This is a brief statement of my opinion on the Aziz Ansari case. Content note: rape.
There’s a direct analogy between rape and drowning. Drowning looks very different in real life vs the movies. But nobody demands that people behave more stereotypically while drowning. When people fail to behave stereotypically, still nobody denies that it was really drowning. And nobody derails the conversation by insisting that nearby swimmers can’t be treated as criminals just because they don’t recognize drowning.
I understand that among SJ-oriented people, there is some controversy about the Aziz Ansari case. A lot of people saying that it was wrong, but not sexual assault. My stance is that it was a fairly typical story of rape, making it a troubling demonstration of people’s inability to recognize rape. Yes, “rape” instead of “sexual assault”, because it was penetrative–that should be straightforward. But the part that gives people trouble, is that Grace didn’t behave as they expected a non-consenting person should, and they think the typical person would have great difficulty recognizing the signs. To this I say, okay, but please update your expectations. This is what drowning looks like.
Both people in the story were really bad at communicating their desires. From the outside, it seems that Grace was willing to trade oral sex for a ‘foreplay’ kind of intimacy, while Aziz thought that it was clear that he wanted intercourse and that her statements to ‘take it slow’ merely meant that she wanted to build up to it a little more slowly.
Neither got the deal they wanted and both made an effort/sacrifice to get their true desires met, without actually getting it. This is a tragedy of bad communication on both sides, where both people made false assumptions about the desires of the other person.
I frankly think that it is absurd to call it rape when someone is willing to trade oral sex for something else and feels hard done by, when the other person doesn’t reciprocate as desired/hoped for. This cheapens the word ‘rape’ immensely (to the extent that many people will stop seeing rape as automatically a bad thing, if it includes things like this). If a person is really only willing to do X if they get Y, then they need to be explicit about it. Other people are not responsible for obeying contracts that only exist in your mind.
Furthermore, it is highly sexist and validates the worries of progressive anti-feminists, because it places all the responsibility of good communication on men. Any inability to tease out the secret contract that exists in a woman’s mind, means that he is now a rapist. The man is responsible for picking up any indication of non-consent that the woman thinks she sent, including those below the threshold of what he can detect. It is unavoidable that men will fail at this standard in large numbers.
It also ignores that communication doesn’t just involve consent and non-consent. It involves soft limits and hard limits. It involves negotiations about what one person is willing to do for the other, in exchange for something else. It involves people changing their mind about their actual limits along the way. It is very messy. It seems much more logical to preserve the standards that we had until now: people can try to navigate this mess until it really goes too far and then they can pull the brakes by making an unambiguous statement and/or running away. Violating those clearly expressed hard limits is then rape/assault. The extreme that you seem to support, demanding that people assume the worst, is going to make any sex impossible. You can never be certain.
Your logic ultimately betrays a very one-sided view. The problem with the statement that drowning might not look like drowning is that what doesn’t look like drowning very often isn’t. If a lifeguard has to assume that any instance that doesn’t look like drowning is actually drowning, then no one gets to swim anymore.
The worst part is that your narrative very plausibly may increase the number of people who get raped, when people no longer feel obligated to clearly show that their hard limits have been crossed, because the societal narrative is that the other person should be able to detect vague signals. I’ve read various uncomfortable stories where women didn’t resist, but thought that it was clear that they didn’t consent, while the men in question seemed to have no idea.
@Aapje,
Okay, but this is what rape looks like to you. It looks like “a tragedy of bad communication”, it looks “absurd”, it looks like it “cheapens the word ‘rape'”, it looks like “men will fail at this standard in large numbers”, it looks like “people changing their minds about their actual limits along the way”, it looks “very messy”. I already know that this is how real stories of rape are commonly perceived, because I have already adjusted my expectations. You should adjust your expectations too.
Lifeguards don’t recognize drowning by “assuming that any instance that doesn’t look like drowning is actually drowning”. There are recognizable signs, which simply aren’t the signs that most people think they are–please actually read the linked article.
