Tag Archives: rape culture

Defining Sex-Negativity

Cliff Pervocracy wrote a really nice post about what he means by sex-positive, so I figured I would talk about what I mean by sex-negative. (While glaring at the feminists of a generation ago who couldn’t think of any better words.)

I think a lot of times people think of sex-negativity as the Forces of People Who Hate Sex. Admittedly, people who really hate sex do exist: St. Jerome taught that he who loves his wife too ardently is an adulterer (wooo Church Fathers). And certainly it seems like the current batch of sex-negative people don’t like fucking too much, what with the trying to keep birth control from being covered by insurance and the abstinence-only sex ed and so on. 

But I think that the Forces of People Who Hate Sex model oversimplifies the situation, at least when you aren’t talking about early Church Fathers. I think sex-negativity and compulsory sexuality are two sides of the same fucked-up coin. Look at two things that I happen to know a lot about, and that I would call glaringly sex-negative: modern Protestant fundamentalism and Cosmo magazine.

Modern Protestant fundamentalism is very obsessed with people not fucking until they get married. In fact, some people will choose not to kiss until their wedding day for fear that that might lead them to commit sexual sin. But they don’t see themselves as anti-sex: in fact, they recommend purity because they believe that sex is better when you’re married and you’ve only had one sex partner.

Once you’re married, women are expected to give their husbands sex regularly, even if it is uncomfortable or painful. Not wanting sex is “defrauding” him of his marital right. Before marriage, you can only say no; after marriage, you can only say yes. 

…Okay, that’s really depressing. 

On the less depressing and more stupid department, Cosmo! In Cosmoland, there are two kinds of sexual activities: there are Hot Sex Moves He Secretly Wishes You’d Try, and there are Creepy Things Weird People Like. I’m not sure about Cosmo’s logic here, because toilet paper bondage is on the Hot Sex Moves He Secretly Wishes You’d Try list, and girls in drag is on the Creepy Things Weird People Like list, even though I know way more people who are into girls in drag than toilet paper bondage.

(Please tell me I have a reader who’s into toilet paper bondage, that would make my life.) 

About half the sex tips articles will assure you that these are the hot and kinky kind of sex tips, not the scary and kinky kind. (This is often phrased as “no whips and chains,” because Cosmo is Not Original.) Every month we have the Sexy vs. Skanky list; literally every human behavior has been put on one side or the other.

This is the difference between sex-positivity and sex-negativity. Sex-negativity is the model where there is a Right Way To Fuck and a Wrong Way To Fuck. It doesn’t matter what the content is: whether you’re a defrauder if you don’t fuck after marriage but impure if you fuck before, or unsexy if you don’t like spanking but creepy if you want to use a paddle, or a tease if you don’t put out but a slut if you put out too much, or– hell– anti-feminist if you don’t care about your sexual pleasure but also anti-feminist if your sexual pleasure involves being tied up. It’s all the same bullshit.  

Sex-negativity is the belief that anything not forbidden is compulsory.

Sex-positivity, the way I see it, is the belief that as long as you and your partners are happy no one should give a fuck about the sex you’re having. If you or your partners are not happy, we can give you some advice about how to fix that, but if you are? It’s none of my fucking business. 

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Intro To Rape Culture, Or, Ozy Fangirls David Lisak

My boyfriend is confused about the concept of rape culture, which means I need to explain what rape culture is. Again.

For what it’s worth I don’t think it’s necessarily good to use the word “rape culture,” because people who aren’t feminists tend to respond to the word by saying “…but rape is illegal in our culture, everyone hates rape!” and then wander off assuming that feminists are rape-obsessed and probably hate sex.

The Problem

According to very respectable national research done by the American government, about 18% of women and 6% of men are raped over the course of their lifetimes. According to peer-reviewed psychological research, between 6% and 13% of men have committed rape. (As far as I’m aware no one has done similar research on female rapists.) That is a lot of rape.

Rape is also a really big problem. For instance, let’s take PTSD rate as a proxy for severity of trauma. Rape survivors have a higher PTSD rate than combat veterans, which suggests that being raped is actually more traumatizing than fucking combat.

Rape culture is the term for “the cultural forces that make the rape rate so fucking high.”

