I don’t know what fraction of women attending college are victims of rape there now—for reasons already aired by others in this thread, the figures often quoted don’t seem terribly trustworthy. But I doubt that an official no-sex-before-marriage norm, as such, makes much difference.
Explicit social norms of this kind notoriously make less difference than you might think. (Warning: most of the things below are single studies which could be wrong or misleading in all kinds of ways; but I know of no reason to expect them all to be wrong in the same direction.)
But I bet a no-sex-until-marriage norm was quite effective in making it harder for women to say they’d been raped. Not for the stranger-leaping-out-of-a-bush sort of rape. But for the sort that I think is much more common on college campuses, where someone gets you too drunk to resist or slips drugs into your drink or just declines to stop when you say “look, this feels very nice but I really don’t want to go any further”—well, with those social norms in place you can’t tell that sort of story without getting labelled a Bad Girl, in which case you lose even if your story is believed.
I don’t think it would be easier, but I think it might be more beneficial if it worked.
I don’t know how accurate that statistic really is, but my understanding is that it is a measure (accurate or not) of the number of women who say they had sex in college without consenting to it. The 20% figure is credible to me, taken as measured in that way, and might be accurate, even though I would also not be surprised if the true figure is only 10%.
I would guess, however, that the following situation makes at least some contribution to that situation. A man and a woman have sex. Neither of them mention it explicitly. No one says, “do you want to have sex?” or anything like that. But both of them make positive behavioral contributions, and a reasonable person, judging from the behavior alone, would assume that both are consenting.
Then, the woman feels bad afterwards. This surely does happen in real life, for many reasons. Now as Katja Grace mentioned in a recent post, frequently we do not know our own desires directly, but infer them from signs. So it is perfectly possible for the woman in this situation to reason, “look, I feel bad about this, and although I was cooperating physically, I never actually said I wanted it. So I likely did not give real consent.”
You could say that we could repair this situation by requiring that people actually mention it and say yes.
That would repair the situation, in the sense that the woman would no longer be able to complain that she had sex without consenting. But notice that when she felt bad, that probably had little to do with whether or not she explicitly said yes: she could feel bad even if she did. And the yes-means-yes policy would do nothing to fix this.
And the yes-means-yes policy would do nothing to fix this.
The question isn’t about yes-means-yes as policy but yes-means-yes as cultural value.
No one says, “do you want to have sex?” or anything like that.
The fact that you don’t know anyone who practices explicit consent doesn’t mean that nobody practices explicit consent.
In the BDSM community it’s standard to have explicit consent. Having sex with a person who’s tied up without being explicit about bondaries beforehand is seen there as bad.
In Tantra they consigrate sexual sex before those acts are happening. That’s also an explicit act.
Wheel of consent would be another model of how sex works where people engage in explicit consent.
That’s three communities who thought about how to make sex work well that all value explicit consent and where people explicitely communicate about it.
Many guys who hasn’t thought much about how sex is supposed to work and who take their ideas about the nature of sex from porn on the other hand likely doesn’t explicitely communicate about it at the moment. Yes-means-Yes activism is supposed to work against that trend.
Your argument here appears to be more or less as follows. (I admit I am presenting it unkindly.)
Sometimes people have sex and regret it.
That would happen less if they had a lot less sex.
People who care about reducing rape should really be trying to reduce all sorts of bad sex.
Therefore they should advocate for social norms that make having sex more difficult and more fraught with undesirable consequences, so that people will have less sex and therefore less bad sex.
It may well be true that (if it were possible) reestablishing a strict no-sex-before-marriage norm would result in less bad sex. But that seems like a very inadequate reason to think that it would be a good thing, even for people who are exceptionally concerned about reducing the incidence of rape.
It’s not clear to me whether you’re really intending here to advocate for a return to no-sex-before-marriage norms, or whether this is intended to be a reductio ad absurdum of (some) anti-rape activists’ positions: “These people want a strict consent culture, which would probably reduce rape but only at the cost of making sex more awkward for everyone. That would be the same sort of tradeoff as switching to a strict no-sex-outside-marriage culture. Maybe its silliness will be more obvious in the latter context.”
