I’m about to overshare personal information:

I have a deep affection for the furniture of the Arts and Crafts movement, particularly Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Also, Harry Chapin. My father loved his music, and I can probably still sing every track on Greatest Stories Live.

But that’s not what we mean when we say “TMI,” is it?

Mostly, I see people warn that they are about to give too much information when they are about to talk about their own sexuality — and not when they are interjecting it into a conversation where it is off topic. I usually see people — and, really, usually women — disclaim that they are about to overshare when the conversation is specifically about sex. As if it’s inappropriate, when discussing sex, to share one’s personal experiences with sex. I worry about that, because I believe it’s a habit of mind.

If we’re going to talk about sex, we need to accept that it is entirely proper to say explicitly what we do, what we like and what we think about. If we don’t, if we feel we can’t, then we don’t have any real idea what others’ experiences are.

It’s isolating. How many times has someone said something on a thread, followed by a string of “I thought I was the only one, I’m so glad to know I’m not alone”? Even for those of us who are totally within the mainstream — especially women — there is a terrible silence about sexual practice.

It’s silencing. If we have something to say, but we can’t talk frankly about our bodies or what we do with them, then it becomes very difficult to say bluntly what we mean. One of the most basic forms of argument in feminist discourse is, “what you say does not match my experience.” But if saying precisely what that experience is is disfavored, this argument is much tougher to make.

That’s not to say that we all have to share everything. We all have things we want to keep private. But when we want to say what we think and what we do, and we feel constrained from doing that or feel the need to mute it of qualify it for fear of TMI, that’s a problem with the rules of the discourse.

Don’t worry about TMI. Go ahead and say it.

I’m about to be unfair. The Democrats threw women under the bus and made the already pathetic state of access to a medical procedure that is a constitutional right and that one in three women will have even worse than it already is. Because mainstream Dems don’t care about women. I’m so angry, and so much has been said about the Stupak Coathanger amendment that I don’t feel I have much to add. So I’m looking for a target for free-floating antimisogynist anger, and Lisa Miller presented herself by saying something appallingly stupid. So … I’m taking it out on her. If it’s any consolation, I’ll stay mad for a long time; probably as long as I have a daughter, a wife and a sister living in this world. I’ll be unfair to lots of other people who say stupid antifeminist things.

What did Miller say that was so stupid? Using Newsweek as her podium, she said:

True Love Revolution might do better, then, to leave aside the divisive and wrongheaded “one man, one woman” language and help guide students through this modern sexual wilderness. And though it is not a religious group, it has religious underpinnings, and it might look to religion for some of the most thoughtful (and, perhaps, useful) analyses of how liberated women and men can reasonably opt out of sex—or, at least, the kind of sex they don’t want to have.

What’s so stupid about that? TLR is the Harvard abstinence group. Recently, they came out of the closet as the hateful bigots they are:

Recently the group has drawn fresh ire because it added to its mission statement, which had formerly supported sexual abstinence as a lifestyle choice, a platform that seemed calculated to ignite a culture war on campus. The new statement asserted that sex outside of marriage is “harmful to both parties”; it embraced “traditional marriage” (that is, not gay marriage); and it argued that choosing abstinence is “true feminism” in that “it recognizes the natural characteristics, strengths, and abilities of women and seeks to affirm them in this identity.”

So they admitted that what they are after is marriage for heteros only, and sex only in marriage. They follow the ancient theological principle of “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” first enunciated in a second-century Greek text that, miraculously, translated into a rhyming couplet. (Remember that part in the New Testament where Jesus talks about homosexuality? No, me neither.)

None of us who actually pay attention to the purity movement (see generally Jessica Valenti’s Purity Myth, probably the best one-stop shop for facts and analysis on this)* are at all surprised. There is no meaningful secular abstinence preaching, because it doesn’t work. There is no religious left abstinence preaching, because when the religious left talks sexuality, they approach it in a holistic fashion, with information, and with values that don’t sound like someone’s grandfather yapping, “when I was your age, women kept their legs closed!”
And that’s just what Miller sounds like. She writes:

I went to college in the early 1980s, when feminist arguments like Kovvali’s [that consensual sex is not degrading] were as ordinary as air: I think True Love Revolution is on to something. … Although the actual amount of sex college students are having may not be as high as parents fear—nearly 80 percent of college students report having had one or no sexual partners in the past year—students say the hookup culture is dominant and oppressive.

