: You’re a prisoner?
Genie: It’s all part and parcel, the whole genie gig.
[grows to a gigantic size]
Genie: Phenomenal cosmic powers!
[shrinks down inside the lamp]
Genie: Itty bitty living space!

Despite this relative and complex imbalance of power, the pair become genuine, caring friends, for which there is an entire song whose chorus is, “You ain’t never had a friend like me!”

Over the course of the film, they band together to fight Jafar, a skeevey, power-hungry Grand Vizier who wants total control over the lives and, in Jasmine’s case, the bodies of others:

Jafar: I am your master now!
[crushes the Genie with his foot]
Genie: [muffled] I was afraid of that.
Jafar: Genie, grant me my first wish. I wish to rule on high as Sultan!

[…]

Jafar: [Aladdin has tricked Jafar into wishing to be a more powerful genie than Genie]
Jafar: The universe is mine to command! To control!
Aladdin: Not so fast, Jafar! Aren’t you forgetting something?
Jafar: Huh?
Aladdin: You want to be a genie? You got it!
Jafar: [cufflinks form on Jafar’s wrists]
Jafar: What?
Aladdin: And everything that goes with it!
Aladdin: [Aladdin shows the black genie lamp that sucks Jafar in]
Jafar: No! No!
Iago: I’m getting out of here!
[Iago tries to flee, but Jafar grabs him]
Jafar: [screams]
Aladdin: Phenomenal cosmic powers.
Iago: Come on you’re the genie. I don’t want.
Aladdin: Itty bitty living space.
Genie: Al, you little genius you.

But the climax of the movie is not really the predictable marriage between Aladdin and Jasmine. Everyone saw that coming a mile away. No, the most beautiful and unexpected part of the whole film is when, sacrificing his ability to magically become a prince, Aladdin frees Genie:

Aladdin: Genie, I wish for your freedom.
Genie: One bona fide prince pedigree coming up. I. What?
Aladdin: [He holds the lamp up to Genie] Genie, you’re free!

It’s obviously still Disney-fied, but it’s still a clear sentiment: “No bosses. No masters.” And no Dominants.

I must’ve watched that movie dozens of times as a child. I saw it in theaters no less than six. I still get teary-eyed when Genie touches his own bare wrists for the first time.

Damn. No wonder I fell head over fucking heels in love with Aladdin when I was a little boy. All the boys talked about being Aladdin. I did, too. But y’know what? I was Genie.

- submitted by anon

Note by rolequeer: OMG I loooooove Aladdin. Thank you so much for this analysis. 

:)

Submission’s where the magic happens.

Submission’s where the magic happens

That’s so perfect. 

I got somewhat exited and watched Aladdin again. The genie really is a fascinating character. He’s a servant but he acts nothing like it. Especially during his first scenes he’s constantly pushing Aladdin around, overwhelming him, running the scene. And although he hopes Aladdin will free him at some point, he also genuinely seems to be enjoying himself, even before Aladdin promises him freedom. 

And the rest of the movie, despite it’s obvious problems (orientalism etc)  has some more interesting things relating to power. For examle, Aladdin, a marginalized character from the start, dreams of a life without poverty but at the same doesn’t want power. When he realizes he’ll be sultan after he marries Jasmine he doesn’t just worry about getting discovered, he genuinely doesn’t like the idea of being sultan. (This dilemma is ignored at the end when he does marry Jasmine, probably to get a less complex happy ending). This is very relevant to me because to me the ‘we all want power’ myth is an important part of Domism. 

Love love love

You might be a rapist if it never occurs to you that rape is something you’re capable of.

maymay:

perksofbeingaqueermo:

You Can Take It Back: Consent as a Felt Sense « Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed

“We also consider how our relationship to consent changes when we acknowledge that whether a person actually feels violated is more important than whether they expected to feel violated.”

So relate to this.

It’s really rewarding to see references to Consent as a Felt Sense pop up all over the place at an increasing rate with supporting, empathetic comments like this one. :) That’s really wonderful and, again, I’m so glad to see the results of work unquietpirate & I did to heal from personal traumas become a focal point in discussions for others’ healing, too. That’s just…well, it’s fucking wonderful!

Of course, the fact that our work spread beyond the relatively small spaces of our personal influences also means that people who once loudly described themselves as against these very same ideas, who described my co-author and I and even these very same works as having “gone off the deep end,” suddenly decide it’s time to talk about what they think are the good things in our work, too. How generous of them.