If the former, I think I’ve already said enough to make it plain why I am not convinced. If the latter, I will add that the ratio of bad sex avoided to good sex prevented seems very different in the two cases.
(Of course someone who holds that there is really no such thing as good sex outside marriage will disagree. And of course I agree that someone whose position that is will probably want a strict no-sex-outside-marriage culture. But that’s rather obvious and doesn’t seem relevant to the rest of the discussion here.)
In the first place, I agree with Lumifer that in practice people cannot (or will not) return to a previous norm. So any actual way of addressing problems is going to be something different. So I am not “advocating” the old norm in the sense of trying to bring it about. I don’t think anyone can do that. But I am suggesting that were it possible, it might be better.
It seems to me certainly true, even if not PC, that one reason that women are more likely to feel bad in the cases under discussion, is that a stable situation is more important to women than to men, so that men are on average more comfortable with casual sex than women are. This is presumably biological: women want help raising their children, while a man in principle will have more children by having as much sex as possible. I think that this has consequences for this discussion.
Let’s say some potential sex might turn out to be good or might turn out to be bad. The above reason suggests that outside of marriage it will be more likely to turn out bad from the woman’s point of view, than from the man’s point of view. It might turn out bad even within marriage, but it would reasonable to think that there will less inequality (in the amount of bad sex from the point of view of each.)
It seems to me possible that the greater equality there might indeed be an adequate reason for preferring the no-sex-before-marriage norm, and the strict consent culture attitudes and arguments are suggestive in this regard. The word “rape” is extremely negative: traditionally people understood it to mean a violent attack on someone. If the word is applied to a situation where consent is imperfect or not completely clear, but in fact there is no such violence or threat of violence, the implication is that the outcome is still extremely bad. I think people would admit, if asked explicitly, that the violent case is worse. But even without the violence, they are saying, it is still very bad.
I am inclined to agree that the situation is very bad: it could cause a woman emotional trauma for a very long time, for example. Compare the good that people get out of non-marital sex: it’s pleasant, it can strengthen friendships, and so on. But a single occasion is likely not going to affect your life for months or years. That suggests to me that even a low ratio of the bad cases (admittedly I am talking about cases somewhat lacking in consent) to good cases is not worthwhile: it might be better for women if you simply have no non-marital sex at all.
Of course, as I said, I was talking about cases where there might be some lack in consent. But this might not be the most relevant factor. If you just have “bad sex”, even if there is strict consent, the woman may be emotionally affected in very similar ways, as I pointed out above. If we admit that this situation is extremely bad for her, this again might be a reason to prefer to completely avoid non-marital sex, even in comparison with a strict consent culture.
I am not “advocating” the old norm in the sense of trying to bring it about. [...] But I am suggesting that were it possible, it might be better.
OK. (That is “advocating” in the sense I had in mind, but I appreciate the distinction you’re making.)
it might be better for women if you simply have no non-marital sex at all.
Well, anything might be true. Let’s have a look at how plausible that is. On the one hand, you have the benefits of being permitted to have sex: in particular, (1) the actual sex, which available evidence suggests most people—women as well as men—consider a very major benefit, and (2) the ability to be better informed before embarking on the (nominally) lifelong commitment of marriage. On the other hand, you have (3a) the fact that some freely-chosen sex will turn out to be bad, and if you can’t make that free choice you avoid the bad as well as the good, (3b) the hope that this will reduce opportunities for what is sometimes called “date rape”—i.e., nonconsensual sex in contexts where consensual sex might have been a live option—and (4) the hope that it will also somehow reduce the incidence of stranger-rape.
