Just shifting one variable and telling men to say “I only have sex when women say yes” would be very weird. If a guy tried to implement that in the current system, some people might look at him like he was crazy or even get offended.
Luckily, there’s actually a culture striving towards this. My favorite framing of the desired behavior is “Enthusiastic consent”.
Reinforcing the idea that consent should be enthusiastic—and that enthusiastic consent is desirable and sexy—will go a long way towards quickly shifting the system.
I’m going to talk in gender-normative terms now, since a good deal of the problem exists within those gender-normative spaces.
For men, “enthusiastic consent” isn’t merely a behavioral shift; it’s a values shift. It’s the recognition that they actually kinda WANT enthusiastic consent from their potential partners. A lot of the current language still carries so-called “slut-shaming” baggage—“I kinda like a girl who’s a whore in bed”, etc. - so there’s work that needs to be done to either find better terms, or ‘re-claim’ the terms that are being used. But I think the principle is there and rooted deeply enough in the current culture that it shouldn’t be too difficult to get men behind the idea that a girl who is blatantly “into it” is a preferable partner to a girl who is unsure, ambivalent, or even directly hostile to the idea.
For women, “enthusiastic consent” seems much more like a simple behavioral shift than like a values shift, but I may be mistaken there due to a lack of personal perspective. Any values shift that occurs, it seems to me, would be one towards self-esteem and away from seeing themselves as a prize to be competed for and won, and seeing men as merely competitors for the prize of their affection.
Aha, no; I was mistaken—I think it is a values shift on both sides. And I think the deeper value shift that would need to occur on the woman’s side is to stop treating pick-up technique as a tool in the intragender competition for status. Adopting ‘enthusiastic consent’ means abandoning the idea that a woman’s worth is based on the quality of man she can acquire, and treating the negotiation of sexual encounters as desirable for their own sake instead of merely as a signal. Luckily, culture is already shifting in that direction rather rapidly, so there isn’t nearly as much work to be done there as with men.
Maybe the whole thing could be framed in marketing terms—women’s liberation could be framed as much more appealing to the sort of men who typically denigrate it, if the idea of freer, easier, and more enthusiastic sexual encounters was added as a deal-sweetener. There would still be some hold-outs among men who “prefer to be the pursuer”, of course, but those hold-outs will narrow as the underbelly of those processes get exposed via contrast with their alternatives.
My favorite framing of the desired behavior is “Enthusiastic consent”.
What about those of us who aren’t interested in doing “enthusiasm”. Are we perpetually banned from the ability to consent to sex?
The concept of “enthusiastic consent” seems to me to devalue the importance of consent by itself. I want my “yes” to mean “yes”, I don’t want to have to shout “Yes, oh god yippee yes!”. Why can’t the former be respected and accepted by itself, without the need for “enthusiasm”?
“Enthusiasm” doesn’t mean exuberance. It means unequivocal agreement. You don’t need to jump up and down, but you at least need to give unambiguous signals. Does that make sense?
Where did you get that definition from? No, “enthusiasm” doesn’t mean “unequivocal” in English, it means excitement and exuberance.
You don’t need to jump up and down, but you at least need to give unambiguous signals. Does that make sense?
Then “clear consent” or “unambiguous consent” or “loud consent” would have been the term used. “Enthusiastic consent” clearly means that unless you are excited over something, you can’t consent. That if you are hesitant or bored or “whatever” but agreeable you can’t consent
Yes, ialdabaoth has clarified what ialdabaoth means, that doesn’t necessitate that it’s the same thing the words are intended to mean when communicated by the majority of people using them, nor does it necessitate that it’s the same thing that is understood by the majority of people hearing it.
I believe that ialdabaoth has misunderstood the concept in its intended meaning by the people who invented the concept, and I believe ialdabaoth is wrong about what the word “enthusiastic” communicates to pretty much everyone.
FWIW, prior to reading this thread my understanding of what advocates of “enthusiastic consent” are talking about was much closer to ialdabaoth’s meaning than to yours.
To be more specific, I have always understood it as attempting to contrast with grudging consent, and as having nothing at all to do with exuberance or excitement.
That being said, I agree that understanding how an audience will interpret my phrasing is critically important if I want to communicate to that audience. If you understand “enthusiastic consent” to mean that excitement and exuberance must be expressed, then it’s a really bad phrase to use when trying to communicate with you and those like you.
And if you’re correct that pretty much everyone shares your linguistic intuitions here (and ialdabaoth and I are aberrant outliers), then it’s a bad phrase to use when trying to communicate with pretty much everyone.
