Matt Purple, writing at The American Conservative, wrote an article entitled #MeToo Becomes a Revolution, which starts out alarmingly enough with a stock photo of a man and a woman, their backs turned, their stances tense with anger, the sun setting behind them. He then asks
Purple wants to portray the #MeToo movement as one in which the "inherent contradictions of leftism" are now tearing The Leftist Sexual Agenda™ apart. He gleefully quotes Christine Emba's Washington Post article, Let's Rethink Sex, in which Emba writes,
To which I respond:
Welcome to the Queering of America.
In a conversation with Andrew Sullivan at the New York Public Library five years ago, Dan Savage correctly hit on what's happening:
But there's more to in than just this. There's the other side of the issue.
Sex between two people of the same sex lacks the gender dynamic of sex between two people of the opposite sex. There's no culturally embedded expectation of a power differential between two men, or between two women. It's hard to be a misogynist when you're a woman. It's hard to be a misandrist when you're a man. Men expect other men to bring the same feelings, the same power, the same desires to bed; the same is true of women. There have been a handful of reports of gay men in positions of power harassing other men, but there have been no reports of gay men harassing other men when they're peers, but plenty of reports of men harassing women peers because men expect to get away with it and women have been socialized to accept it.
(I don't want to paint the gay sex scene as idyllic; it's just as full of jerks and monsters as the straight scene. Differentials of race and, especially, class play a huge role, since wealthier gay men can afford PReP while the poorer ones, as everywhere else, are struggling to eat and keep the lights on. The interactions between those who have been reconciled to coming out and those who haven't can be fraught with unstated agenda. But the single largest conflict in our culture, that between men and women, simply doesn't exist.)
The conflict here is between those who want that power between men and women to be equal, and those who don't. And conversations about power lead us not to the queering of America, but something else:
Welcome to the Kinking of America.
If you've been to a professional conference in the past ten years, you may have been asked to read a Code of Conduct, which specifies the expectations of people at professional events to, well, be professional, and describes the social and professional, if not legal, consequences of exceeding the terms specified. I've read over twenty of these things and I've come away with one distinct feeling every time: whoever writes a Code of Conduct should send a thank-you note to Pat Califia.
Thirty-five years ago, Pat Califia wrote one of the most important books in the history of human sexuality: The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual. A slim volume, little more than a chapbook, was the first to lay out in explicit, concrete terms the notions of power differential and consent that we're grappling with today. She took the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and made it intimate: how we as intimate individuals have a right to feel safe in our own skins and in the presence of others, even when the power differential between them is vast, even when what the two people want out of an intimate encounter is a violent, physically demanding role-playing of the existing power struggle or its inversion.
Every modern Code of Conduct descends from The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual. The earliest ones are almost verbatim copies of the guidelines for kinky events; later ones refine the CoC with more professional language. It's almost as if, when the time came to write it, a volunteer stepped forward with "I have significant experience on this," without going into detail what experience she had.
Consent is necessary but not sufficient.
When Emba writes that consent is "that thin and gameable boundary," she's making a category error that kinky people don't make— and our world is the one that's been thinking about consent longer than anyone else. When a friend visits and you offer them a drink, if they don't consent, you know not to shove it down their throat, not matter how much you may like alcohol. In every other category of life, we understand consent implicitly. It's only in sex that we artificially thin out and game the boundary, mostly because the cads in power want it that way. All we're asking is that the rest of the world adopt our ideas on the inviolability of the other person's body, humanity and dignity as we expect it of our own, and to do so without assumption as to how the other person defines those terms.
We ask that you ask.
The school district where I live has an excellent three-week sex-ed course for middle school students that includes a brilliant section on consent. It, too, reads a lot like the Safety Manual, only it adds years of sociological research into conversational interaction and provides a pretty good formula for asking for consent: set ground, then ask. "I like when you do X. Could you do it more?"; "I don't like when you do X. Would you be willing to do something else?"