The fact that people—women as well as men—do in fact choose to have sex outside marriage suggests that they feel #1 outweighs #3{a,b}, and for what it’s worth that seems fairly obviously true to me. (Though I happen to be male and hence, as you say, may be inclined to give #1 more weight relative to #3 than it deserves.) #4 seems to me like no more than a pipe dream: I see no reason to think that stranger-rape would be any rarer on account of a “no sex before marriage” norm (it’s not like we don’t have a “no rape” norm now, after all), and in so far as rape is about sex rather than power, misogyny, etc., having a larger number of sexually frustrated young men around seems likely to make the problem worse. Even #3b seems pretty doubtful to me unless those social norms go far enough beyond “no sex before marriage” to rule out situations in which rape could happen. (E.g., if it were viewed as monstrous for a man and a woman who are not married ever to be alone together.) And then there’s #2, whose benefit I’ve no idea how to estimate but seems likely to be a big deal.
(For the avoidance of doubt, in suggesting that #2 is a big deal I am not intending to imply that sexual compatibility is the only important thing, or even the most important thing, in a marriage. But it is certainly a thing.)
I think you have some valid considerations here, but it is only a part of the picture, and I think the no non-marital sex idea is more reasonable than you are suggesting.
But I’m going to excuse myself from this discussion; I think bringing it up on LW was a mistake on my part.
Because you’re making decisions for them. In particular, ”...is not worthwhile: it might be better for women if you simply have no non-marital sex at all”.
Besides, it’s funny how in the scenario where two people got drunk and woke up in one bed in the morning, one of them (hint: the one who has agency) is the rapist and the other (hint: the one without agency) is the victim.
I am not making decisions for them. You might be mistaken about the best route to work in the morning. That does not mean that you are not an agent or that you do not decide which route to take, or that I am “making decisions for you” if I notice that you are mistaken.
I am not the one who decided who is called a rapist in your scenario; in fact, I suggested (even if it was between the lines) that the term “rape” in that scenario does not fit very well at all.
In this case I don’t understand what do you mean when you say “it might be better for women”.
You might be mistaken about the best route to work in the morning
Yes, and when someone says “it might be better for all commuters to just take public transportation”, the implication is that each commuter is incapable of making his own choices “correctly” and that taking the ability to make the choice away from her would be of net benefit to the society.
But if you want I can replace the word “agency” with another word: “freedom”.
I am not the one who decided who is called a rapist in your scenario
Your whole line of argument is built around the asymmetry between men and women.
“It might be better for women” in the same sense that “it might be better for you” to take a different route in the morning.
And no, that doesn’t mean that anyone in particular is incapable of making their choices correctly. It does mean that some people make mistakes sometimes, and that is a thing that happens. But there is nothing impossible about the situation where a custom of using only public transportation would be better for society overall: if that were true, it surely does not mean anyone is not an agent.
There are many asymmetries between men and women. But both of them are agents, and that has nothing to do with calling anyone a rapist.
It means that taking the agency away would be a good thing (net benefit to the society).
But let’s get explicit. Are you saying that—if it were possible—forbidding premarital (and extra-marital, presumably) sex would be a good thing? And that if you had a button to push which would make it so, you would push that button?
First of all, the existence of a social norm is different from a law, and we were discussing the former, not the latter. It’s true that if you have reason for a social norm, you might have reason for a law. But it may be that the norm would be overall beneficial, and the law overall harmful.
If having a norm or a law against something means that people are not agents, then people are not agents because there is a law against murder. So obviously that does not follow. If you want to call that “taking away agency,” you can, but people are still agents.
Are you saying that society would be better off overall without any norms or laws? And would you push a button to bring about that state of affairs?
To push the button in your scenario I would have to be very certain that it would be beneficial overall, including the fact that I was pushing a button like that. I am not that certain, so I would not push it.
Not as many women attended college, but some did. I actually mentioned that as I was writing the comment and then deleted it, since it isn’t relevant—you could reinstitute one of those norms without the other.
“Shouldn’t activists support shutting down most colleges?”
When most people supported the social norm, “no sex until marriage,” do you think that 20% of women attending college were raped while in college?
Maybe those activists should just support the restoration of that social norm.
I don’t know what fraction of women attending college are victims of rape there now—for reasons already aired by others in this thread, the figures often quoted don’t seem terribly trustworthy. But I doubt that an official no-sex-before-marriage norm, as such, makes much difference.
