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No Means No — But You Have to Actually Say “No”
In Jonah Goldberg’s most recent Remnant podcast, he discusses, among other things, the #metoo movement and the Aziz Ansari case with his guest, Kristen Soltis Anderson. Jonah and his guest are both smart people, but I thought their analysis a little weak and wanted to comment on it.
I think about the plight of women (and yes, that’s how I think of it) quite a bit, and more so since the sexual abuse/harassment/regret movement began. The movement rolls too many kinds of misbehavior together, and that makes rational discussion about it difficult. I think it’s useful to break it down a little.
There are rapists, the men who overpower women, use drugs or alcohol or physical intimidation or authority to compel women to do things they don’t want to do. They’re criminals and should be dealt with as such. Similarly, there are the men who use the threat of serious loss — of employment or position — to coerce women. Their legal status is more ambiguous, but their moral culpability is comparable to the rapists’: they are exploiting women against their will.
Then there are the men who are trading on their prominence and influence, convincing women to surrender something in exchange for a promise, spoken or otherwise, to advance the woman’s interests. This is a more problematic group, in that the relationship is consensual, however tawdry we may find it. There’s a difference between being threatened with the loss of employment, on the one hand, and hoping to improve your chances of getting a coveted position not yet yours, on the other.
These are the cases that have been the substance of the #metoo movement. Ricochet’s ever-eloquent Midge has posted this well written and thought-provoking piece on the subject of these two types of men, using a compelling analogy in the process.
My interest is in the third group of men, a group that constitutes the vast majority. They’re neither monsters nor wealthy manipulators. They’re just men. Unfortunately, that alone is enough to pose a problem for women.
So, about that podcast and Ms. Anderson’s observations. At the 1:00:35 mark, while talking about the Ansari case, she says this:
If we’re looking for something in this, here’s something for which we can blame the patriarchy, it’s this idea that a woman in that situation, even if she has taken all of her clothes off, should not have the right to go “you know what, I change my mind, suddenly this is not working for me anymore and I’m going to go.”
And here’s my first objection. What kind of “right” are we talking about? Does any woman doubt that she has the legal right to put her clothes on and walk out? Why are we using the language of “rights” here?
Ms. Anderson continues:
There is this conditioning that women get, which is that if you’re already in that situation, well, you don’t want to be a tease, right? You don’t wanna, I mean gosh, that’d be really horrible if you did that.
How does the “patriarchy” teach this? How is this conditioning performed? What, exactly, are we talking about here? It’s possible there is such a message being delivered by the “patriarchy,” though I doubt it. But if so, and if anyone can explain it to me, I’ll listen.
She goes on:
That is something that, if we could eradicate that view and get women to a place where they feel like they can utter the words “no, absolutely not, I’m leaving” instead of feeling like they have to rely on these nonverbal signals because they don’t quite know that they want to say it, because they don’t want to be the bad guy, they’d really rather the guy just kinda get the message and figure it out and leave her alone…. My hope is that, the bad guy here is this idea that women should feel that they can’t make a decision to walk away from a sexual encounter.
As best I can tease that apart, what she’s saying is that it isn’t that women can’t say no, but rather that they don’t want to disappoint.
And that makes perfectly good sense. Of course, they feel guilty. By the time a woman finds herself in the situation described in the Ansari account, the man quite naturally has certain hopes and expectation. If she says “no,” he is going be disappointed — far more than he would have been had she said “no” before things had gone as far as they did.
Ms. Anderson concludes:
I’m not necessarily blaming the victim in this situation. I’m blaming the conditioning that led her to think she could not say “no” more forcefully.
She can say “no” more forcefully. What she can’t do is eat her cake and have it too. She can’t get into a sexually charged situation and then expect an excited man to listen for subtle cues that, however much her actions are saying yes, her secret wish is that she would say “no.” And she also doesn’t have the luxury of saying “no” and not expecting to create disappointment — and, perhaps, come across as confused or teasing.
It’s an impossible situation. That is, it’s a situation which, once a reluctant woman finds herself in it, offers no resolution that isn’t going to disappoint someone and cause some bad feelings.