To be more specific, I have always understood it as attempting to contrast with grudging consent, and as having nothing at all to do with exuberance or excitement.
Ok. The thing is that grudging consent is still consent. If you grudgingly buy something you can’t sue to get your money back.
I agree that grudging consent is still consent. My understanding of what advocates of “enthusiastic consent” are talking about includes the idea that mere consent is insufficient for sex… e.g that sex is held to a different standard than marketplace purchases. (Lemon laws similarly establish an alternate threshold for car purchases.)
My understanding of what advocates of “enthusiastic consent” are talking about includes the idea that mere consent is insufficient for sex… e.g that sex is held to a different standard than marketplace purchases.
I don’t think most feminists would say that explicitly, because that immediately raises the question of why should the standards be different and why that particular standard. Incidentally, I’ve been involved in at least one argument with a feminist where “my side’s” goal was for or less to get him to admit that the above was a consequence of his position.
(Lemon laws similarly establish an alternate threshold for car purchases.)
Lemon laws are different, they’re about the buyer being misinformed.
I expect that most of the feminists I know would agree with my statement.
In general, my country’s laws don’t treat sex as equivalent to marketplace purchases, so the question of why the standard should be different for the two doesn’t seem terribly important to avoid… we run into analogous questions all the time without fleeing from them.
The question of why that particular standard might be worth avoiding; I’m unsure.
Yes, but I still think it’s a bad thing when people are talked into begrudgingly buy stuff they don’t actually want, and I would be in favour of changing social norms so that that happens less often… if only I had any idea how to do that without also disapproving of bargaining.
ArisKatsaris is not arguing that ialdabaoth is wrong, based on the definition of a word. He’s arguing that evangelizing people using a particular word is going to have a different effect than the evangelist has predicted; which seems completely reasonable. Whatever ialdabaoth means by “enthusiastic,” if he’s telling other people to look for enthusiasm, those other people are going to use their own definition.
And I think the deeper value shift that would need to occur on the woman’s side is to stop treating pick-up technique as a tool in the intragender competition for status. Adopting ‘enthusiastic consent’ means abandoning the idea that a woman’s worth is based on the quality of man she can acquire, and treating the negotiation of sexual encounters as desirable for their own sake instead of merely as a signal. Luckily, culture is already shifting in that direction rather rapidly, so there isn’t nearly as much work to be done there as with men.
This is more or less one of the way the PUA/Game crowd model women’s behavior except that as they will tell you it is not in fact declining.
Maybe the whole thing could be framed in marketing terms
You seriously think that what is likely a deeply embedded aspect of human nature can be changed with a little marketing?
You seriously think that what is likely a deeply embedded aspect of human nature can be changed with a little marketing?
Hmm … consider the change in popular perceptions of homosexuality over the past fifty to seventy-five years. Or, for that matter, women’s economic role.
Things that people have in the past thought are “human nature” (or, more broadly, matters of “natural” and “unnatural”) turn out to be quite socially malleable over just a few generations.
We shouldn’t expect ourselves to be all that unusual in the course of human history; therefore, we should conclude that things that seem to us to be “human nature” — especially ones that inspire controversy and defensiveness — are likely to turn out to be socially malleable, too.
There are lots of other ways to interpret it! Forget not the words of the saints, that whenever you think there are two ways something could be, you should look for at least five ways. I’ll name one, and let you think of the other two:
3. People who exhibit homosexual behavior do so out of a choice to rebel self-destructively against what would be good for them.
(This is a somewhat secularized version of what I take to be the Catholic Church’s position on that particular matter.)
However, I think you mistook my point, which was a sort of self-sampling argument and not an argument about that particular topic. We shouldn’t take our own perceptions of what’s normal or natural very seriously on topics where we observe that there has been a lot of wibbly-wobbly change in perceptions of what’s normal or natural … because those topics are unusually likely to be ones where we’ve come to believe an unlikely local myth of normality or naturalness.
People who exhibit homosexual behavior do so out of a choice to rebel self-destructively against what would be good for them.
Which hasn’t been falsified either.
However, I think you mistook my point, which was a sort of self-sampling argument and not an argument about that particular topic. We shouldn’t take our own perceptions of what’s normal or natural very seriously on topics where we observe that there has been a lot of wibbly-wobbly change in perceptions of what’s normal or natural … because those topics are unusually likely to be ones where we’ve come to believe an unlikely local myth of normality or naturalness.
So are you claiming there are many societies out there where women don’t treat the dating game partially as a competition intragender status? Or is your idea of “avoiding self-sampling” limited to looking at the past 50 years of western culture and extrapolating?