As with drowning, the behavior of rape victims is not very responsive to societal narratives of how people “should” respond to rape. This is because a lot of rape victims do not immediately recognize that they are rape victims, and therefore do not know to engage with those societal narratives in the first place. You can see that this was the case for Grace/Aziz (and HJ recently showed a table that shows this is true in the majority of cases). Obviously victims should try to respond in an a way that can be recognized by anyone, even people who do not know what rape looks like. But in order for victims to make that response, they have to know what rape looks like. Both victims and would-be perpetrators benefit from being able to recognize the signs.
As I said, I believe that people can get very upset over not getting the quid-pro-quo they expected. Feminism has addressed this when it comes to expectations by men, for example by telling them that they cannot expect sex just because they paid for dinner or that they cannot expect intercourse in return for foreplay. However, I think that women make the same kind of mistake (that men make) and that this is not discussed in the same terms. Because we don’t offer women the proper narrative, they instead start using the narrative that society does offer them, which is one of sexual assault/rape.
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In the Grace’s story, I don’t see Grace claim that she felt and meant to communicate non-consent to oral sex at the time. What she said and did matches my interpretation much better than the narrative that she non-consented at the time. She writes down herself that she was pushed into interpreting her feelings within a sexual assault/rape narrative by her friends.
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That is what you are doing as well, in my view. You are imposing a narrative on people, seemingly in a gendered way and in a way that seems to me to be inconsistent with what Grace actually wrote down. Isn’t this exactly what we need to move away from? Don’t these gendered narratives just lock us into gender roles and gender stereotypes?
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Secondly, I think that your analogy may be misleading. Drowning may, despite not looking like the stereotype, almost always look significantly differently from swimming; but passive non-consent may often not look significantly different from passive consent. So you may be able to teach people to distinguish drowning from swimming with high accuracy, but it may not be possible to distinguish passive non-consent from passive consent with decent accuracy. I have heard quite a few men complain about women who were too passive (for their tastes) in bed. So your analogy may break down in this respect.
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Frankly, I think that this discussion is poisoned because those who propose change almost never seriously address the risks and downsides of their proposals. For example, standards like enthusiastic consent require people to have sex in a certain way. So what happens to people who want to have sex in a way that isn’t ‘enthusiastic’? Will they be disallowed from having sex in the way that they desire? Do these people actually feel that the price they have to pay for a possible reduction in rape is fair? It is even recognized that these people exist?
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It seems eerily similar to the war on drugs, where it’s ignored that large numbers of people are just not going to behave as desired by those who feel that one should ‘just’ not use drugs. The war on drugs puts many people in prison for behavior that harmed no one, with a strong bias towards certain groups. Won’t your ideals just result in something similar?
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In general, I notice a lot of ‘typical mind fallacy’ errors, where people favor solutions that work for their own (sexual) preferences, but that seem to break down for a large contingent that have other preferences. Those people do exist, though & they deserve happiness as well.
@aapje,
I take it you have not read any of my other writing about sexual violence (such as the two posts immediately before this one). I am queer, and mostly talk about sexual violence in queer contexts. The gendered dimension you’re adding seems like irrelevant nonsense to me.
Also, I very much have looked at consent models critically. Enthusiastic consent is not well-liked in ace communities, and we talk about this an awful lot.
In my view, Grace’s behavior does not look like passive non-consent, since she vocally asked to stop. This is a clear and recognizable sign, and someone who knows their stuff would understand that her continuing participation is less indicative.
However, I understand that to you, you did not see that, or you do not remember that part of the story, and thus to you, it might look like passive consent. Okay, then take that seriously. What if it really is hard to distinguish passive consent from passive non-consent? So if someone perceives passive consent, there’s a risk that they’re wrong. What do you think is the cost-benefit analysis between the risk of violation, and the inconvenience of having to communicate?