This same spreading of our work also means my proverbial Internet radar lit up with a flurry I can barely keep track of. Sadly, Sturgeon’s law applies here: ninety percent of everything is crap. I’ve seen links from MRA forums (did you notice that the Red Pill weighed in?), feminist “social justice” advocates, and just about everyone else. Ninety percent of all responses, both the MRA and the feminist ones, are crap.

I addressed a lot of the repetitive crap in my essay, “3 Reasons Why Rape Fans on Both Sides of the Fence Hate ‘Consent as a Felt Sense’,” and I’d encourage you to have (another) read through it if you’re tempted to fly to the comments section to tell me how wrong I am. But one of the newer patterns many crap responses to Consent as a Felt Sense are taking, especially from people also threatened by our evolving work breaking the abusive/consensual and Dominant/submissive binaries in conversations among the emerging rolequeer community, seems worth addressing now, too.

That argument, rephrased diplomatically goes like this: “Consent as a Felt Sense normalizes the idea that everyone is a rapist and thus further convinces rapists that ‘everyone’s doing it.’” Conveniently for us, this line of thought almost always comes with “proof” in the form of a direct quote from our essay itself:

Realistically, anybody who is having any kind of sex in the context of rape culture is likely to violate someone’s consent at some point. The most ethical response to this fact, obviously, is to not have sex—and, in fact, if enough people decided to opt out of rape culture by opting completely out of erotic intimacy, that would ultimately bring rape culture crashing down. But a “sexual hunger strike to bring about the end of rape culture” is an unrealistically high ethical bar to set for most real people who are trying to survive in a world where intimacy is a human necessity.

Instead, we need to take it as a given that if you choose to have sex in the context of rape culture, especially if you choose to have sex with people who have less power than you, and especially if you choose to have kinds of sex that explicitly play with that power differential, at some point you are probably going to violate someone’s consent—if you haven’t already. We need a process for dealing with that other than abject denial. We need to develop ways of regularly acknowledging, taking accountability for, and participating in healing work around the damage our coercive behavior causes.

When this quote is responded to at all, it almost always takes the form of “but it’s not hard for ME to tell when someone’s not consenting!” or “but most people aren’t rapists and don’t want to be rapists and even when they do rape someone it’s just that one time!” or the most ignorant and maybe deliberate reinterpretations of all, “maymay and unquietpirate are seriously suggesting that rape is normal and that this is totally okay and that makes Consent as a Felt Sense useful for rapists and dangerous for everyone else.”

There are a number of things wrong with these interpretations, not least of which is that they once again re-center the conversation on rapists and relegates survivors to the metaphorical back burners of our concern. That’s the opposite of shifting discourses on consent away from legalism. But there’s a simpler problem: they’re just wrong.

They’re wrong in the same way repeating the oft-cited “fact” that “Andrea Dworkin thinks all penetrative sex is rape” is wrong. It’s wrong first and foremost because that’s not actually what Dworkin said, just as we never argued “rape is normal and totally okay” or any derivative of it. That misunderstanding of Dworkin’s quote is also wrong because it’s not actually addressing the context in which her quote was made, just as responding to this part of our essay by once again refocusing on rape perpetrators instead of rape survivors is not addressing the context of ours.

In case the Dworkin misunderstanding is news to you, consider Dworkin in her own words:

My point was that as long as the law allows statutory exemption for a husband from rape charges, no married woman has legal protection from rape. I also argued, based on a reading of our laws, that marriage mandated intercourse — it was compulsory, part of the marriage contract. Under the circumstances, I said, it was impossible to view sexual intercourse in marriage as the free act of a free woman.

So, to paraphrase, Dworkin says “in a relationship where having sexual intercourse is required for that relationship to be recognized as legal and also does not provide legal protection from rape, that sex act can not be legally distinguished from rape,” and somehow this turns into “all sex is rape.” Who would play such a nasty game of telephone with Dworkin’s meaning? Oh, I’m sure you can come up with a few likely suspects.

In our own works, “breaking the abusive/consensual binary” is shorthand for “recognizing that the reality (of rape culture, heterosexism, capitalism, and more such contexts) means that there are numerous overlapping and interlocking pressures of different kinds which place both direct and indirect coercive force on people who are likely to do things including have sex.” In such a reality—which only the truly deluded are denying exists—it is risky at best and predatory at worst to un-self-critically engage in what you know is both highly personal and often fraught activities. Nowhere do unquietpirate & I challenge the idea that most rapes are perpetrated by people who do not care that they are raping someone, the idea colloquially known as “Predator Theory.” In fact, if you have even a shred of perspective on our work, you will recognize what is arguably our most famous collaborative project as having been based on that exact theory: Predator Alert Tool. We even reference the academic studies explicitly. Hell, the tool is named after it.