As I’ve said before, I think anybody ought to be able to say no to any kind of sex with anyone, anytime for any reason or no reason. So if students at Harvard are having sex and are miserable about it, that’s a real concern and I’m all ears about addressing it. Surely, if such a thing were in evidence, Miller could have cited it. But she can’t. Instead, she comes up with evidence that contradicts her argument, presents it as if it is support, and goes right on rambling. Here’s her “evidence”:

A G-rated example: “I am a conservative Christian. I am going mad with sexual desire. FML.”

That’s it. On Harvard FML, a conservative Christian is complaining about being horny all the time. No evidence of any sexual activity, let alone unwanted sexual activity. Further, no evidence that anything in the Harvard social environment caused this Christian to be horny. It might be … normal teenage hormones.

In fact, Miller all but admits she is full of shit:

Although the actual amount of sex college students are having may not be as high as parents fear—nearly 80 percent of college students report having had one or no sexual partners in the past year—students say the hookup culture is dominant and oppressive.

Which students? The FML Christian. That’s it.

There’s no logical route from “some Christian kid wants sex and isn’t having it and is intolerably horny” to “the culture of sex at Harvard is oppressive.” There is a hopeless series of leaps in there. What one might infer is that for conservative Christian teens, remaining abstinent is tough and a support group is a good idea. But TLR is not a support group. It’s an advocacy organization. They are actively trying to recruit others to their lifestyle. (Why is it only a problem if the pro-sex folks do that?)

All this is in the service of Miller’s point:

And though [TLR] is not a religious group, it has religious underpinnings, and it might look to religion for some of the most thoughtful (and, perhaps, useful) analyses of how liberated women and men can reasonably opt out of sex—or, at least, the kind of sex they don’t want to have…Teaching kids that saying no can feel as good as saying yes—that’s a revolution.

But TLR doesn’t want kids to know that saying no and saying yes are equally valid choices, and that both are fulfilling. Their purpose is to tell women — not really men, see Jessica’s book — that they will be used tape, used lollypops, and plucked flowers if they say yes. They are not preaching agency, they are preaching abstinence. They are not in favor of autonomy, they are in favor of restriction.

If Miller doesn’t get this, she’s a complete dupe and not worthy of a high-profile column in Newsweek. If she does get it, then she is actively participating in TRL’s charade, using “respect” for women as a stalking horse for an agenda to restrict sexual conduct. I said above that I was being unfair — in fact, maybe I’m being too fair.

*And I don’t just say that because she’s my editor and my friend.

Partly, that’s because while in practice I switch, I identify more as a bottom. Partly, it’s because, even writing pseudonymously, my spouse prefers that I not talk about what I do with her as a top. What I do as a bottom is personal to me, and I can talk about it as I see fit; what she does as a bottom is personal to her, and she doesn’t want to see the details in the blogosphere.

People who top in various aspects of BDSM play do so for a variety of reasons, and I’m not going to attempt a typology of topping. Since our experiences are highly individualized, it’s tough to say much more than, “this is what I do, this is how I feel about it.” And my freedom to do that is limited, so I tend instead to talk about my experiences bottoming.

I did, however, run across someone saying a lot of things about topping that resonated with me, and that I will share for that reason. Over at Cuntlove, Cleofaye writes about her shift from bottoming exclusively to topping female and male partners. She started out as a bottom — a common though not exclusive pattern and one that I suspect but can’t demonstrate is more common among women. She says:

Then I met K. K was a girl in my women and gender studies class who I fell in love with hard… She was a sub, but only interested in the Bondage and Domination, but not in any sort of erotic pain. From K I learned that I loved control, much more than I thought I would.

Being a top was hard work. Yes, I had all the power, but as they say in the spiderman movies, with great power becomes great responsiblity. Now, having sex wasn’t about me anymore. I wasn’t allowed to be selfish and I wasn’t allowed to lose control anymore. Everything I did had to be carefully thought through to make sure I wasn’t making my sub uncomfortable, overstepping her limits, or putting her in danger. …

[...] Giving orders and making demands were something I had never been very comfortable with, but the second I saw how excited and turned on those orders made K, any feelings of guilt or hesitation were gone. It became a game, a job; figuring out what I could do that would turn her on. How I could top the last experience, how I could take her to the next level, how I could push her limits even more without crossing the line. Her needs became my needs. Learning her desires and limits made me feel closer to her then I had ever felt to anyone.