Because consent is necessary to an ethical sexual encounter, but it is not sufficient. The two participants must talk about it. They must explicitly raise the issue of existing power differentials, and they should agree that even in the presence of those differentials, the forms of intimacy they're considering would most likely work out for the best. In short, when Emba says, and Purple endorses, that sex must include "temperance, prudence, and respect," she's claiming that the consent movement needs to start talking about, well, the stuff we've been talking about for thirty-five years!
The consent movement assumes that people have temperance, prudence and respect for each other, and has for all that time that we've been talking about it, and has always said that if you don't have those things you shouldn't be out there.
Answering the questions.
So, to answer Purple's snarky introduction:
"Is it okay to proposition a woman for sex after drinks?" The answer is: it depends on the context. Are you co-workers? Then no, it is not okay. There are power relationships going on around you that can skew your relationship badly: you cannot guarantee that your sense of duty will not be compromised by a request from your partner or your employer. Are you at a professional conference or event? Maybe, if neither of you is a presenter; otherwise, one of you has power the other does not. Are you friends? Again, maybe.
"Is it okay to initiate a workplace romance?" Under almost all circumstances: no. Maybe, if you were in wildly different divisions, with different chains of command, that had no working relationship. But you could never ethically date within the company if you or the other person was an executive, or a member of human resources, as again the power differential is a great risk.
"Is it okay to behave like a Casanova and bed as many partners as possible under the catchall excuse that you’re just 'playing the field?'" Yes, as long as every one of your partners understands that's what's going on, and that you both still go through the essential conversation about whether or not it'll be good for you both.
There exist, and have existed for decades, contexts which men and women visit for the explicit purpose of meeting, pairing up, and having sex. There are bars, there are "singles events" at square dances, small theatres, garden clubs, and kite-flying at the park. There have always been gay bars and kinky dungeons, too. These days there are websites and Tindr and Grindr and a host of others. In another context, all we ask is that you have respect, decency, and an awareness that that context may not be one suitable to a come-on.
Women are, in general, physically smaller and less strong than men. Men have created a world in which women learn from a very young age that this makes them vulnerable, and men have crafted a social and legal system that gives them every advantage over women; the society we live in teaches that women aren't to be trusted, believed, or even understood. A recent and utterly brilliant take on this is Kristen Roupenian's Cat Person, a short story from a woman's point of view about meeting and dating a man, and how her picture of him is constantly changing, because she's constantly on guard against the threat men represent to her from the simple, constant, leering attacks on her dignity all the way to threats of violence; from her point of view, and from the point of view of most women, men have a lot of work to do until they're understood, believed, and trusted.
Which is a bit of a shame. As I learned long ago, women actually like sex more than men do, but can rarely let loose the way they'd like because they're too busy burning mental cycles trying to figure out if the guy they're with is a threat and, having determined that he's not a threat, if he's any damn good at all in bed. Most men can name more parts of a gun, an automobile engine, or a computer mainboard than they can a vulva.
To claim that, twenty years ago, Purple's list of caddish activities would be met with a "resounding Yes!" is to miss the point of the #metoo revolution. Lots of men have been jerks. Women are tired of doing all the work while "great men" get the credit, and women are tired of constantly having to fend off the unwanted advances of men, the constant distraction of low-level sexual harassment while they're just trying to get their jobs done. The Internet has given them a tool with which to rally, and we should all be thankful for it.
It's hard to take Purple seriously. When he says that twenty years ago being a cad was, well, maybe not the best thing in the world but Christians had learned to live in a world full of cads, the funny thing is that the kinky community was saying that a world full of cads is a terrible thing and we can, and should, do better.
The queer and kinky communities have always been a bit utopian: after all, they both started as reviled communities, and both wished for a better world not just for themselves but for everyone. They first started to surface in the 1960s, the same time as Stewart Brand's New Games movement, and the motto of that last is still the best one we've ever had. We wish, and we teach, people to bring it into the bedroom:
Play hard. Play fair. Nobody hurt.
Is it okay to proposition a woman for sex after drinks? To initiate a workplace romance? To behave like a Casanova and bed as many partners as possible under the catchall excuse that you’re just “playing the field”?
