I have never seen the meaningless expression “to wear down” used as many times as it is in the following article: Why “Affirmative Consent” Laws Are Needed http://amptoons.com/blog/2014/10/14/why-affirmative-consent-laws-are-needed/
A hint for aspiring writers: if your entire argument rests on an obsessive use of a single expression, there is a problem with the argument. Especially if the expression in question is a meaningless colloquialism.
If you do follow the link, I warn you that it is written by a sexist woman-hater of the first order. What I find extremely bizarre is that such people seem to believe in all earnestness that they are doing something progressive and even feminist. Tell them that they are promoting one of the more vicious tenets of patriarchy and they will pucker their narrow foreheads in extreme confusion.
Clarissa's Blog 
So what are the Yankees doing, because I really do not understand it. I just finished seeing them on TV shooting down an Iranian Airliner, but what, specifically, are they doing in this instance?
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Protecting helpless damsels who will be raped and ravaged the moment they set their foot out of the door if a benign paternal authority doesn’t protect them. In case you didn’t know, there are crowds of men who do nothing but plot and scheme to lure defenseless women into. . . . SEX!
When did the Iranian Airliner happen? Is this recent?
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No, no, no. This is a rehash of a rehash (the TV show Air Crash investigations).
Ah, Ok, I see about the affirmative consent notion. I really could never read that blog you linked to as it seems to be hairsplitting in some tremendous way, just like most feminist blogs do nowadays.
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Ah, got it. You never know, something might have happened today (with an airliner, I mean), so it’s best to ask.
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Yes, I know, I was being random and facetious, but actually I have an ulterior motive for the way I sometimes talk, in that I am trying to do a community service when I remind Americans that they are Americans. Because so much of the time they will take what one says in a different way, as if everybody was necessarily born into American culture and had the same ideas and values as they do.
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More for musteryou than Clarissa, but still: I get the feeling that when Americans ask you “where you’re from” that it’s often considerably less than friendly …
The problem is that while I’ve been back in the US, this has happened a lot, and in Canada it hardly happens at all. (I tell them I’m from Cornwall and begin immediately to talk like a pirate, which confuses them greatly.)
If I attempt an American accent, these people then tend to ask where in Canada I’m from, so I can’t actually win with this tactic either.
I know “microaggression” is one of several risible words that are treated somewhat like “bullfarts”, but I do have to wonder …
Also, if it weren’t for the fact that I’m checking Canadian news sources, I wouldn’t have known about the potential Ebola case in Belleville, Ontario. US news sources are typically treating the US border as a magical thinking fence that’s so powerful that if every American simply wishes hard enough for competent disease outbreak management, it’ll stop any future outbreaks, so they can supposedly ignore what’s happening in the magical not-quite-so-belle province due north of New York state.
Sensible people, of course, don’t believe one risible word of any of this.
Otherwise, I’ll spare you my Dirty Old Professor Modest Proposal for the month, except to say that you shouldn’t be shagging your own students when you can be shagging someone else’s … [ahem] 🙂 🙂
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One problem, of course, is that it’s only a matter of time before someone who gave “affirmative consent” claims that they hadn’t been sincere or had been “pressured” to give consent so in fact they were raped.
The more the law treats adults like children incapable of expressing themselves the more people will live up to that eventually retreating into total infantilization with whims to be catered to that change by the day or minute.
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“One problem, of course, is that it’s only a matter of time before someone who gave “affirmative consent” claims that they hadn’t been sincere or had been “pressured” to give consent so in fact they were raped.”
– Very true. I find the articles like the linked one to be offensive because the way they present women is just humiliating. And the obsessive use of the expressing “to wear down” just drove me nuts. What does it even mean? It’s like people speak a different language.
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i don’t have a problem with “affirmative consent” laws per se. Or at least I didn’t originally. I’m a feminist. I understand that date rape happens regularly; I understand women (or men) can be raped by their spouses or regular sexual partners; I don’t think rape is limited to a surprise and terrifying encounter in a dark alley etc. etc.
All that being said, some of these “affirmative consent” cases are so bizarre to me. I just don’t see how Lisa Sendrow’s case (described in the OP you linked to) is rape. It was a problematic, unhealthy, and unkind sexual encounter but it wasn’t a criminally actionable sexual encounter. There is a difference.
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And the story of Sophia Katz later on in the article?