Almost 20 years ago now, Professor Ralph Bolton said in a conference session, “you should never intellectualize sex unless you’re topping an S&M scene.” (He’s spent much of his career doing academic anthropology around sex, so I expect then and now that he meant you should never intellectualize it while it’s happening.) But topping, for me, has always meant being in my head: planning, reading, thinking, adapting, constantly adjusting to keep my partner on the journey she was seeking, often while consciously avoiding the obvious route. For that reason, even when I do something as a top what involved genital stimulation for me (and I often don’t), it’s hard to come. I have too much to do and too many other things to pay attention to. Getting off is not really on my priority list.

(My partner’s orgasm isn’t necessarily on my priority list — whether BDSM need be “sexual” is contested terrain among BDSMers ourselves, and to the extent it is, often it is sensual, erotic, sexual, but not genital-focused or not orgasm focused. In fact, I’ve told my spouse that I’d like to orgasm less as a bottom, but she gets a sense of completeness out of making me climax when she’s topping.)

Cleofaye says she has had one partner that she could let go and go a bit heavy with, a man:

knowing that we would both be into S&M play was the main reason we started hooking up in the first place. The first few times I was with him, I underestimated both him and myself. I’m a pretty strong girl, and I’ve learned to hold back most of my life. I never use all my strength to do pretty much anything. I held back hitting him, scratching him, I stopped myself from using all my strength, every time.

He took me aside and told me to stop holding back, that I hadn’t come close to his pain tolerance. For one of the first times in my life, I could let go, stop holding back, and I let myself go. It was a wonderful feeling. Spanking him, slapping him, hitting hit with a riding crop, he would get harder and harder. He would break his usual stoic sexual behavior to grunt and groan and scream in that way that tells you they are the border of pleasure and pain.

I don’t think that holding back as a top is exclusive to women, but I think it is a more powerful force to overcome. Tops have limits, too, and there are things that I’ve had partners want to do that I was not prepared to do as a top. But my spouse has had to work much harder with some mental blocks as a top. When I first said I wanted her to kick me in the testicles, she couldn’t do it. She didn’t refuse. She liked the idea. So there I was, naked, kneeling, breath hot with anticipation. She went to kick me and … stopped, as if an invisible hand grabbed her foot. It took a lot of practice to make that invisible hand go away. A lot of wonderful, wonderful practice.

I do really appreciate that I’ve been playing with the same person for over a decade now. There’s a pattern of evolution with regular partners, from “this does nothing for me but she wants to try it,” to “she loved it last time, so maybe I can amp it up a bit” to “this gets her so hot that it makes me hot to watch her react to it.” I savor that evolution.

In the end, something is true for me as a BDSMer that I would certainly never claim as a universal. For me, topping or bottoming, BDSM is intimate. Which is not to say that I only ever play with romantic partners or even with people I know well; but it is to say that doing BDSM creates in me a powerful sense of intimacy with a partner. And while I wouldn’t claim it as a universal, there again I’m not alone:

A BDSM session would leave us giddy and light headed. We would lay in bed, catching our breath. We actually fell deeply in love very quickly, which I think is one of the real dangers of BDSM. You have to trust each other and learn to read each other, something that leads to intimacy that you may not have intended. It connects you to your partner quickly and intensely, it’s an adrenaline rush and it’s a release of physical energy that’s like nothing else.

Thank you, Cleofaye, for saying it so well.

In response to Kathryn Holmquist’s execrable notion of “too late to say no”, Amanda Hess at the Washington Citypaper has already done a full takedown, but I felt compelled to add what I think ought to be a basic bottom line:

Anyone ought to be able to refuse to be sexual, in any way, with any other person, at any time, for any reason, or for no reason.*

The whole concept of “Yes Means Yes” is to move past “No Means No” to a more thoroughgoing and positive sexual ethic. But that is not to say that “no” becomes unnecessary or unimportant. In fact, without “No”, there is no “Yes.”

*I’m consciously leaving aside the question of consensual nonconsent among BDSMers — whether I can decide ahead of time that a later decision to change my mind won’t be binding — because it is the most narrow and deliberately separate kind of special case. Discussion of c/nc is O/T on this thread.

Over at Feministing Community, there is a thread about trans folks, disclosure and consent . I find much of the comment thread upsetting. Obviously there is a lot of transphobia, but also a lot of misinformation and assumption.