Purple wants to portray the #MeToo movement as one in which the "inherent contradictions of leftism" are now tearing The Leftist Sexual Agenda™ apart. He gleefully quotes Christine Emba's Washington Post article, Let's Rethink Sex, in which Emba writes,
We need to reintroduce virtues such as prudence, temperance, respect and even love. We might pursue the theory that sex possibly has a deeper significance than just recreation and that ‘consent’—that thin and gameable[sic] boundary—might not be the only moral sensibility we need respect
To which I respond:
Welcome to the Queering of America.
In a conversation with Andrew Sullivan at the New York Public Library five years ago, Dan Savage correctly hit on what's happening:
Everything that straight people do now in their twenties and their early thirties is what was condemned thirty years ago by right-wing religious conservatives as the gay lifestyle. You renamed everything. Gay people had tricks, you people have hookups, gay people had fuck buddies, you people have friends with benefits, but the whole moving to the city, living in an urban area, having an apartment, fucking a lot of people, dating around, and then settling down in your thirties, that period of straight life, post-college, pre-marriage, the way we do it in the blue states, where it works, is the gay lifestyle.
But there's more to in than just this. There's the other side of the issue.
Sex between two people of the same sex lacks the gender dynamic of sex between two people of the opposite sex. There's no culturally embedded expectation of a power differential between two men, or between two women. It's hard to be a misogynist when you're a woman. It's hard to be a misandrist when you're a man. Men expect other men to bring the same feelings, the same power, the same desires to bed; the same is true of women. There have been a handful of reports of gay men in positions of power harassing other men, but there have been no reports of gay men harassing other men when they're peers, but plenty of reports of men harassing women peers because men expect to get away with it and women have been socialized to accept it.
(I don't want to paint the gay sex scene as idyllic; it's just as full of jerks and monsters as the straight scene. Differentials of race and, especially, class play a huge role, since wealthier gay men can afford PReP while the poorer ones, as everywhere else, are struggling to eat and keep the lights on. The interactions between those who have been reconciled to coming out and those who haven't can be fraught with unstated agenda. But the single largest conflict in our culture, that between men and women, simply doesn't exist.)
The conflict here is between those who want that power between men and women to be equal, and those who don't. And conversations about power lead us not to the queering of America, but something else:
Welcome to the Kinking of America.
If you've been to a professional conference in the past ten years, you may have been asked to read a Code of Conduct, which specifies the expectations of people at professional events to, well, be professional, and describes the social and professional, if not legal, consequences of exceeding the terms specified. I've read over twenty of these things and I've come away with one distinct feeling every time: whoever writes a Code of Conduct should send a thank-you note to Pat Califia.
Thirty-five years ago, Pat Califia wrote one of the most important books in the history of human sexuality: The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual. A slim volume, little more than a chapbook, was the first to lay out in explicit, concrete terms the notions of power differential and consent that we're grappling with today. She took the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights and made it intimate: how we as intimate individuals have a right to feel safe in our own skins and in the presence of others, even when the power differential between them is vast, even when what the two people want out of an intimate encounter is a violent, physically demanding role-playing of the existing power struggle or its inversion.
Every modern Code of Conduct descends from The Lesbian S/M Safety Manual. The earliest ones are almost verbatim copies of the guidelines for kinky events; later ones refine the CoC with more professional language. It's almost as if, when the time came to write it, a volunteer stepped forward with "I have significant experience on this," without going into detail what experience she had.
Consent is necessary but not sufficient.
When Emba writes that consent is "that thin and gameable boundary," she's making a category error that kinky people don't make— and our world is the one that's been thinking about consent longer than anyone else. When a friend visits and you offer them a drink, if they don't consent, you know not to shove it down their throat, not matter how much you may like alcohol. In every other category of life, we understand consent implicitly. It's only in sex that we artificially thin out and game the boundary, mostly because the cads in power want it that way. All we're asking is that the rest of the world adopt our ideas on the inviolability of the other person's body, humanity and dignity as we expect it of our own, and to do so without assumption as to how the other person defines those terms.
We ask that you ask.
The school district where I live has an excellent three-week sex-ed course for middle school students that includes a brilliant section on consent. It, too, reads a lot like the Safety Manual, only it adds years of sociological research into conversational interaction and provides a pretty good formula for asking for consent: set ground, then ask. "I like when you do X. Could you do it more?"; "I don't like when you do X. Would you be willing to do something else?"