It is my suspicion that far more women find themselves in situations like this than in the more threatening situations described earlier, the ones involving rapists and exploitative men. I think it’s the inevitable product of imagined sexual equality. The sexes aren’t equal, not in this respect: they’re not even similar. Men often are powerful, women often are vulnerable, and the false narrative of sexual liberation has, too often, made women easy victims.
The obsolete standards of propriety that once characterized social interactions between men and women empowered women. It gave them an easy way to decline advances and helped them avoid getting into situations from which the only way out was embarrassment and disappointment.
I believe it is in the nature of men to want sex and to overlook any but unambiguous objections in its pursuit. I believe it is in the nature of women to want to be seduced and to yield to and enjoy the early stages of sexual pursuit. Social guidelines once made the pursuit possible for both sexes, while giving women a socially acceptable means of managing the process.
That “conditioning” Ms. Anderson worries about, the thing that prevents women from saying “no,” is actually the absence of the social barriers that have historically protected women. The answer, as unlikely as it is to be achieved, is to recreate those barriers.
That means re-establishing the idea that women are, once again, prizes to be won by men.
Published in Culture
The only thing that distinguishes “no” from “now” is a double you.
I’d hope not. There wasn’t one.
How do we know that this isn’t conditioned by the patriarchy? Because almost the same thing happens with men. Not that men fear that if they don’t want to continue that they’ll be forced, but then that is not what happened with Grace & Ansari either. The worry is that there will be hard feelings. A scene. Recriminations. Exactly what, you don’t know, but something emotionally charged and unpleasant.
The relationship &/or friendship may be permanently altered if the partner feels rejected, particularly when you appeared to be on the path to having sex imminently and suddenly changed your mind. One’s reputation may be sabotaged by the party with hurt feelings if they’re vindictive- although young men are going to be jealous of different aspects of their reputation than young women.
The phenomenon is essentially the same for both genders. One makes a mental calculation: now that I’ve decided I don’t want to follow through… how important is it to me to stop versus how much social discomfort and potential fallout afterward will I need to endure to extricate myself from the situation?
Sometimes going through with it after a change of heart is unappealing, but it’s still easier than a last minute course correction when you’ve been signaling that you intended to have sex. It may be easier to follow through than to deal with the tension and emotions that would erupt if you end things abruptly with a partner who thought you were ‘into it.’
Depicting the protagonist making that calculation was part of what made the New Yorker ‘Cat Person’ short story go viral. Grace eventually decided she’d rather leave than go through with it, but she ducked out without actually confronting Ansari and then blamed him for the anxiety she had about what the confrontation might be like. She was never able to say what she wanted or didn’t want in a straightforward way and never owned her own voice or the consequences of her silence. She just blamed Ansari via text and a third party, but never to his face.
This has very little to do with patriarchy and everything to do with intimacy being downgraded to the point where having sex you don’t want to have isn’t as big a deal as getting into an argument about it.
I’m old fashioned. If a 23 year old lady comes up to my place at midnight and starts parading around in her birthday suit I’m going to get a subtle clue.
I’d call these voluntary sexual situations, that go far beyond dinner and conversation, the naked night cap.
In the midst of the naked nightcap, there are always two plays in this high stakes game:
yes or no.
By nature, men playing the game are hoping for a homerun, and aim for yes, all the way.
No may be accepted more graciously when it is played in an early “inning,” preferably before the naked innings begin.
So, sexually liberated men and women, who want to play the naked nightcap game, need to buck up and learn the rules.
What makes this game high stakes is the rules are personal: different for each player.
The modern era brings many unschooled players into the game, and tremendous variation in the rules, especially with multiple casual partners.
This has always confounded me: the willingness to get naked and intimate, all the while harboring the fear of discussing the rules (and sundry consequences) of this high stakes game with your supposedly intimate partner.
Of course, if the game is too stressful, don’t play it. Or carefully choose a partner you trust.
It’s very disappointing to see conservative women using the word “patriarchy”. I am not sure what is meant by that word, but it seems fair to assume that anyone who uses it feels that American society treats women unfairly. Ms Anderson laments the fact that young women are supposedly conditioned to think that they can’t say no. And she blames not feminism or Hollywood for this, but “the patriarchy’, ie, men.
