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Oct. 7th, 2014
Book Blogging
Oct. 7th, 2014 05:36 pmI finally stepped off my mania for filling out my little hardcover journals, and finished some book-blogging for my regular journals. I was going to wait a little longer, being so close to finishing my second book, but I decided to start re-normalizing my daily routine. I was becoming too single-track minded.
Campus Rape and Affirmative Consent
Oct. 7th, 2014 08:07 pmIn an effort to minimize campus rapes, California passed an 'affirmative consent' law. It effectively switches the burden of proof from the prosecution (or the victim) to the defendant by requiring the male to successfully prove that he obtained consent for sex, rather than requiring the woman to prove that she said no. Here is a critical note, which argues that even the best sex is not necessarily wholly and entirely consensual.
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The truth is that, except in the first flush of infatuation, both partners are rarely equally excited. At any given moment, one person wants sex more passionately than the other. What's more, whether due to nurture or nature, there is usually a difference in tempo between men and women, with women generally requiring more "convincing." And someone who requires convincing is not yet in a position to offer "affirmative" much less "enthusiastic" consent. That doesn't mean that the final experience is unsatisfying — but it does mean that initially one has to be coaxed out of one's comfort zone. Affirmative consent would criminalize that.
The reality is that much of sex is not consensual — but it is also not non-consensual. It resides in a gray area in between, where sexual experimentation and discovery happen. Sex is inherently dangerous. There will be misadventures when these experiments sometimes go wrong. Looking back, it can be hard to assign blame by ascertaining whether both partners genuinely consented. Indeed, trying to shoehorn sex into a strict, yes-and-no consent framework in an attempt to make it risk free can't help but destroy it.
-- Shikha Dalmia at The Week.com
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The truth is that, except in the first flush of infatuation, both partners are rarely equally excited. At any given moment, one person wants sex more passionately than the other. What's more, whether due to nurture or nature, there is usually a difference in tempo between men and women, with women generally requiring more "convincing." And someone who requires convincing is not yet in a position to offer "affirmative" much less "enthusiastic" consent. That doesn't mean that the final experience is unsatisfying — but it does mean that initially one has to be coaxed out of one's comfort zone. Affirmative consent would criminalize that.
The reality is that much of sex is not consensual — but it is also not non-consensual. It resides in a gray area in between, where sexual experimentation and discovery happen. Sex is inherently dangerous. There will be misadventures when these experiments sometimes go wrong. Looking back, it can be hard to assign blame by ascertaining whether both partners genuinely consented. Indeed, trying to shoehorn sex into a strict, yes-and-no consent framework in an attempt to make it risk free can't help but destroy it.
-- Shikha Dalmia at The Week.com
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