These women definitely need a lot of urgent help. Whether that will be legal help, will become clearer later (they act like textbook victims of child sexual abuse.) But all of the discussion about the consent laws obscures a crucial fact: they have a very very deep-seated trauma that needs to be treated. There is something going on with them that has to be addressed. They are not objects but human beings who seem very traumatized.
But of course none of this negates the existence and the enormous prevalence of the phenomenon of date rape. It’s simply a different discussion.
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“But of course none of this negates the existence and the enormous prevalence of the phenomenon of date rape. It’s simply a different discussion.”
Exactly. I couldn’t agree more.
I agree that these women need help. I would also suggest that the men in these stories need help. Who would continue having sex with a woman just lying there staring mutely at the ceiling? But again, unhealthy sex isn’t rape. And I think it’s disrespectful to rape victims to call these sexual encounters rape.
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These are men who were brought up not to see women as human beings. Any man who would beg for or insist on cajole or try to talk a woman into sex was brought up to think that women are not human beings. And the women in these stories seem to agree that women don’t have full humanity. Then they grow up, have children of their own, and pass down the model.
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I also want to add that during my dating life, the second I saw that a man didn’t hear my “no” (not just about sex, about anything), if there was any whining, cajoling, insisting or “yes, butting” in response to my “no”, I would dump him immediately. As a result, I went through quite a few boyfriends but I never had to be around somebody who didn’t consider me fully human.
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You could “wear someone down” by continually asking for sex, until someone said, “I guess so.” Then you have “worn someone down” but still have “affirmative consent,” i.e. explicit verbal assent. So the “wearing down” argument doesn’t really work. I’m wholly against affirmative consent laws precisely for this reason. They seem to legislate degrees of enthusiasm for sex in an extremely tricky way. The goal posts always seem to move, and even those who propose this do not seem to think that most people would follow this standard explicitly in their actual sexual activity.
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“You could “wear someone down” by continually asking for sex, until someone said, “I guess so.” Then you have “worn someone down” but still have “affirmative consent,” i.e. explicit verbal assent. So the “wearing down” argument doesn’t really work. ”
– Of course. And this is exactly what would happen.
“They seem to legislate degrees of enthusiasm for sex in an extremely tricky way. ”
– The arguments on favor of these laws sound like people find it SO hard to believe that women can want to have sex that they need for women to provide constant and insistent reassurance, “Yes, I do, I do, I totally do, here is a notarized statement saying I do, I promise that I do, I really really want to have sex right now.” Of course, the reassurance has to be offered every ten seconds because who knows, maybe the woman has suddenly been cured of her weird desire to have sex and wants to withdraw the consent.
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Many women have been taught by their parents that a hard “No!” is impolite, not acceptable and leads to more danger and punishment. They also learn that their “No!” is easily overridden and of no consequence. I don’t think you have to be an abuse victim for that to be true. At least, not of the kind which is recognized by most people.
I once made a guy jump back five feet because he was touching me in a condescending manner and I didn’t like it and I was angry. I also made a superior who was about a foot taller than me sit back on her heels because she decided to make choking gestures in the region of my neck when I was sitting down. Neither of these was treated as evidence of psychological health by my parents or third parties who have heard the story. To them, it was the opposite.
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“Many women have been taught by their parents that a hard “No!” is impolite, not acceptable and leads to more danger and punishment. They also learn that their “No!” is easily overridden and of no consequence.”
– EXACTLY. That’s precisely the point I’m trying to make.
“I don’t think you have to be an abuse victim for that to be true. At least, not of the kind which is recognized by most people.”
– I call that abuse.
“Neither of these was treated as evidence of psychological health by my parents or third parties who have heard the story. To them, it was the opposite.”
– They were wrong. You acted as a supremely healthy person with a great respect for her own boundaries. You are to be envied, not criticized for this!
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Maybe I can understand the Yankee a bit as a kind of half-way house between yes and no. My conditionioning to only have mild or positive emotions was much more extreme than this. My father used to get visibly distressed if I expressed the mildest degree of negativity or hestitation. Perhaps that is one way to look at my life. When I’ve previously tried to relate this in writing, so that I could understand it myself, people automatically sided with him, it seemed, because if he said I was being cheeky to him, people concluded that this was so. It wasn’t though — I was always incredibly mild. And I didn’t know how to read adult emotions, because I wasn’t exposed to the due depths of feeling my parents had about anything. I experienced sometimes an overheating of their emotions, second-hand, but never had anything explained to me in rational or even conventional language.
For instance, when I was betwen primary school and high school, the regime in my country changed. Many families began to leave the country at that point, and my friends were not around so much anymore, although I didn’t really notice it since I was very used to amusing myself during the holidays.