I was raised by very conservative, WWII generation parents; they allowed me to talk back, mostly just to them, but if justified to other people too. Once, when I was 14, I gave a police officer the what for in front of my mother: she thought it was funny, she totally agreed with what I had done and she totally supported me. Her father, whom she absolutely adored, was a police officer-she loves police officers, but this particular one really was being a jerk, and she had no problem when I told him off. Most of my friends were even more outspoken than I was. We were not raised to cower in front of authority figures, or men. We were not conditioned to think that we had to be nice to everyone at all times. Many young women nowadays say that they have been conditioned to be nice to everybody all the time, and they blame the patriarchy, ie conservatives, ie men for that, but could it be that they are blaming the wrong people? In some cases, I have to wonder if some of these young women have ever even met a conservative.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of these young women were raised by conservatives and what percentage were raised by liberals. If we had that information, then maybe we would have a better idea of who and what to blame.
I am so exhausted with this topic.
“You have to actually say no”. Sounds quite reasonable. But to the #metoo faction, it does not. They feel that no matter what they do, no matter what situation they have voluntarily entered into, they should never find themselves in the position of even having to decide yes or no. This is the conclusion I’ve reached from talking to leftist women of various ages.
It comes down to: why should the decision rest with them? And it always will, in our “patriarchy”– after all, males are “only after one thing”!
That was a cliché back in the ’50s and before…but it’s hard to believe it will be true in the future. A few more years of this universal misandry, women spurred on to greater vitriol by homosexuals and gender thieves–and I doubt heterosexual men will have any sex drive left.
Oh, Hypatia,
the pendulum will swing back toward sanity.
All the crazies will lose their mind, and the sane will regain their strength.
There is truth in the idea of survival of the fittest…
This is why I swore off American women.
I don’t believe it’s conditioned by the “patriarchy.” But I also don’t believe the same thing happens with men.
That is, men and women are profoundly different about sex. In general, sex for men* is relatively trivial; sex for women is a big deal. Why?
Gestation.
Almost nothing about sex is the same for men and women.
* By “sex for…” I mean “any single act of sex for….”
Lol! Don’t try and involve us in this – we’re pretty good at saying yes or no and we truly don’t care of you do or not.
I don’t think she ever knew what she wanted or didn’t want.
And she seems to think that is everybody’s fault but hers.
Some thoughts:
I believe a woman should be able to say ‘no’ at any time and that her decision must be adhered to. Whether it should be respected qua respect is another matter; changing your mind at the last minute is a dick-move regardless of gender.
Used to be that a woman could get a reputation – fairly or unfairly – as a [CoC]-tease. Whether that possibility mitigated in favor of saying ‘no’ earlier or saying ‘yes’ so as to not to get the rep I don’t know.
Finally, after listening to ‘No means no’ being declaimed in tones suitable for a toddler for about a decade I can honestly say that I believed the first time. What I am unwilling to accept is that all manner of other things that mean ‘maybe’ or ‘I’m not sure’ are supposed to mean ‘no’ as well. If your big girl panties are on the floor it’s time to put them back on and go home.
Upon reflection, i guess it isn’t gays themselves who want to demasculinize straight men. They’re just being used by Leftists who hate their own culture and want to hold up an alternative lifestyle choice as superior to heterosexuality.
The Left has the greatest contempt for “breeders”, as I have heard gays call heterosexuals. To gays, that may be just a descriptive term, a way of expressing that a certain individual is not “okd ” — but to the life-denying Left, it’s is the supreme denigration. So I guess you’re right: gays as individuals aren’t involved, at least not voluntarily. They’re just a talking point for the Left.
Gays calling straights “breeders”? Leftists holding up homos as being a superior “lifestyle” “choice”? You live in a very strange place, and you should move immediately.
Let me recommend southern California. The gays never insult you, nobody attempts to convert straights to gays with imaginary “lifestyle” issues, and everyone gets along.
I dunno, is the above a joke? In case it isn’t..