You are correct that I am discussing this more in the context of the current societal discussion, which is mostly about heterosexuality. You may of course consider this uninteresting, especially to you personally, but I feel that it is important and very relevant given the way that gender roles and stereotypes bleed into how the issue is discussed and what solutions are proposed. If you restrict yourself to debating the issues and solutions with/for ace homosexuality, then your statements may find traction in your relatively tiny community, but I don’t see how it can then gain traction for society as a whole.
The solution that the majority decides upon is going to impact everyone, so it may be wise to look at the bigger picture.
Anyway, Grace only made ambiguous statements that can indicate a desire to go more slowly. She explicitly notes that Aziz was very clear that he wanted to have sex, but that she didn’t speak out against this:
So what I see here is one person who is very explicit about his desires and one person who hides her desires, presumably because of emotional immaturity. She could have said: “I just want to make out” or otherwise have been clear about not wanting to have sex. It’s pretty normal in communication to interpret it as agreement, when person A tells person B their intent & person B doesn’t speak out against it. To be blunt: I’m not going to blame a person for being deceived by a person who is deceiving. In general, Grace seems to believe that Aziz should be able to interpret her vague body language and statements exactly how she meant them, which is a big mistake. Communication with strangers doesn’t work that way. Even within long-term relationships, expecting this kind of communication to work can be very harmful (some people are fundamentally not capable of this, even if they have known the other person for a long time).
I’m not saying that Aziz is blameless. But IMO, his blame is of the ‘rude’ variety and not of the ‘forced someone into doing something variety.’
Ultimately, an issue with feeling pressured into doing something is that different people are extremely different in how much agency they feel they have, which is not the same as the agency they actually have. The most extreme underestimate means that you cannot ask this person anything, because it will be taken as a demand that they cannot deny. We thus cannot use this as a standard, because it makes human cooperation impossible and we have to teach/fix people with an low sense of agency.
When teaching people with a low sense of agency, it seems most feasible to teach them to indicate their hard limits forcefully.
My personal cost-benefit analysis is irrelevant, just like my personal desire to use drugs (low) is irrelevant to my opposition to the war on drugs. Society-wide standards have to be acceptable to the vast majority and they should minimize having people do harm accidentally.
Ironically, a lot of SJ advocates seem to favor policies that in my view, would create a huge amount of accidental sexual assaults/rapes. Both the affirmative consent model and your felt sense model seem heavily based on teaching people to better judge how others feel. It is true that when people do this badly, they can accidentally sexual assault/rape. However, I don’t see how people can ever be expected to judge how others feel with high accuracy. People are just too different in how they act and very many people have passive moments during sex, like when receiving oral sex or when getting penetrated. You are even arguing that giving oral sex in the way that Grace did, should be interpreted as non-consent, which required Aziz to not just interpret passivity as non-consent, but also insufficient activity. Don’t you see how hard that is? One person may think/feel: ‘I’m unenthusiastically doing oral because I don’t want to,’ while the other may just interpret it as the person being bad at oral or being unenthusiac at everything they do, including the things they like.
It seems way more workable to (also) teach people to step out of this model when it doesn’t work, by giving up ‘soft’ signals for ‘hard’ signals.
Instead, what I often see is that teaching people to escalate into hard signalling is dismissed as victim blaming. This leaves people with no recourse when their soft signalling doesn’t work. Look at Grace, she could have send many hard signals that would almost certainly have stopped Aziz, but she didn’t. Instead, she kept trying to do communicate in a way that clearly wasn’t working (and he kept trying to do what he thought she was cool with). She didn’t even seem to understand the difference between hard and soft signalling, which is a mistake that I see a lot of progressive people make. I think that this is very harmful and that consent models that merely talk about soft signalling are not teaching people a crucial tool that can makes them substantially safer from harm.
@Aapje,
I said “queer” not “ace homosexual”. There are some gender/orientation-specific issues that can be discussed, but I don’t think they are relevant here.
Studies of conversation suggest that people tend to couch their refusals. So, this is what a refusal looks like. And if you couldn’t tell, then okay, I acknowledge that. Just update your expectations.