Because consent is necessary to an ethical sexual encounter, but it is not sufficient. The two participants must talk about it. They must explicitly raise the issue of existing power differentials, and they should agree that even in the presence of those differentials, the forms of intimacy they're considering would most likely work out for the best. In short, when Emba says, and Purple endorses, that sex must include "temperance, prudence, and respect," she's claiming that the consent movement needs to start talking about, well, the stuff we've been talking about for thirty-five years!
The consent movement assumes that people have temperance, prudence and respect for each other, and has for all that time that we've been talking about it, and has always said that if you don't have those things you shouldn't be out there.
Answering the questions.
So, to answer Purple's snarky introduction:
"Is it okay to proposition a woman for sex after drinks?" The answer is: it depends on the context. Are you co-workers? Then no, it is not okay. There are power relationships going on around you that can skew your relationship badly: you cannot guarantee that your sense of duty will not be compromised by a request from your partner or your employer. Are you at a professional conference or event? Maybe, if neither of you is a presenter; otherwise, one of you has power the other does not. Are you friends? Again, maybe.
"Is it okay to initiate a workplace romance?" Under almost all circumstances: no. Maybe, if you were in wildly different divisions, with different chains of command, that had no working relationship. But you could never ethically date within the company if you or the other person was an executive, or a member of human resources, as again the power differential is a great risk.
"Is it okay to behave like a Casanova and bed as many partners as possible under the catchall excuse that you’re just 'playing the field?'" Yes, as long as every one of your partners understands that's what's going on, and that you both still go through the essential conversation about whether or not it'll be good for you both.
There exist, and have existed for decades, contexts which men and women visit for the explicit purpose of meeting, pairing up, and having sex. There are bars, there are "singles events" at square dances, small theatres, garden clubs, and kite-flying at the park. There have always been gay bars and kinky dungeons, too. These days there are websites and Tindr and Grindr and a host of others. In another context, all we ask is that you have respect, decency, and an awareness that that context may not be one suitable to a come-on.
Women are, in general, physically smaller and less strong than men. Men have created a world in which women learn from a very young age that this makes them vulnerable, and men have crafted a social and legal system that gives them every advantage over women; the society we live in teaches that women aren't to be trusted, believed, or even understood. A recent and utterly brilliant take on this is Kristen Roupenian's Cat Person, a short story from a woman's point of view about meeting and dating a man, and how her picture of him is constantly changing, because she's constantly on guard against the threat men represent to her from the simple, constant, leering attacks on her dignity all the way to threats of violence; from her point of view, and from the point of view of most women, men have a lot of work to do until they're understood, believed, and trusted.
Which is a bit of a shame. As I learned long ago, women actually like sex more than men do, but can rarely let loose the way they'd like because they're too busy burning mental cycles trying to figure out if the guy they're with is a threat and, having determined that he's not a threat, if he's any damn good at all in bed. Most men can name more parts of a gun, an automobile engine, or a computer mainboard than they can a vulva.
To claim that, twenty years ago, Purple's list of caddish activities would be met with a "resounding Yes!" is to miss the point of the #metoo revolution. Lots of men have been jerks. Women are tired of doing all the work while "great men" get the credit, and women are tired of constantly having to fend off the unwanted advances of men, the constant distraction of low-level sexual harassment while they're just trying to get their jobs done. The Internet has given them a tool with which to rally, and we should all be thankful for it.
It's hard to take Purple seriously. When he says that twenty years ago being a cad was, well, maybe not the best thing in the world but Christians had learned to live in a world full of cads, the funny thing is that the kinky community was saying that a world full of cads is a terrible thing and we can, and should, do better.
The queer and kinky communities have always been a bit utopian: after all, they both started as reviled communities, and both wished for a better world not just for themselves but for everyone. They first started to surface in the 1960s, the same time as Stewart Brand's New Games movement, and the motto of that last is still the best one we've ever had. We wish, and we teach, people to bring it into the bedroom:
Play hard. Play fair. Nobody hurt.
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