I’m not going to trans 101 here, mostly because that’s not the purpose of this thread but also because I’m not qualified. What I want to do here is set out a view that covers most information about one’s sex partners. Some may disagree, but I think it’s a very useful view.

I’ll borrow a concept from law here: materiality. In securities law, “material” is that which a reasonable person would think it important to know, as part of the total mix of information, in making a decision.*

When folks enter into some kinds of transactions, certain information will always be material. But a lot of information may be material to one person in some circumstances, and not to another person or in another set of circumstances.

(I’m not really talking about dating — the whole process of dating is getting to know someone. I’m talking about the more casual ends of the spectrum of partnering for sex, ranging from anonymous and near-anonymous to longer-term arrangements.)

I don’t think sex should be a transaction. I think it should be an interaction. But when we engage with sex partners, each of us is in a different situation, with different wants, needs, likes and dislikes. Our potential partners don’t know what those are. They don’t know what is material to any potential partner. They can guess, but they don’t know. So they can’t know what I want them to disclose.

The possibilities are endless! Do I draw political lines and refuse to be sexual with conservatives? (Yes, in fact, I dumped a recurrent partner for that reason once.) Does it matter to me if my partners have preferences for certain kinds of sex? Do I care if my partners are unattached? If a casual partner is married, is that a dealbreaker? Or is it a dealbreaker only if ze is lying to zir spouse? Or one factor among many that I want to consider? Or if it’s a one-time thing do I not give a rat’s ass?

If my partners had to cover all bases of disclosure, they would have to hand me a fifteen page informed consent disclosure. (Ever see a public company’s annual report? With attachments, often 100 or more pages, sometimes much more.) In reality, what will happen is that people will disclose what they think most of their partners want to know; and whether that suits me or not will depend on how well I fit that mold.

If I want to get the information I need, I’m going to have to ask. Is my partner okay with penetrating me? If I want to know, I have to ask. Are my partner’s politics a problem for me? If I want to know, I’m going to have to ask. Is my partner cisgendered? If I want to know, I’m going to have to ask.

Back to the Feministing thread, and to clear up what should be rudimentary misconceptions and assumptions: not all trans people have had genital surgery, but some have. Some trans folks have genitals that match their identity, some don’t. Not all folks whose genitals vary from the expectations of their sex identity are trans. Folks have all kinds of genitals for all kinds of reasons. Not every sex act involves all participants’ genitals. Biology does not equal identity.

Which of these things matters, and how much? Well, that’s entirely subjective. For my part, I’ll say that identity matters to me, history and anatomy don’t. So a disclosure to me about trans history by a partner who lives as a woman with female genitals would be an irrelevancy; a disclosure by a female partner with a penis might be information I would get anyway, or might not, and wouldn’t matter. The one thing I care about, I’ll admit, is that it would mess with my head to be sexual with someone who identified as male — regardless of anatomy. That’s not merely academic: since I’m attracted to butch specifically and genderfuck in general, it’s not inconcievable that at some point I’ll find myself moving towards some kind of sexual play with a person whose gender identity isn’t clear to me. Probably by then I’ll know a name and preferred pronoun from which I can determine identity — but if I can’t, I’m the one who knows it’s important to me, so I’m the one that ought to ask. If I’m into it enough to play with a someone who I find attractive and who is male, I’m an adult and I’ll deal with whatever emotional stuff I may have about that; and if I really need to know that if I play with someone who is in some way gender-ambiguous that ze identifies as female at the time so I can keep some arbitrary benchmark of straightitude (too late anyway; I have not met a strict gold-star hetboy test since high school) then it’s on me to find out — and if it’s awkward to ask, it has to be a lot more awkward for my partner to raise it.

I can’t know in advance what people want to know about me, either. If someone doesn’t want to be sexual with lawyers … who am I to say that’s a silly rule? My age, my number of sex partners, the part of the country I’m from … things that I’d never guess could be a dealbreaker for someone, so if they want to know, they need to ask.

The comments on that thread make clear to me another problem with inventing affirmative disclosure obligations. It defines an implied norm. Cis folks say trans folks should disclose, het folks say queer folks should disclose, able-bodied and neurotypical people say the disabled and non-neurotypical should disclose. And the people with the privilege get their comfortable assumptions and do no work and everyone else goes out of their way not to discomfit the lease-discomfited. Again.