My favorite framing of the desired behavior is “Enthusiastic consent”.
Taboo: “Enthusiastic consent”. Once you’ve done that you might want to ask: How likely is it for there to be a misunderstanding about whether something constituted “enthusiastic consent” or not? How easy would it be for a woman who did give “enthusiastic consent” to deny having done so after the fact because she doesn’t what the stigma of having cheated on her boyfriend/having slept with a low status guy/etc.?
How likely is it for there to be a misunderstanding about whether something constituted “enthusiastic consent” or not?
Pretty unlikely. Being self-consciously dishonest is unpleasant and worth avoiding. People like to think of themselves as being good and honest. Most social dishonesty is less conscious and explicit than that, and hinges on maintaining ambiguity and deniability to oneself as well as to others.
However, we’re disproportionately likely to hear of situations like that, because of narrative bias: that sort of thing, while rare, creates dramatic stories which people are unusually likely to repeat to each other and get each other emotionally involved in. Moreover, since we acquire a lot of our beliefs about society from fiction, if we haven’t done careful sociological research, our models of social behavior are likely to be riven with narrative bias: ideas that tell us that the social world acts like movies, dramas, sitcoms, and soap operas much more than it actually does.
(Put another way: People have to be pretty honest much of the time, otherwise we wouldn’t have a society that made any kind of sense. But good fiction about social interactions is more engaging if it’s got as many levels of deceit as our little brains can handle. Since we acquire a lot of our model of society — especially parts of society that we’re not personally familiar with — from fiction, we’re likely to think of them as being more dramatic and deceptive than they really are.)
How easy would it be for a woman who did give “enthusiastic consent” to deny having done so after the fact because she doesn’t what the stigma of having cheated on her boyfriend/having slept with a low status guy/etc.?
It seems to me that it would be a very curious theory of human sexual interaction which modeled women as scheming Machiavellian agents and men as disarmingly forthright chumps.
Pretty unlikely. Being self-consciously dishonest is unpleasant and worth avoiding. People like to think of themselves as being good and honest. Most social dishonesty is less conscious and explicit than that, and hinges on maintaining ambiguity and deniability to oneself as well as to others.
Precisely, and retroactively rationalizing that you did not give “enthusiastic consent” strikes me as a decent example of such ambiguity.
Whereas I think the way that I and ialdabaoth are using the idea of “enthusiastic consent”, it is (in part) about being unambiguous. So I think we are using terms differently here.
I’m curious if you have a substantive response to the rest of that comment, by the way.
Whereas I think the way that I and ialdabaoth are using the idea of “enthusiastic consent”, it is (in part) about being unambiguous.
The problem is that you haven’t actually defined standards for “enthusiastic consent” and near as I can tell neither have any of the other people arguing for it. It’s not enough to simply assert that something should be unambiguous. Since the property of being unambiguous is itself ambiguous.
I’m curious if you have a substantive response to the rest of that comment, by the way.
As for your accusations of narrative bias, the same could be said about the existence of this supposed “rape culture”.
Luckily, there’s actually a culture striving towards this. My favorite framing of the desired behavior is “Enthusiastic consent”.
Reinforcing the idea that consent should be enthusiastic—and that enthusiastic consent is desirable and sexy—will go a long way towards quickly shifting the system.
I’m going to talk in gender-normative terms now, since a good deal of the problem exists within those gender-normative spaces.
For men, “enthusiastic consent” isn’t merely a behavioral shift; it’s a values shift. It’s the recognition that they actually kinda WANT enthusiastic consent from their potential partners. A lot of the current language still carries so-called “slut-shaming” baggage—“I kinda like a girl who’s a whore in bed”, etc. - so there’s work that needs to be done to either find better terms, or ‘re-claim’ the terms that are being used. But I think the principle is there and rooted deeply enough in the current culture that it shouldn’t be too difficult to get men behind the idea that a girl who is blatantly “into it” is a preferable partner to a girl who is unsure, ambivalent, or even directly hostile to the idea.
For women, “enthusiastic consent” seems much more like a simple behavioral shift than like a values shift, but I may be mistaken there due to a lack of personal perspective. Any values shift that occurs, it seems to me, would be one towards self-esteem and away from seeing themselves as a prize to be competed for and won, and seeing men as merely competitors for the prize of their affection.