I didn’t ask for your “personal” cost-benefit analysis, just your cost-benefit analysis. But never mind, I don’t want you to commit to any particular answer.
I didn’t say that, I said continuing participation was “less indicative”.
You seem to be arguing that if people look at real narratives of rape, they will try to make more questionable judgments about how their partners’ feel. But whatever makes you think this is the lesson people will take away? It certainly isn’t the lesson you took away. You looked at the situation, and thought it looked ambiguous and hard to judge. If that’s your perception, then obviously you’re not going to think “I should judge my partner’s feelings instead of asking them”. Instead, you came to the conclusion that “people should step out of this model when it doesn’t work, by giving up ‘soft’ signals for ‘hard’ signals”. Great! The only thing I would add to that, is that both partners have the capability to step out of the model when it doesn’t work.
The problem is when the only narratives of rape involve hard refusals. People look at these narratives and think, “every instance of rape is easily recognizable and unambiguous”. And that’s when people come to the conclusion, “I should judge my partners’ feelings instead of asking them”. All I’m asking in this post, is for people to recognize real narratives of rape, and see that (to an untrained eye) they often look ambiguous.
The issue is that refusals are not black and white. You can refuse to have any sex or you can refuse to have some kinds of sex. You can not want intercourse at all or you may just refuse to have intercourse on the kitchen counter. You can refuse to have sex without (more) foreplay, but want sex with foreplay. Etc. Etc. There is no singular ‘refusal.’ There are refusals in different shapes and forms, that object to different things.
I don’t disagree that Grace made refusals. I don’t disagree that Aziz recognized that she made refusals. What I’m arguing is that Aziz interpreted her communication very differently from how she meant it. I can see why, because when I read her own account, I see her do and say things that in our culture are commonly interpreted as wanting to have intercourse (like going home with him after the date). Aziz saw it that way, which is why he interpreted her vague refusals as a desire to have sex differently (although he doesn’t seem to have a solid repertoire of alternative approaches, so he fell back into the same behavior again and again, which shows a lack of skills on his part). Because of his misperception, he accidentally ‘moved past the sale.’ Moving past the sale can be a coercive technique used by salespeople, but it is also something that can happen accidentally, through miscommunication.
So I can see why Grace felt coerced, but I also see that Aziz almost certainly didn’t mean to be coercive. This is fundamentally a tragedy of two incompetent people, who both did things that made the situation worse. Aziz was the first one to bail on this sad dynamic, realizing that his approach wasn’t working and abandoning his earlier conclusion (that she wanted sex).
My argument is not that Aziz couldn’t have done better. My argument is that they both could have done better. As you say: both had the power to break out of this tragedy. Grace seemed not to know that she had the option to state what she wanted or more clearly stating what she didn’t want and Aziz was very bad at figuring what Grace wanted and/or asking questions that Grace could answer. So I think that as a society, we should empower both Grace and Aziz (read: women and men), teaching both to do better, not put the entire burden on men (or the initiator…but in practice that is often code for men). Aside from being unegalitarian, it is also dumb, because no matter what you do, sometimes people are going to fail. If you empower both men and women, the chance that both fail at the same time is much smaller than the chance that the man fails.
You don’t seem to realize the value in having a strict definition. Currently most people interpret rape as a malicious act, where a person intentionally ignore consent. This means that people can communicate that they were the victim of a malicious act by saying this one word. If you widen the definition, using the word conveys less information in itself. This makes it harder to communicate.
Even worse, what tends to happens in practice is that different people have different definitions. So you can get a situation where Mary says that she was raped by Bob, where she means that Bob mistakenly thought she consented, but where Jack, Alice and perhaps the authorities, treat Bob as a malicious rapist. This can then mean that Bob gets treated extremely unjustly, in a way that Mary never wanted. You can also get a situation where Jane say that she was raped by John, where she means that she made her non-consent unmistakable and that John ignored that; but where Bill, Lisa and perhaps the authorities treat John as someone who made a relatively minor mistake.