Explicit social norms of this kind notoriously make less difference than you might think. (Warning: most of the things below are single studies which could be wrong or misleading in all kinds of ways; but I know of no reason to expect them all to be wrong in the same direction.)
Divorce rates are higher, not lower among evangelical Christians.
Of all US states, Utah views the most internet pornography per capita.
Abstinence-only sex education correlates with higher teenage pregnancy rates.
But I bet a no-sex-until-marriage norm was quite effective in making it harder for women to say they’d been raped. Not for the stranger-leaping-out-of-a-bush sort of rape. But for the sort that I think is much more common on college campuses, where someone gets you too drunk to resist or slips drugs into your drink or just declines to stop when you say “look, this feels very nice but I really don’t want to go any further”—well, with those social norms in place you can’t tell that sort of story without getting labelled a Bad Girl, in which case you lose even if your story is believed.
Why do you think it would be easier to establish that norm than the “Yes means Yes”-norm?
I don’t think it would be easier, but I think it might be more beneficial if it worked.
I don’t know how accurate that statistic really is, but my understanding is that it is a measure (accurate or not) of the number of women who say they had sex in college without consenting to it. The 20% figure is credible to me, taken as measured in that way, and might be accurate, even though I would also not be surprised if the true figure is only 10%.
I would guess, however, that the following situation makes at least some contribution to that situation. A man and a woman have sex. Neither of them mention it explicitly. No one says, “do you want to have sex?” or anything like that. But both of them make positive behavioral contributions, and a reasonable person, judging from the behavior alone, would assume that both are consenting.
Then, the woman feels bad afterwards. This surely does happen in real life, for many reasons. Now as Katja Grace mentioned in a recent post, frequently we do not know our own desires directly, but infer them from signs. So it is perfectly possible for the woman in this situation to reason, “look, I feel bad about this, and although I was cooperating physically, I never actually said I wanted it. So I likely did not give real consent.”
You could say that we could repair this situation by requiring that people actually mention it and say yes.
That would repair the situation, in the sense that the woman would no longer be able to complain that she had sex without consenting. But notice that when she felt bad, that probably had little to do with whether or not she explicitly said yes: she could feel bad even if she did. And the yes-means-yes policy would do nothing to fix this.
The question isn’t about yes-means-yes as policy but yes-means-yes as cultural value.
The fact that you don’t know anyone who practices explicit consent doesn’t mean that nobody practices explicit consent.
In the BDSM community it’s standard to have explicit consent. Having sex with a person who’s tied up without being explicit about bondaries beforehand is seen there as bad.
In Tantra they consigrate sexual sex before those acts are happening. That’s also an explicit act.
Wheel of consent would be another model of how sex works where people engage in explicit consent.
That’s three communities who thought about how to make sex work well that all value explicit consent and where people explicitely communicate about it.
Many guys who hasn’t thought much about how sex is supposed to work and who take their ideas about the nature of sex from porn on the other hand likely doesn’t explicitely communicate about it at the moment. Yes-means-Yes activism is supposed to work against that trend.
I did not say that no one practices explicit consent. My statement was in the context of an example.
Okay then I don’t understand the main point.
“No sex without explicit consent before marriage” seems to be a lot less restrictive then “No sex before marriage”.
I can’t see how you find the second a good norm but don’t like the first norm.
Your argument here appears to be more or less as follows. (I admit I am presenting it unkindly.)
Sometimes people have sex and regret it.
That would happen less if they had a lot less sex.
People who care about reducing rape should really be trying to reduce all sorts of bad sex.
Therefore they should advocate for social norms that make having sex more difficult and more fraught with undesirable consequences, so that people will have less sex and therefore less bad sex.
It may well be true that (if it were possible) reestablishing a strict no-sex-before-marriage norm would result in less bad sex. But that seems like a very inadequate reason to think that it would be a good thing, even for people who are exceptionally concerned about reducing the incidence of rape.