For public health reasons, there is one major exception that I think is almost always material information: sexually transmitted infections. Whatever other issues I have with a sex partner are between me and zir. But infection has epidemiological implications. I know some folks disagree and want universal protections and no disclosure; that’s not my view. There are certain circumstances where the background assumption is that nobody knows anyone’s infection status — some sex clubs, for example — and if folks enter into those circumstances they know they have to protect themselves as though everyone is infected with everything. They are knowingly and consciously assuming the risk, and they are hopefully making sound decisions about their methods of risk reduction. But using universal protections as a background rule is highly imperfect, because people who are not used to high levels of risk are just not consistent. If we’re about to engage in sexual conduct and have an infection that is reasonably likely to be transmitted by that conduct — whether it’s a cold we could give someone by kissing or HPV or anything else, if we know we ought to disclose. That’s my position.

Obviously, most folks need a lot more information to know who to date than, if so inclined at all, who to be causally sexual with. We have a whole due diligence process for that, called dating. At the more spontaneous end of the spectrum, folks will likely need less information and have fewer dealbreakers, but each of us is the only one who knows what we need to know.

What to do when asked? Well, if someone can’t be honest with me, that person is not a sex partner I want. If someone asks me something and I don’t want to answer, I’m not going to lie. If I refuse to answer, I expect they will consider my refusal and the opportunity may go away, but it’s not as if I was entitled, anyway. My sex partners are their own people with their own decision-making process. They can decide they’re not into it at any time, for any reason or no reason.

None of which constitutes a position on what to think of people’s reason for turning down a sex partner. Some reasons for doing that are appalling. People have all kinds of prejudices. People might not want to be sexual with a particular person because they are racist, classist, transphobic, ablist, and any number of other prejudices. But, on my account, each person can refuse to be sexual with any other person for any reason — even a reason that I think is bigoted — because the alternative is to say, “if your only reason for not wanting that person as your sex partner is X, and X is bigoted, then you have an obligation to have sex with that person.” And I will never say that. Isn’t that basic and noncontroversial?

I can’t waive a magic wand and impose a sexual ethic on anybody but myself. If I could, enthusiastic participation would be a universally accepted norm. But the purpose of Yes Means Yes, the book and the blog, is aspirational thinking about a sexual culture that works better and is better than the one we have. So this is my shot at an ethic of sexual disclosure: you know what’s material to you, so you decide what to ask your partners; it should not be up to them to guess.

*Law geeks: this is a close paraphrase of the Basic v. Levinson standard. Part of the reason I’m importing the term “material” is that deliberately misleading someone about material information so that they reasonably rely on the misrepresentation is generally actionable as fraud, either at common law or by various statutes. Importing that is intentional, as I think lying about a material fact to get someone to be sexual in some way is a kind of fraud, perhaps not in a legal sense but in an ethical sense. If I have actual knowledge that someone needs a piece of information to decide whether to be sexual with me and I am affirmatively misleading, that’s not okay.[Ed: see comments]

Lauren reviewed this survey and said:

Because mothers are more than their children or grocery shopping habits, I’d imagine they tend to check their email, conduct business, and make phone calls too. Was that on the survey?

The answer is that it isn’t. That’s what this culture does to women. It reduces them to component parts, pidgeon-holes them and refuses to recognize or respect the whole woman.

Like much of how patriarchy works, I see it only second-hand and if I were not looking for it I would miss it. I look at my own experiences, and I can see that this does not happen to me, because I am a man. I see myself as a multifaceted person, and nobody challenges that.

When I walk into a meeting of the lawyers in my bar, I expect people see me and think of my firm, or the last case we had together. But those who know me well ask about my kids, or about my wife. Some might make a comment about politics, somebody’s plans to travel to Scotland, Formula 1 racing or mixed martial arts — implicitly recognizing that while I show up to be a litigator, I remain at the same time a spouse, parent, voter, ethnic Scot, and fan of fighting sports. I am all these things, facets that I put forward by turns but that are a part of me all the time. As Walt Whitman wrote in Song of Myself, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

I don’t think we have a society that is comfortable with women being large or containing multitudes. The survey Lauren links treats “mom” as if it encompasses the whole of the woman, defining her entirely. Women are expected to be one-dimensional, so that if a woman is a professional, and if she is also a mother, any sort of acknowledgement that she’s also a mom is seen as slightly or not-so-slightly inconsistent with her role as a professional. Recall Ed Rendell’s open-mic gaffe (in the classic Washingtonian sense of the word; saying what one really thinks in a manner and context that is disadvantageous) about Janet Napolitano, that she was “perfect” for Homeland Security because she had no life and no family?