Aha, no; I was mistaken—I think it is a values shift on both sides. And I think the deeper value shift that would need to occur on the woman’s side is to stop treating pick-up technique as a tool in the intragender competition for status. Adopting ‘enthusiastic consent’ means abandoning the idea that a woman’s worth is based on the quality of man she can acquire, and treating the negotiation of sexual encounters as desirable for their own sake instead of merely as a signal. Luckily, culture is already shifting in that direction rather rapidly, so there isn’t nearly as much work to be done there as with men.
Maybe the whole thing could be framed in marketing terms—women’s liberation could be framed as much more appealing to the sort of men who typically denigrate it, if the idea of freer, easier, and more enthusiastic sexual encounters was added as a deal-sweetener. There would still be some hold-outs among men who “prefer to be the pursuer”, of course, but those hold-outs will narrow as the underbelly of those processes get exposed via contrast with their alternatives.
What about those of us who aren’t interested in doing “enthusiasm”. Are we perpetually banned from the ability to consent to sex?
The concept of “enthusiastic consent” seems to me to devalue the importance of consent by itself. I want my “yes” to mean “yes”, I don’t want to have to shout “Yes, oh god yippee yes!”. Why can’t the former be respected and accepted by itself, without the need for “enthusiasm”?
“Enthusiasm” doesn’t mean exuberance. It means unequivocal agreement. You don’t need to jump up and down, but you at least need to give unambiguous signals. Does that make sense?
Yes, yes it does.
Where did you get that definition from? No, “enthusiasm” doesn’t mean “unequivocal” in English, it means excitement and exuberance.
Then “clear consent” or “unambiguous consent” or “loud consent” would have been the term used. “Enthusiastic consent” clearly means that unless you are excited over something, you can’t consent. That if you are hesitant or bored or “whatever” but agreeable you can’t consent
Please don’t dispute definitions. Your interlocutor has clarified what they meant by the term.
Yes, ialdabaoth has clarified what ialdabaoth means, that doesn’t necessitate that it’s the same thing the words are intended to mean when communicated by the majority of people using them, nor does it necessitate that it’s the same thing that is understood by the majority of people hearing it.
I believe that ialdabaoth has misunderstood the concept in its intended meaning by the people who invented the concept, and I believe ialdabaoth is wrong about what the word “enthusiastic” communicates to pretty much everyone.
FWIW, prior to reading this thread my understanding of what advocates of “enthusiastic consent” are talking about was much closer to ialdabaoth’s meaning than to yours.
To be more specific, I have always understood it as attempting to contrast with grudging consent, and as having nothing at all to do with exuberance or excitement.
That being said, I agree that understanding how an audience will interpret my phrasing is critically important if I want to communicate to that audience. If you understand “enthusiastic consent” to mean that excitement and exuberance must be expressed, then it’s a really bad phrase to use when trying to communicate with you and those like you.
And if you’re correct that pretty much everyone shares your linguistic intuitions here (and ialdabaoth and I are aberrant outliers), then it’s a bad phrase to use when trying to communicate with pretty much everyone.
FWIW, I also interpreted it as you and ialdabaoth.
Ok. The thing is that grudging consent is still consent. If you grudgingly buy something you can’t sue to get your money back.
I agree that grudging consent is still consent. My understanding of what advocates of “enthusiastic consent” are talking about includes the idea that mere consent is insufficient for sex… e.g that sex is held to a different standard than marketplace purchases. (Lemon laws similarly establish an alternate threshold for car purchases.)
I don’t think most feminists would say that explicitly, because that immediately raises the question of why should the standards be different and why that particular standard. Incidentally, I’ve been involved in at least one argument with a feminist where “my side’s” goal was for or less to get him to admit that the above was a consequence of his position.
Lemon laws are different, they’re about the buyer being misinformed.
I expect that most of the feminists I know would agree with my statement.
In general, my country’s laws don’t treat sex as equivalent to marketplace purchases, so the question of why the standard should be different for the two doesn’t seem terribly important to avoid… we run into analogous questions all the time without fleeing from them.
The question of why that particular standard might be worth avoiding; I’m unsure.
Come to think of it, the feminist in question was on the extreme sex-positive end.
Yes, but I still think it’s a bad thing when people are talked into begrudgingly buy stuff they don’t actually want, and I would be in favour of changing social norms so that that happens less often… if only I had any idea how to do that without also disapproving of bargaining.
This was going to be my reply to you comment. Basically, this is why people doing things “begrudgingly” is not necessarily a bad thing.
ArisKatsaris is not arguing that ialdabaoth is wrong, based on the definition of a word. He’s arguing that evangelizing people using a particular word is going to have a different effect than the evangelist has predicted; which seems completely reasonable. Whatever ialdabaoth means by “enthusiastic,” if he’s telling other people to look for enthusiasm, those other people are going to use their own definition.