It’s not clear to me whether you’re really intending here to advocate for a return to no-sex-before-marriage norms, or whether this is intended to be a reductio ad absurdum of (some) anti-rape activists’ positions: “These people want a strict consent culture, which would probably reduce rape but only at the cost of making sex more awkward for everyone. That would be the same sort of tradeoff as switching to a strict no-sex-outside-marriage culture. Maybe its silliness will be more obvious in the latter context.”
If the former, I think I’ve already said enough to make it plain why I am not convinced. If the latter, I will add that the ratio of bad sex avoided to good sex prevented seems very different in the two cases.
(Of course someone who holds that there is really no such thing as good sex outside marriage will disagree. And of course I agree that someone whose position that is will probably want a strict no-sex-outside-marriage culture. But that’s rather obvious and doesn’t seem relevant to the rest of the discussion here.)
In the first place, I agree with Lumifer that in practice people cannot (or will not) return to a previous norm. So any actual way of addressing problems is going to be something different. So I am not “advocating” the old norm in the sense of trying to bring it about. I don’t think anyone can do that. But I am suggesting that were it possible, it might be better.
It seems to me certainly true, even if not PC, that one reason that women are more likely to feel bad in the cases under discussion, is that a stable situation is more important to women than to men, so that men are on average more comfortable with casual sex than women are. This is presumably biological: women want help raising their children, while a man in principle will have more children by having as much sex as possible. I think that this has consequences for this discussion.
Let’s say some potential sex might turn out to be good or might turn out to be bad. The above reason suggests that outside of marriage it will be more likely to turn out bad from the woman’s point of view, than from the man’s point of view. It might turn out bad even within marriage, but it would reasonable to think that there will less inequality (in the amount of bad sex from the point of view of each.)
It seems to me possible that the greater equality there might indeed be an adequate reason for preferring the no-sex-before-marriage norm, and the strict consent culture attitudes and arguments are suggestive in this regard. The word “rape” is extremely negative: traditionally people understood it to mean a violent attack on someone. If the word is applied to a situation where consent is imperfect or not completely clear, but in fact there is no such violence or threat of violence, the implication is that the outcome is still extremely bad. I think people would admit, if asked explicitly, that the violent case is worse. But even without the violence, they are saying, it is still very bad.
I am inclined to agree that the situation is very bad: it could cause a woman emotional trauma for a very long time, for example. Compare the good that people get out of non-marital sex: it’s pleasant, it can strengthen friendships, and so on. But a single occasion is likely not going to affect your life for months or years. That suggests to me that even a low ratio of the bad cases (admittedly I am talking about cases somewhat lacking in consent) to good cases is not worthwhile: it might be better for women if you simply have no non-marital sex at all.
Of course, as I said, I was talking about cases where there might be some lack in consent. But this might not be the most relevant factor. If you just have “bad sex”, even if there is strict consent, the woman may be emotionally affected in very similar ways, as I pointed out above. If we admit that this situation is extremely bad for her, this again might be a reason to prefer to completely avoid non-marital sex, even in comparison with a strict consent culture.
OK. (That is “advocating” in the sense I had in mind, but I appreciate the distinction you’re making.)
Well, anything might be true. Let’s have a look at how plausible that is. On the one hand, you have the benefits of being permitted to have sex: in particular, (1) the actual sex, which available evidence suggests most people—women as well as men—consider a very major benefit, and (2) the ability to be better informed before embarking on the (nominally) lifelong commitment of marriage. On the other hand, you have (3a) the fact that some freely-chosen sex will turn out to be bad, and if you can’t make that free choice you avoid the bad as well as the good, (3b) the hope that this will reduce opportunities for what is sometimes called “date rape”—i.e., nonconsensual sex in contexts where consensual sex might have been a live option—and (4) the hope that it will also somehow reduce the incidence of stranger-rape.