When people talk about the work-life issue, they usually talk about time and priorities — folks like Jack Welch, GE’s sometimes deified former CEO, say that women who take time off to have a family cannot aspire to high professional achievement. On its face that is about two things: (1) time; and (2) commitment.

(The first is a discussion all its own, and can’t be had without bringing in men’s — American white-collar men’s — career paths and expectations and the way we kill ourselves for employers; the two-income-household norm; the stagnation or real wages and the upward appropriation of all productivity gains for more than thirty years; environmental and global sustainability; and men’s willingness to be parents and to de-emphasize career in their self-concept. I can’t fit all that in this post.)

The second is easier, because it’s largely subjective. I can’t find the research at the moment, but I’m relatively certain that I’ve seen research that shows that between a man and woman, each with kids, each of whom work the same number of hours, the woman is perceived as less committed to work. (If I haven’t seen that, then certainly the research that shows that the same resume or work is perceived differently depending on whether a man’s or woman’s name is attached suggests that that would be the result. See, e.g., Virginia Valian, Why So Slow? The Advancement Of Women pp. 127-128, available here; see also this.)

That result is certainly what this paper suggests:

Laurie Anne Freeman, a world-renowned expert on information technology and Japanese politics and a professor in the Political Science Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, received extremely positive reviews from her department until she had two daughters and took leaves to be with them. (1) The reviews she received after returning from her leaves were increasingly critical of her research and productivity. (2) Despite family-friendly university policies, including rules that prohibited consideration of leave time when evaluating productivity, the department repeatedly evaluated her earlier than scheduled and compared her unfavorably with professors who had not taken leaves. (3) When Freeman came up for tenure, she had an impressive list of accomplishments including two prestigious fellowships, one book published and one under contract, and invitations to present her work at leading institutions including Harvard and Stanford. (4) Overwhelmingly negative assessments from her department, however, culminated in a unanimous recommendation to deny tenure.

(Long excerpt only for free, but I’m only concerned with the introduction.) Even family-friendly universities, in practice, seem not to mean it. When a woman becomes a mother, there is what I think is both a powerful and a largely subconscious tendency to see the role of mother as overwhelming all other facets of her, so that other people (even other women; probably even other mothers) will simply believe she is less committed and competent in the workplace, even in the face of contrary evidence.

People: what can I say? Our ability to reject our own observations when they conflict with what we think we know — cognitive dissonance – is stunning. We are not creatures of reason. We are only creatures that reason.

Feminists at all well-read in sexuality, or who just pay attention to the world around them, are well acquainted with the way our culture views women’s sexuality as inconsistent with any other role. This is most often discussed as the “whore/madonna complex”, the inconsistency between sexuality and motherhood or nurturing, but it is not limited to that. Women are virtually always either invisible or sexualized, and if sexualized that very sexual perception (or projection) is used as an excuse to exclude the woman from having any other identity, including professional.

Examples are easy to come by. People don’t want women who have been sexual in a public way to teach or coach their children: Cheer coach fired for former nude modeling. Teacher fired for wearing bikini. People treat a woman political candidate as a joke if she has done sex work.

Law firms even shun women who are sexualized against their will by a knuckledragging horde of anonymous misogynists. When a bunch of evil men acting behind a cloak of anonymity made highly sexualized comments about two young women at Yale Law School, the most prestigious and selective in the U.S., one of the women found that she mysteriously got no job offers. (See para. 30.)*

There is no shortage of feminist literature that discusses these phenomena in detail: the difficulties women in the workplace have in being taken seriously if they are also mothers; the pressure on women to be sexual and then the consequent rejection of any other identity besides sex object — not subject — as inconsistent with being sexual. All that is familiar territory. What I am interested in is the possibility that this is all a single, over-arching phenomenon: that men are accepted as three-dimensional and complex creatures, people who “contain multitudes,” but that women are not — that women pidgeon-holed and expected to fill one role and only one role, and face resistance for showing that there is more to them than that.