Somehow, our statements went from “we need to take it as a given that if you choose to have sex in the context of rape culture, especially if you choose to have sex with people who have less power than you, and especially if you choose to have kinds of sex that explicitly play with that power differential, at some point you are probably going to violate someone’s consent—if you haven’t already,” to “they’re saying rape is normal and it’s totally okay.” Who would play such a misleading game of telephone with our essay? I’ll give you a hint: the answer is in the paragraph right before and the paragraph right after the ones being excerpted. They read as follows:

Both mainstream and numerous feminist discourses tend to treat violation through sexual violence as something committed by “abusers” (i.e., “them,” not “us”). Most often, people treat having raped or having been raped as a defining facet of who someone is, as a person; they don’t treat rape like something people do, they treat rape like it’s something people are. We don’t think that’s helpful.

[…the oft-re-interpreted excerpted portion here…]

When rape is framed as a piece of one’s identity rather than as an act one committed, the possibility that one could “be a rapist” is simply unconscionable for most people to stomach. Their terror at this prospect spurs them to justify or excuse their behavior. We’re going to have to come to grips with what it means to violate others in a way our justifiable fear of “being rapists” has so far prevented us from doing.

And thus, the rub: if you’re serious about engaging in sex (and most people are) but unwilling to ponder the possibility that you could maybe, just maybe, have a sexual experience that might leave someone feeling violated, then you’re not really serious about doing that thing ethically. This doesn’t mean “everyone is a rapist” and it certainly doesn’t imply “rape is no biggie.” It does mean that if you’re unwilling to consider that you might rape or have raped someone at some past or future point, and you’re still going to have sex, you’re probably not going about having sexual experiences in the most compassionate, conscientious, or even consensual way. If that mere possibility isn’t one you’re willing to entertain, then given the overlapping, interlocking, and undeniable influences of heterosexism, capitalism, rape culture, and so on, you’re more likely, not less, to violate someone’s consent in a sexual way.

That’s on you.

Once again, in case this still needs clarifying: genuinely questioning yourself about whether you are raping someone is a required component of not being a rapist. But being a rapist is something you can be, and I argue it is something you are more likely to be, if this question just doesn’t come up, regardless of why. To borrow a Jeff Foxworthy meme: In the context of rape culture, you might be a rapist if it never occurs to you that rape is something you’re capable of.

This logic isn’t even controversial, much less all that complicated. In other arenas, it sounds like: “You might be a hypocrite if you say you support worker’s rights but never question whether you should really get that iPhone made by Chinese workers whose conditions are so terrible they literally commit suicide.” Put yet another way: if you truly believe that there is such a thing as uncomplicated and wholly ethical consumption under late capitalism, I think you should consider questioning your ethical model.

Now, whether or not you are a hypocrite isn’t something I’m terribly interested in right now. I’m not interested in it in much the same way that I’m not currently that concerned with whether you do or do not consider yourself a rapist. For the foreseeable future—a period lengthened by each addition to the 90% of crap responses, I’ll remind you—I’m far more concerned about asking the more important corollary: what does a given rape survivor need to heal?

The answer to that question may vary greatly depending on the individual and the circumstance, but I’m confident there are some things we don’t need. We don’t need continual audits and pedantic debates over what is or is not (“real”) rape. We don’t need new categorizing schemes redefining (“legitimate”) rape distinct from other forms of non-consensual sexual acts. We don’t need oversimplified stories about ourselves as heroes incapable of violating consent. And we certainly don’t need self-proclaimed “feminists who do consent work” or their ilk doing any of those things, thank you very fucking much.

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what 90% of the responses to Consent as a Felt Sense are, especially from feminist circles. These tired and stupid refrains of “we should have a category for ‘sex experienced as a violation’ that’s separate from rape,” repeated ad nauseum that always conspicuously omit suggestions for what those distinctions might be don’t sound like genuine attempts at survivor advocacy to me. What they sound like is political melodrama, fanciful stories casting heroes as heroes and villains as villains, adorned in colors that won’t blend, music you can’t mistake, placed on separate pedestals across a chasm so wide you always know who’s the Good Guy and who’s the Bad Guy.

In other words, they sound exactly like the kind of story people who claim they could not possibly be rapists—not ever, not them—really, really want you to believe.

(Source: maybemaimed.com, via maymay)