Why Rapists Rape

Nearly all the evidence about why (male) rapists rape is correlational– “huh, rapists seem to have Trait Y more than the general population, let’s try to reduce that.” (This blog post is a pretty good summary of the research. Yes, I could really replace this entire blog post with “go read the Yes Means Yes archives.”)

Rapists are more misogynistic than non-rapists (angrier at women, more likely to want to control them); therefore we stigmatize the hell out of misogyny, particularly those forms (like the treatment of women as machines that you get sexual gratification from) that seem likely to lead to rape. Rapists tend to have “toxic masculinity” traits such as lack of empathy, impulsiveness, and antisociality; therefore we advocate for a wider definition of masculinity. (I am not aware of research on how these apply to female or queer rapists because people tend to totally ignore female and queer rapists.)

Rapists are more likely to have rape-supportive beliefs, like “if a girl is raped when she’s drunk it’s at least a little her fault for letting things get out of hand” and “guys don’t intend to force sex on a girl, but sometimes they get a little carried away” and (presumably, there has not been research on this one) “if a man gets hard he’s consenting.” That is why we’re against victim-blaming: not just because it’s horrible to survivors (which, Jesus, isn’t that enough of a reason?), but because rapists believe victim-blaming ideas and it is reasonable to believe this is a causative factor in rape.

Rapists tend to test boundaries to see what people will assert them and what people will give in. There’s this whole idea that women need to be polite and kind and not make a fuss when their boundaries are violated, until they’re raped, at which point it’s “why didn’t you fight back? Why didn’t you say no loud enough?” (The linked Fugitivus post, btw, was my click moment about rape culture.) A lot of people also seem to have difficulty with the concept that men get boundaries at all. Therefore, feminists need to assert that boundaries matter and they matter everywhere– not just during sex, but during kissing and hugs and cuddling and tickling and conversation and what food you fucking eat. And that if someone does not respect your boundaries, they are not a good person and it is perfectly reasonable to be pissed.

Rapists tend to believe that their behavior is normal: that most men commit rape, or want to. That’s why we’re against things that normalize rape, including most rape jokes. Because Pat Not-A-Rapist thinks the joke is funny because haha it’s so absurd that anyone would think they and their friends are rapists, and Robin Rapist thinks it’s funny because that’s how they think the world actually works.

After a Rape

I have a friend who was raped fairly recently at our nice liberal-arts college full of hairy-legged feminists and dirty hippies. (I have her permission to tell this story.) She reflected that the worst part wasn’t the rape– it was that she can’t be friends with anyone who’s friends with her rapist anymore. They might invite him over to hang out and, well, if she told anyone that she was raped– even just to say “so please don’t invite my rapist over while we’re hanging out”– it would instantly spread everywhere and turn into a referendum about whether she was a lying whore.

See, everyone believes that rapists are evil! Rapists are horrible monsters. They probably have fangs or something. It’s just that people don’t like considering their friends horrible evil monsters. So a lot of people are going to hear “your friend raped me” and respond with “it was probably a misunderstanding” or “you just regretted it the next day” or “you’re a lying whore.”

This means that a lot of rapists experience no negative consequences for their rape whatsoever. It means that repeat rapists– who commit most rapes– continue to have access to a social group where they can rape people. It means that rape survivors don’t get the support they need.

This is why feminists are dicks about affirmative consent (other than the boundary stuff above). Because if the norm is “you don’t have sex with someone who doesn’t obviously want to have sex,” people cannot be like “well my friend probably just misunderstood the situation” and justify the commission of rape. Because we are the 95%, we are capable of telling when our partner does and does not want sex, we are not rapists, and we should not be giving social cover to rapists.

–A related but distinct kind of social cover for rapists, which I would be remiss to end the post without mentioning, is that of prison rape. A lot of people seem to accept that rape is a reasonable punishment for crime, which makes it harder to get political will to end prison rape. Some people even seem to believe that rape is a reasonable punishment for rape, which you would think would lead to this weird recursive thing where rapists are raped by people who are now rapists and have to be raped, and so on and so forth ad infinitem.