*Ultimately, both got good jobs, and the suit ended with something of a whimper last month. For those unfamiliar, a lengthy summary is aviailable here. By way of full dislosure, I am in no way objective about the whole incident. Jill Filipovic was also targeted by the same misogynist moral incompetents. She is my fellow Yes Means Yes contributor, my sometime editor at Feministe, my cocontributor at this blog and my friend.

Our little book is a Publishers’ Weekly Book Of The Year. I’ve said before and I’ll say again that I am very impressed with the essays my co-contributors wrote for the book, and with the tireless work of Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, without whom none of it would have made it onto the bookstore shelves.

h/t Jill.

This is about the nuts-and-bolts of how the work gets done. This is about parenting the next generation.

A boy and a girl run around on the grass at the park. The boy tackles the girl. The girl laughs. She gets up and runs away. She loves to run. He chases, she turns and they grab eachother, tumble and land in a pile, giggling. After a few minutes, he tackles her again and she lands a bit hard. She is bigger and physical, but he more than holds his own in roughhousing. She pauses for a second. Then she laughs again; she’s still having fun.

Dad gets his attention, and says, “If she’s not having fun, you have to stop.”

He is two. He needs to hear this now, and so does she. And again, and again, and again, so that like wearing a helmet on the bike it is ingrained. My kids would not think about riding a bike without a helmet. Wearing a helmet is what you do when you ride a bike. Doing otherwise has not occurred to them, and I need the lesson to stick so that, if their peers make bad choices, they stop and think and decide not to join the bad choices.

What I said will mean a lot of things in a lot of contexts; but it always means the same thing. Regard for one’s partner is a basic component of respect.

At one level it’s an anti-rape lesson. This is “Yes Means Yes” in practice. The mere absence of “no” does not a partnership make; and a real partner wants to participate. Shared activity is wanted by everyone involved; “pushing leaners” is for political polling.

But it’s not just an anti-rape lesson. It’s a life lesson. So I start teaching it now. He doesn’t need to know what sex is or what rape is to know what a partner is. If your partner isn’t having fun, you stop.

Sadly, this is probably only the first of several posts about the story of a fifteen year old who was gang-raped outside a school dance in Northern California.

I think we all know that an avalance of apologism, victim-blaming and concern trolling is coming. The only way to head that off would be to change the culture.

Since it will be practically impossible for the defendants and their defenders to deny that anything happened, I expect the most openly nasty response to be along the lines of the Haidl defense: straight-out slut baiting. (The defense said she wanted to be a porn star and therefore consented to get passed out drunk and repeatedly violated on video — some history here.) If we can’t even keep people from doing that to Polanski’s victim, who was 13, we are almost guaranteed to see it used against a fifteen year old.

We will also surely see remarks from people who don’t want to be called rape apologists, and who may even think they are not rape apologists while they gyrate wildly to turn the focus on the victim instead of the rapists and their crowd of aiders and abetters where it belongs. These people will almost always start with some version of “of course I’m not blaming the victim and what the rapists did was wrong and all that …” And then will come the key word, BUT.

Then they will make their real argument. And their real argument is that they are unwilling to actually take rape seriously or do anything to hold rapists accountable. What they believe and argue (but will avoid saying outright) is that the rapist’s behavior is unavoidable, as much a natural disaster as a hurricane or an earthquake, and so the only sensible thing is to plan for its inevitability. The argument will proceed from the dreaded BUT to focus on what SHE did, and how wrong and stupid it was, and ultimately conclude that if women just curtailed their behavior in one or several additional ways, the problem would be solved.*

There’s more wrong with this than I have time to write. There are massive, structural things wrong with this. However, I’m going to focus on the very, very concrete.

I believe in personal responsibility. I am no particular fan of alcohol. I think that teens who get drunk do incur certain risks that we should let them suffer for. They should be allowed to bear all the natural risks that a person faces when that person drinks excessively and nobody commits a criminal violation of their most basic human rights. These risks include: that they may fall and twist an ankle or a knee, tear clothes, get written on in magic marker by asshole friends [ETA: see comments], puke, wake up with a massive hangover, and get grounded by their parents. That’s what happens when you’re a fifteen year old who gets shitfaced outside the school dance. Those are the risks our sons run as well as our daughters.