This is more or less one of the way the PUA/Game crowd model women’s behavior except that as they will tell you it is not in fact declining.
You seriously think that what is likely a deeply embedded aspect of human nature can be changed with a little marketing?
Hmm … consider the change in popular perceptions of homosexuality over the past fifty to seventy-five years. Or, for that matter, women’s economic role.
Things that people have in the past thought are “human nature” (or, more broadly, matters of “natural” and “unnatural”) turn out to be quite socially malleable over just a few generations.
We shouldn’t expect ourselves to be all that unusual in the course of human history; therefore, we should conclude that things that seem to us to be “human nature” — especially ones that inspire controversy and defensiveness — are likely to turn out to be socially malleable, too.
… I’d be VERY interested to hear the rationale behind voting this comment down.
I don’t see who this is at all analogous. What’s the perceived embedded aspect of human nature you claim changed in your example?
There once was a popular perception that homosexuality was against human nature.
Quaint, ain’t it?
There are two ways to ways to interpret the italicized statement:
1) most humans do not want to engage in homosexual behavior.
2) people who want to engage in homosexual behavior are “deviant” and likely to exhibit other “deviant” behaviors.
Note that neither of these versions were falsified by “the change in popular perceptions of homosexuality over the past fifty to seventy-five years”.
There are lots of other ways to interpret it! Forget not the words of the saints, that whenever you think there are two ways something could be, you should look for at least five ways. I’ll name one, and let you think of the other two:
3. People who exhibit homosexual behavior do so out of a choice to rebel self-destructively against what would be good for them.
(This is a somewhat secularized version of what I take to be the Catholic Church’s position on that particular matter.)
However, I think you mistook my point, which was a sort of self-sampling argument and not an argument about that particular topic. We shouldn’t take our own perceptions of what’s normal or natural very seriously on topics where we observe that there has been a lot of wibbly-wobbly change in perceptions of what’s normal or natural … because those topics are unusually likely to be ones where we’ve come to believe an unlikely local myth of normality or naturalness.
Which hasn’t been falsified either.
So are you claiming there are many societies out there where women don’t treat the dating game partially as a competition intragender status? Or is your idea of “avoiding self-sampling” limited to looking at the past 50 years of western culture and extrapolating?
Taboo: “Enthusiastic consent”. Once you’ve done that you might want to ask: How likely is it for there to be a misunderstanding about whether something constituted “enthusiastic consent” or not? How easy would it be for a woman who did give “enthusiastic consent” to deny having done so after the fact because she doesn’t what the stigma of having cheated on her boyfriend/having slept with a low status guy/etc.?
Pretty unlikely. Being self-consciously dishonest is unpleasant and worth avoiding. People like to think of themselves as being good and honest. Most social dishonesty is less conscious and explicit than that, and hinges on maintaining ambiguity and deniability to oneself as well as to others.
However, we’re disproportionately likely to hear of situations like that, because of narrative bias: that sort of thing, while rare, creates dramatic stories which people are unusually likely to repeat to each other and get each other emotionally involved in. Moreover, since we acquire a lot of our beliefs about society from fiction, if we haven’t done careful sociological research, our models of social behavior are likely to be riven with narrative bias: ideas that tell us that the social world acts like movies, dramas, sitcoms, and soap operas much more than it actually does.
(Put another way: People have to be pretty honest much of the time, otherwise we wouldn’t have a society that made any kind of sense. But good fiction about social interactions is more engaging if it’s got as many levels of deceit as our little brains can handle. Since we acquire a lot of our model of society — especially parts of society that we’re not personally familiar with — from fiction, we’re likely to think of them as being more dramatic and deceptive than they really are.)
It seems to me that it would be a very curious theory of human sexual interaction which modeled women as scheming Machiavellian agents and men as disarmingly forthright chumps.
Precisely, and retroactively rationalizing that you did not give “enthusiastic consent” strikes me as a decent example of such ambiguity.
Somewhat ironic given the original meaning of “enthusiastic”: possessed by a god.
Whereas I think the way that I and ialdabaoth are using the idea of “enthusiastic consent”, it is (in part) about being unambiguous. So I think we are using terms differently here.
I’m curious if you have a substantive response to the rest of that comment, by the way.
The problem is that you haven’t actually defined standards for “enthusiastic consent” and near as I can tell neither have any of the other people arguing for it. It’s not enough to simply assert that something should be unambiguous. Since the property of being unambiguous is itself ambiguous.
As for your accusations of narrative bias, the same could be said about the existence of this supposed “rape culture”.