Since you put both “lifestyle ” and “choice” in quotation marks, let me just tell you that gays, or the intelligentsia among them, are abandoning their anti-choice stance. “They can’t help it!” was useful to them and useful to the Left initially, it made any opposition to gay marriage seem tantamount to refusing to hire the handicapped. But, if you embrace the “born that way” ideology, you have to accept pedophilia, too.
Besides, if the gay “lifestyle ” is so great, and is perfectly socially acceptable, in fact we all have to, not just tolerate it, but actually celebrate it,
Then why wouldn’t people voluntarily choose it?
All of this overlooks an important point. I read the Grace article. She was dealing with a fellow who is a sexual predator and who at age 36 (to her 23) has perhaps five times as much experience in the Mating Game. Grace was overwhelmed by an expert womanizer, a man who attempted to turn every action of hers into a path to intercourse. He didn’t even let her finish dinner, for Pete’s sake.
Picking her big girl panties up off the floor and calling an Uber was of course the right thing to do. Pity she didn’t do it an hour earlier.
I have three daughters and have raised them to treat their bodies with respect, to offer their virtue only to a man they know and love. None of my girls would have gone to this guy’s apartment.
I also spent 6 years as a widow in the adult dating game and I can assure you, it is a different world than it was in 1978. And it is a wholly different world at 50 than it was at 20. But perhaps these are the same thing.
You left out slapping his face the first time he did something she “was uncomfortable with”.
Don’t inconvenience yourself, we’ll be fine, truly….
This is the best summary I’ve read so far, and I agree with it 100%. I would go a little further.
The woman in question at least had the honesty to admit that she was fantasizing about a relationship with Ansari in which he would act like the perfect gentleman (which was obviously very naive, not only in retrospect). She didn’t necessarily want to say “no” to his advances, she wanted to say “not yet” – she wanted him to give the Prince Charming treatment, and then she would have been happy to get physical.
In other words, she wanted a third option between no and yes, but he obviously wasn’t offering that. She correctly recognized that any clear form of “no” at that juncture – be it speaking the word, pushing him away, or just walking away and getting dressed – would probably ruin any future chance of her dream relationship. And she clearly couldn’t accept that reality, so she dropped a phony dime on him.
Like many others here, I get suspicious any time I read the vague term “patriarchy”.
I haven’t heard this podcast yet, so perhaps one of them addresses this in more detail. However, there was an article in the Atlantic a few months ago describing a similar situation of a female student with an ambiguous sexual encounter that I found very revealing:
So the “patriarchy” dictating that women can’t be teases is actually…..”UMass Student Culture”. Not male students, not the frat scene, but the student culture in general – including women. Let that sink in: even in this age of crazy anti-sexual assault student activism, the general wisdom among male and female students on campus is “you can’t start with a guy then leave him hanging”.
The “patriarchy” is really just a lazy cover-up for “society in general”, chosen to obscure the fact that women are just as guilty of promoting a sexually predatory culture as men are.
Yuh, sadly, in the US that’s not possible.
But I would like to know where you, Zafar, stand on the issue of whether it is still anathema that being gay can be a choice…?
I have kind of a “yeah, but” reaction to the Grace account. It is no doubt a different world than 1978 and happily I haven’t been on the dating scene in over 34 years. For those of us in that older cohort it sounds like Ansari got his “home run” (as @JulesPA would say) and was simply looking for another at bat. That Grace did not see it that way is confounding and makes intergenerational discussion very difficult.
I agree with the comment that “patriarchy” is simply a different word for “society in general” (hat tip: @Mendel). Also, when did Mother Nature become a guy? The problem is that progressives want to believe that they can fundamentally change people’s innate behaviors rather than developing strategies to contain and direct them. They have sold this lie to several generations now and we are simply entering another progressive pogrom that will leave both women and men no better off.