The fact that people—women as well as men—do in fact choose to have sex outside marriage suggests that they feel #1 outweighs #3{a,b}, and for what it’s worth that seems fairly obviously true to me. (Though I happen to be male and hence, as you say, may be inclined to give #1 more weight relative to #3 than it deserves.) #4 seems to me like no more than a pipe dream: I see no reason to think that stranger-rape would be any rarer on account of a “no sex before marriage” norm (it’s not like we don’t have a “no rape” norm now, after all), and in so far as rape is about sex rather than power, misogyny, etc., having a larger number of sexually frustrated young men around seems likely to make the problem worse. Even #3b seems pretty doubtful to me unless those social norms go far enough beyond “no sex before marriage” to rule out situations in which rape could happen. (E.g., if it were viewed as monstrous for a man and a woman who are not married ever to be alone together.) And then there’s #2, whose benefit I’ve no idea how to estimate but seems likely to be a big deal.
(For the avoidance of doubt, in suggesting that #2 is a big deal I am not intending to imply that sexual compatibility is the only important thing, or even the most important thing, in a marriage. But it is certainly a thing.)
I think you have some valid considerations here, but it is only a part of the picture, and I think the no non-marital sex idea is more reasonable than you are suggesting.
But I’m going to excuse myself from this discussion; I think bringing it up on LW was a mistake on my part.
OK; no problem. It was interesting.
You’re denying agency to women.
No, I’m not. Where do you think I denied that women are agents?
Because you’re making decisions for them. In particular, ”...is not worthwhile: it might be better for women if you simply have no non-marital sex at all”.
Besides, it’s funny how in the scenario where two people got drunk and woke up in one bed in the morning, one of them (hint: the one who has agency) is the rapist and the other (hint: the one without agency) is the victim.
I am not making decisions for them. You might be mistaken about the best route to work in the morning. That does not mean that you are not an agent or that you do not decide which route to take, or that I am “making decisions for you” if I notice that you are mistaken.
I am not the one who decided who is called a rapist in your scenario; in fact, I suggested (even if it was between the lines) that the term “rape” in that scenario does not fit very well at all.
In this case I don’t understand what do you mean when you say “it might be better for women”.
Yes, and when someone says “it might be better for all commuters to just take public transportation”, the implication is that each commuter is incapable of making his own choices “correctly” and that taking the ability to make the choice away from her would be of net benefit to the society.
But if you want I can replace the word “agency” with another word: “freedom”.
Your whole line of argument is built around the asymmetry between men and women.
“It might be better for women” in the same sense that “it might be better for you” to take a different route in the morning.
And no, that doesn’t mean that anyone in particular is incapable of making their choices correctly. It does mean that some people make mistakes sometimes, and that is a thing that happens. But there is nothing impossible about the situation where a custom of using only public transportation would be better for society overall: if that were true, it surely does not mean anyone is not an agent.
There are many asymmetries between men and women. But both of them are agents, and that has nothing to do with calling anyone a rapist.
It means that taking the agency away would be a good thing (net benefit to the society).
But let’s get explicit. Are you saying that—if it were possible—forbidding premarital (and extra-marital, presumably) sex would be a good thing? And that if you had a button to push which would make it so, you would push that button?
First of all, the existence of a social norm is different from a law, and we were discussing the former, not the latter. It’s true that if you have reason for a social norm, you might have reason for a law. But it may be that the norm would be overall beneficial, and the law overall harmful.
If having a norm or a law against something means that people are not agents, then people are not agents because there is a law against murder. So obviously that does not follow. If you want to call that “taking away agency,” you can, but people are still agents.
Are you saying that society would be better off overall without any norms or laws? And would you push a button to bring about that state of affairs?
To push the button in your scenario I would have to be very certain that it would be beneficial overall, including the fact that I was pushing a button like that. I am not that certain, so I would not push it.
And when was that?
In those time women did not attend colleges. The triple K (Kinder, Küche, Kirche) were expected to be enough for them. Social norms, y’know...
Not as many women attended college, but some did. I actually mentioned that as I was writing the comment and then deleted it, since it isn’t relevant—you could reinstitute one of those norms without the other.
Actually, I don’t think you can reinstitute any of these norms, together or separately.
I agree. (We are using could/can in two different ways, and each statement is true.)