Those risks should not include murder, waterboarding, or rape. Each of the latter is a criminal violation of human rights that we should not tolerate, regardless of who the victim is, nice or naughty, drunk or sober, man or woman. Because they are wrong in the big, non-situational sense. These things are not forces of nature. Tornadoes appear on their own due to climatological conditions, but rapes do not self-generate from masses of air. People commit rapes. With staggering frequency, male people commit rapes, and commit them against women.

And then, people make excuses for them. These are not independent phenomena. By making excuses, we …WE, none of us is an island, and all of us are us, including those of us that do the things that anger and shame all of us, because we all have to live in the society that we make … we grant them a social license to operate. To make apologies for is to excuse, and to excuse is to condone.

It takes one rapist to commit a rape, but it takes a village to create an environment where it happens over and over and over and over and over with such frequency that ordinary people throw up their hands and treat it as a part of the environment instead of as violations of fundamental human rights.

The rapist rapes, the apologist supports and the bystander lets it happen. Who is not part of the solution, is part of the problem

Rape apologist concern trolling in comments will be banned.

* That list. The fictitious list of “things that if women did it would stop rape -and we’re not saying it’s their fault except we are because if they didn’t do these things it would go away”. The list that never ends, and includes an infinite number of items, and that would prevent women from doing all kinds of things many of which, when men do them, are called “having fun,” “living one’s life”, and “the pursuit of happiness.”

The State of Maine is near and dear to my heart. My mother’s family is from there, and I have spent more time there than in any state except the state of my birth and the one I live in now (with New Hampshire a close second. I have a tremendous affection for Northern New England).

Marriage equality is also near and dear to my heart. Not because marriage is a panacea for anything or even the most important right, but because the glaring inequality is a continuing and blatant symbol of exclusion and second-class citizenship. We do not extend civil rights to some of our people because it would offend the religious and social mores of the majority: that may be the way the Puritans did things in their theocratic monocultures* but it is not the system we codified in the Bill of Rights, where the First Amendment has an establishment clause that prohibits the state from taking a side in religious disputes and a free exercise clause that provides that my mother’s Unitarian church should be able to marry who it believes it should without the fear or favor of the State.**

All of Northern New England is there.*** They have marriage equality by legislation. Bigots in Maine are trying to reverse it at the polls. The excellent polling-and-quantitative-poli-sci blog Fivethirtyeight (were we not all glued to it last year about this time? Nate hasn’t quit) is
all over the story.

Nate, who is firmly on the pro-equality side of this, got an email to marriage equality opponents, and he summarized the talking points like this:

1. The new law won’t make gay marriage equal to straight marriage. Instead, it will create a new kind of marriage in which gay people and straight people are equal.
2. Although we may not have proven any connection between gay marriage and public education, our opponents haven’t disproven the connection, and it’s their fault that the subject came up.
3. If gay marriage is upheld, then marriage will exist solely to make people happy.

Tactics aside, my first reaction to this was, “Yes, I am for that.”

Will marriage equality make marriage gayer, change it from an institution with a lot of barriage about gender roles to a more intentional and custom-crafted union between two people who go through the comedies and tragedies of life together? I sure hope so.

Will school children learn that queer people and straight people are equal, that same sex marriages and opposite sex marriage are equal? That’s what we teach in my house. I hope some day that will be what they teach in my kids’ school.

Will marriage equality mean that marriage is only to make people happy? Wow, if ever there were better proof of the continuing influence of Puritanism! My marriage exists solely to make people happy. My spouse and I are raising children together. Our union is an expression of our commitment to do that as a team, to help and support each other. We share our incomes and our spending, we take our vacations together. We live in a house and make a home together, and we work on the house together and we decorate it together. We cook some of our meals together, and we eat as many as we can together, either just the two of us, or us and our kids. We do these things because it makes us happy. Because we are happier doing these things with each other than with anyone else.

I am for that. I am for that being available to everyone.

So if that’s what marriage equality is for, why are some people against it? Nate has it right:

The fact is that the overwhelming majority of people who dislike gay marriage do so for one of two reasons: either their religion has a taboo against homosexuality, or they find the practice gross.

*(lifting Russell Shorto’s terminology from Island at the Center of the World, which I recommend).

**There are constitutional scholars who don’t agree with these interpretations, and who despite fancy educations and access to all sorts of persuasive facts and arguments continue to be wrong. What can I say? You can lead a horse to water …

***All of New England, in fact, except Rhode Island, where the Governor is a stumbling block and the legislation has a good shot as soon as he is out.