But what I didn’t understand is that my parents wanted to buy Christmas cards for their friends that still had the word, “Rhodesia”, on it. At least, as you might see right now, I am attempted to furnish their behavior with a rational explanation.
In any case, they were going up and down the aisles of the charity warehouse and couldn’t seem to settle on any particular pack of cards, so I got weary. It seemed like they had been up and down there for almost an hour. So I asked if we were going yet as I was getting tired.
My father glared at me and asked whether or not I had friends I might like to send cards to and I told him that at the moment I didn’t have such friends that I could send any cards to (this was factual, not cheeky).
He then flew into a rage and threatened to belt me for my insolence. Well I was about 12.
Now, people might think that conventional emotions are a closed book to me, and for a long time they were, because I was always getting threatened for the mildest responses I gave to parental questioning. I really had no idea how others through, especially my parents.
And this was very bad, because they eventually taught me to feel guilty for saying literally nothing at all. That was considering demonic and viewed as me emanating bad vibes and bringing down the standards in the house.
For a long time, then, I was genuinely silenced. And then things reached a tipping point after I was bullied at work, and I realized I had to do something to save myself. I figured out since I had been implying yes all the time, I should just start saying no. After that, whenever anybody demanded that I go along with their program, inside my head I just said no. I had no knowledge as to whether my declination of demands was reasonable or not, but I knew that it was now a matter of saving my life to be able to become habituated to saying no. I was learning the other side of the dialectic, that would enable me to live an adult life.
Unfotunately, though, I was still extremely naive, plus another unfortunate thing — I’d had some education by now (my BA). My education wasn’t working for me, but rather against me, because I would speculate or hypothesize as to why my parents did as they did. But once you start to try to make sense of it, you furnish them with reasons that seem rational enough, because of course you are trying to find a rational explanation for the poor behavior. But by furnishing their behavior with possible rational meanings, you give the impression that you already knew that your behavior was out of line, because it makes it seem (wrongly) aqs if you implicitly understood the parent’s point of view, but behaved in an uncomprehending way in any case. The more I tried to explain the dire situation I was in, the more I made their strange ways seem justified.
That was terrifying. Like singing deeply into quick sand. The more I struggled, the deeper I would sink.
The only way I could prevent myself from being totally swallowed up in something I had no control over was to extend my ability to say “no” to those who heard my story and automatically too my parent’s side. That was really hard to do, as I was losing friends and allies, but I knew that I was saving my own life and so I had to do it.
Talk about character-building.
I did free myself completely though, although at the cost that my whole life was absorbed in this struggle primarily, for at least a couple of decades. It would have been nice if feminists, at least, had sided with me. It would not have cost them all that much.
I did escape from the conditioning you get under an extreme right wing, militarized culture, but that was because I had begun to suffer so much that my circumstanced had become unbearable enough for me to have to act decisively.
I guess many in the USA are more like the proverbial frog, boiling slowly.
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Another examination of the phenomenon, notable for teasing out the motivation behind these rules.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/neo-victorianism-campus_810871.html?nopager=1
The idea is to radically decrease the amount of recreational sexual encounters that take place between students. No liberal could actually name that goal out loud so byzantine work arounds have to be found.
It’s also noteable for the neologism(?) “sexocrat” – a person on the university payroll who pries into the mechanics and minutiae of student sexual encounters: ““It will sometimes boil down to details like who turned who around”
There’s a lot to like but you’ll hate the last paragraph.
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The article was not written by a sexually healthy person. She is suffering from an obvious dysfunction that isn’t very different from the “rape” pieces I’ve been linking. It’s the exact same problem: a person is completely unaware that what is ailing her should be taken to a doctor, not to a public discussion forum.
As for the goal, I believe it is quite different. The goal here is for sexually repressed middle aged folks to engage in public erotic fantasies about the sex of teenagers. So the idea is not to decrease sex among teenagers. It is to increase it among adults who need to feed their flagging libidos with these acts of voyeurism.
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“A hint for aspiring writers: if your entire argument rests on an obsessive use of a single expression, there is a problem with the argument. Especially if the expression in question is a meaningless colloquialism.”
Two words you may now repeat …
Toyota Celica.
Then again, never let it be said that this sort of thing isn’t a kind of white noise …
[ahem]
BTW, who would own a Toyota Cressida anyway — I mean, isn’t the name itself a dead giveaway? 🙂
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