Back in the day (oh, when did I have to start talking “old people talk”?), women were expected to say “No!” to most sexual advances – and certainly not to have a first date that involved going to the man’s home after dinner and engaging in sexual activities. No matter how much a woman was attracted to a man, she simply would not do this – and a man would not expect her to. These were the days of the terrible “patriarchy.” And yet, look at the relative power of the two individuals. In the old regime (i.e., back when I was dating in the mid- to late 60s), a woman held the power: she was the one who could say “yes” or “no.” And the expectation was that it would usually be a “No!” Of course, this also placed the burden of responsibility on her. Feminists felt this was the essence of inequality: women were forced to make these decisions while men had no decision-making responsibility (not actually true, of course). Feminists (and sexual liberationists) wanted an equal playing field – or thought they did – so the claim was made that women should have an equal “right” to make sexual decisions. Instead of operating from an automatic “No” (at the risk of being considered a slut if one didn’t), the woman must have the equal right to say “Yes” and must be allowed to have a full (and judgment free) sexual life – just like men! And so, in the supposed interest of obtaining equal sexual power, women abandoned a system in which they had almost all the power. In the old days, if a woman said this far and no farther (including saying, no sex play at all), a man was supposed to respect that decision. Women called the shots – and if men didn’t abide by women’s decisions, they were deemed rapists. Now women supposedly have equal power with men, but that has apparently resulted in a system where they feel, in practice, that they have no power at all. They shouldn’t have to say “No” because the man should somehow be able to read non-verbal clues, or read their minds. Women in the “old days” often didn’t even have to say “No” because men took it for granted that sexual intercourse, or even advanced sexual “play,” was not going to happen within the dating framework. Nowadays, advanced sexual play is apparently assumed to be part of the basic dating regime, and getting to know each other and determine if you are basically compatible is something that will occur sometime later, if, after having sex, you determine that the other person is someone who is worth continuing to date. So women have, in the interest of feminist equality, abandoned a system in which they had almost all the power, for a system of “equality” in which they find that they have only the power to act as sexually obsessed as men (and to complain about and regret their poor decision-making after the fact).
It’s important to understand in some cases the level of crazy we are dealing with here. In another forum, I read a post by a man who was lamenting “rape culture”, and blaming “rape culture” for rape. I pointed out to him that murder happens in our society too, and I asked him if he considered America to have a murder culture; he said yes, he believed that American culture encourages murder, and that we do in fact have a murder culture. He was not talking about abortion.
There are some people who will blame anything and everything bad that happens in society on society, no matter how hard that society tries to prevent bad things from happening.
Okay, I just read that Cat Person story. Wow, the author has really created a terrifying character, a monster of selfish desire: Margot.
She initiates the flirting. She makes sure the relationship,doesn’t lapse, because she’s so self-absorbed that if it did, she’d feel,insecure in her attractiveness. He kisses her and she does not like his kiss. Still, She asks Robert to take her to his place to have sex.
At this point, when Robert takes a long time opening the door, I thought O God here it is he’s breaking in to somebody else’s home! But no, it’s his place.
She likes it.
They screw.
She doesn’t like it.
She asks him to drive her home. He does.
Her far more resolute roommate texts him that it’s over.
He responds with a polite regretful text.
Later she runs into him in a bar, points him out to a gaggle of her giggling friends who make a big show of escorting her out like as she says , the Secret Service.
He sends her a last text in which, at the end, he calls her “Whore.”
I hafta say, I don’t blame the guy for losing his temper.
“A third option between no and yes”–exactly! I was a virgin when I fell in love with a guy who was content with the “third way” until I was ready.
Reader, I married him!
Well yeah, if she wants a lawsuit ;-P
Ideally, we’d live in a world where a guy who attempted to prosecute a gal for slapping (or kneeing, etc) him for getting fresh would simply be laughed at, but do we live in that world anymore? When I was younger, I was pretty convinced we did not. Which didn’t lead me into unwanted sex, but did slow my reaction-time for repelling surprise, er, “moves”.
It’s perfectly reasonable to expect inexperienced girls to be hesitant to slap the “fresh” guys unless they’re given preassurance that it’s OK to do so, that this is one time they won’t be blamed for doing something we’re otherwise careful to instruct youth they should not do.
I am unsure now of the two types you thought I was writing about. @wilypenelope gave two pretty concrete examples of what I was talking about, though, pretty prosaic matters, not involving
but arguably including some of what you call the “third group”
depending on how bad you believe behavior has to get before it’s considered monstrous. (I would call some pretty bad behavior nonetheless short of monstrous.)
I am also curious as to why you think
will be the cure for women’s current shortcomings at “defensive womaning”.