"Yes means maybe, and maybe means no" [View all]

[redqueen]

I love the way this woman spells it all out. I have to quote her again.

http://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/under-duress-agency-power-and-consent-part-two-yes/

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Radical (and some other) feminists identify a ubiquitous pressure against women’s consent which is part of and partially created by rape culture. In an interview discussing her book, Are Women Human?: And Other International Dialogues, Catharine MacKinnon described it as follows:

The (sexist) assumption is that women can be unequal to men economically, socially, culturally, politically, and in religion, but the moment they have sexual interactions, they are free and equal. That’s the assumption – and I think it ought to be thought about, and in particular what consent then means… My view is that when there is force or substantially coercive circumstances between the parties, individual consent is beside the point.

Radical feminists argue that the concept of a straightforward “yes” is unique to those groups who don’t experience pressure on their consent. A “yes” under pressure can’t be unequivocally understood as “yes” because it may mean “maybe” or indeed “no”. The act of a man taking a woman’s “yes” as a “yes” is an act which directly denies conditions of sex inequality between men and women under patriarchy.

Properly, the radical feminist understanding of consent can’t be summed-up as an “x means y” statement. When under duress, there’s no such thing as a simple “yes” or “no”; the very idea of a statement ‘meaning’ one of those things becomes questionable when an answer may have as much (or more) to do with the power factors at play than with what a person really wants to communicate.

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Someday many more people will catch up with her, and we won't have to struggle to be heard on issues of consent. We seem to be a long, long way away from that at the moment, though.