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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
Is it, though, if you mean “intimacy” how I think you mean it – intimacy as a sexually-charged prize (which is what I think you mean), as opposed to the intimacy of nonsexual relationships (which is what I think you don’t mean)?
When men form friendships among themselves, we find nonsexual intimacy and men earning the respect and admiration of other men. Yet we do not teach young men their male friends are “prizes to be won by men”, do we? Why not?
No, that’s not what I mean by intimacy. Once upon a time (but not that long ago), there was a gradual building toward physical intimacy. During that time, a man and woman grew to understand each other better, to speak to each other differently, and to grow in all kinds of intimacy. Ideally (though of course it didn’t always work this way), by the time the woman was ready to be physically intimate, the man and woman had great respect for each other. The woman could then surrender herself to him without fearing that she was a transient conquest.
Because gestation.
Because men and women are different, and it is women, not men, for whom sex is expensive and potentially dangerous. Men don’t need to build that level of trust and security between each other in order to interact as men interact, because men interact as equals. Men and women, when it comes to sex, do not interact as equals, and so the woman has to have the security of knowing that the man values her and is committed to her.
A gradual build toward sexual intimacy I get. I think it’s a great idea, as you can probably tell.
That said, to get young women to honor young men, too (to “step up to share the pedestal of admiration and respect”), friendly but not sexual relationships with guys can be super-helpful, and shouldn’t be overlooked. Naturally, we should observe due caution about friendships between the sexes, but in terms of teaching a girl to honor men for who they are, getting to know men who aren’t there to gaze at her, but by whose side she can stand while they both gaze upon the same scene, can be a good way for her to learn to appreciate the male perspective, and value it for what it is.
Having a father to stand beside so he can show her how he sees the world is the ultimate instructor here, but brothers and… “brothers” (“brothers” adopted through the bond of friendship) are also quite instructive, and can have an equality lacking in the hierarchical parent-child relationship.
I agree one hundred percent.
(At the risk of repeating myself, I think “brothers” have a better chance of remaining brotherly if there’s a strong social compulsion to do so.)
Maybe we’re getting derailed by the word ‘same.’ I certainly grant that it’s not identical. As I said, there’s not any worry about force.
If you want to argue that the phenomenon happens with women more than with men, then I’m sure that is true. Men are more often the one who’s more eager and women have more complex criteria for what is desirable and therefore men can more easily be made to feel desire.
Still, having said all that, it’s still something that both men and women experience: going through with sex they would rather not have because it seems less onerous than disentangling oneself from the situation. I’m not hypothesizing that both men and women could experience this. Both do.
I think you may be overestimating the degree to which instincts linked to gestation dominate over conscious thoughts that have been shaped by cultural expectation. The instincts are always there, but they’re often not in command. A lot of women behave in ways that from a traditional perspective would be regarded as the masculine role.