There is a reason why, when someone kills a person through an unfortunate accident where there is fairly little blame on their part, we don’t call them a murderer.
Then there is also the issue that vague and/or shifting definitions harm the ability of people to reason well. It is sadly fairly common to see people to reason with one definition in part of their argument and another definition in another part of their argument, creating an illogical argument that seems plausible unless you are aware of the switcheroo.
A society-wide cost-benefit analysis depends on knowing how strongly various people value certain benefits and dislike certain costs. However, we are currently in a situation where most people are heavily in denial about why they behave how they behave, what needs they have and what causal mechanisms exist. We also have societal indoctrination. The result is that it is very hard to determine how strong people’s various needs truly are. I prefer not to wildly speculate and/or fill in the blanks with my own (surely atypical) preferences. I see way too many people make that mistake (and propose/implement drastic interventions that are almost guaranteed to have unforeseen negative consequences and that probably won’t work for large groups in society).
I am very atypical. My models of human behavior became substantially more accurate when I modeled people a bit more like an alien species and less based on my own needs, desires, etc. It is a mistake to take me as representative of anything but a weird subset of humanity.
That is an incorrect conclusion, because many people appear to strongly value the benefits of having their ‘mind read.’ This seems to be (partly) caused by societal narratives like romantic ideals and gender roles. I’ve seen quite a few men complain about their experiences with women who suddenly became distant or even aggressive after being asked explicitly, while they accepted and reciprocated sexual behavior when explicit consent was not asked. Individuals can often not unilaterally decide to act differently (although sometimes people to manage to form a subculture with different norms), which is why social change is hard.
I’ve also come up with various reasons why people may benefit from having a partner judge their feelings, rather than be explicit. These benefits may outweigh the costs and risks in the eyes of a large portion of society (mainly those with better social skills and high desirability).
So my personal conclusion is not that what works for me should be forced on everyone, because that might very plausibly be harmful/oppressive to most of society. Instead my conclusion is, given that I don’t have seem to have access to an atypical subculture, that I cannot personally succeed without conforming to the societal norms. Furthermore, I concluded that it might be impossible for me to achieve the level of social skills to do this well and that in any case, the process of acquiring such skills requires ‘jumping into the deep end,’ with the subsequent risks of failure. Furthermore, I find the societal norms very unpleasant, which greatly detracts from the overall value of the experience.
So this boils down to me being fucked (or rather not fucked).
My desire is mainly that society becomes more rational and thereby better better at recognizing the actual trade offs that are being made and how the benefits disproportionately accrue to part of society. Ideally this make people less likely to adopt selfish behavior that is at the expense of others, less judgmental of atypical people and more willing to assist with creating solutions for those who are currently mostly despised. I don’t foresee this happening in time for my benefit, but the sooner it changes, the more (future) people will benefit.
An additional benefit of people becoming more sensible is that I will have to (figuratively) smash my head into the wall less, which tends to happen when I see people complain about behavior by the other gender that they themselves incentivize and where they feel entitled to having the benefits that this behavior gives them.
@Aapje,
I think you might have lost track of my point, because that’s not addressing the conclusion that you’re labeling as incorrect. I was saying that showing people ambiguous narratives will generally lead them to be less confident in guessing partners’ feelings. And ignoring ambiguous narratives will lead them to be more confident in guessing. That’s why ambiguous narratives are important. I also contend that they can become less ambiguous the more you read of them.
Anyways, I feel satisfied with the point that this discussion has reached. I don’t have any high ambitions of persuading any particular person on the internet of anything, so it’s fine if we still disagree on a bunch of things. Thanks for commenting.
I certainly agree with that point. I am very much in favor of teaching people about the nuance that exists by exposing them to reality, which is often grey, rather than black and white.
I mainly objected to classifying this as rape, which I think is harmful (and actually reduces the nuance, by making people interpret stories with a fixed narrative in mind, rather than have them build up their own narrative).
Anyway, thanks for the discussion!