(I’m kind of dodging the justice system issue here, because I’m not a legal expert, and because while our justice system often treats rape survivors horribly it’s hard to imagine a justice system that simultaneously protects the mental health of the survivor and the rights of the accused. Anyway, we are not going to lock up ten percent or so of the male population. The solution to rape culture has to be a cultural change, not a legal change.)

Because it is apparently necessary that I link to every post on Yes Means Yes, I want to signal-boost this as a really good case study of rape culture in a particular community– namely, the BDSM community. The BDSM community is a really interesting group to look at because it’s about sex, so a lot of the dynamics that are hidden in other communities are out in the open.

So What Do I Do?

  • Don’t rape people. Okay, this shit is obvious, but I feel like it needs to be said anyway.
  • Respect people’s “no.” All the time. For everything. Without fussing about it.
  • Don’t say “no” when you don’t mean “no.” Again, I can’t believe I have to say this, but apparently some people are going about saying “no” when they don’t mean it and then everyone else is like “women! Sometimes they say no, but they don’t mean no, therefore I am totally justified in having sex with people who have said no!” So seriously, if you pull that shit, stop ruining it for everyone else. (You can do rape play if you want, but use a safeword.)
  • “Ask before touching people” is a really really good social norm. So is “ask before sex.” (I know this is stigmatized in some social groups– which is horrible and rape-culturey itself. But it’s still a good thing to do.)
  • Make it clear that you are part of the vast majority of people who are not rapists and that violating people’s consent, victim-blaming, misogyny, and so on are Not Okay. You do not have to lecture people about rape culture– I mean, I do, but that’s less anti-rape activism and more being a boring one-trick pony. But you can be like “dude not cool” when someone talks about how funny prison rape is or about getting women drunk to have sex with them.
  • Check in and, if necessary, rescue people if it looks like something skeezy or abusive is happening. (Examples of “skeezy or abusive”: person looks creeped out; one person is getting another person very drunk; someone has said “no” and the other person is trying to get them to do a thing anyway)
  • Believe survivors. I know, I know, some unknown (but small!) percentage of accusations of rape are false rape accusations. But like. It is not that hard to not invite a survivor and the person they accused to the same party, or to keep an eye on people accused of rape to see if they seem to be repeating it, or to provide support to a survivor, or to bluntly talk to someone about their behavior. And if someone has been accused of rape multiple times or has a history of being a gigantic boundary-violating creeper… seriously, you don’t have to be “innocent until proven guilty” on being friends with someone. Not being invited to parties is not a goddamned death sentence.

I mean. Nearly everything on this list is stuff that people I know– even people who aren’t super-aware of rape culture– do anyway, because they’re not douchebags and they’re not rapists. Because… really if there’s one takeaway point here, it’s that we are not rapists, we don’t approve of rape, and we need to stop fucking acting like we do.

Prudes’ Progress: Why Not Instrumental Sexuality?

[Part of the Response to Prudes' Progress series, mostly a response to this bit. Trigger warning for rape.]

Sex-positive feminists have this weird tendency to say “anything between consenting adults is okay!” That’s really dumb. Five minutes’ thought will reveal that consenting adults can have all kinds of unethical sex.

For instance: it is not ethical to cheat on your partner or have sex with someone who’s cheating on their partner. It is not ethical to bring a child into the world when you can’t make sure that it’s properly taken care of (whether through adoption or parenthood). Reproductive coercion is not ethical. (In fact, reproductive coercion is abusive behavior.) Lying to obtain sex is not ethical. Having sex with someone when you have reason to believe they will regret it (for instance, because they believe premarital sex is immoral or because they’re not ready to have sex yet) is not ethical. Not giving a fuck about your partner enjoying themselves* is not ethical. Obviously, reproductive coercion and rape are far worse than having sex with someone who might regret it or not caring about your partner enjoying themselves, but these are all Bad.

I think instrumental sexuality is a mindset that often leads to behavior that hurts other people and yourself, and is therefore generally bad, even if the sex is consensual. I would call it bad in the same way hate is bad. A lot of people hate people and don’t hurt anyone, which makes it a bit difficult to call hate strictly immoral; in fact, some people find their hate empowering and enjoyable and generally happiness-maximizing. Certainly it is unreasonable to expect everyone to not hate anyone. Still, if you have a choice between hate and not hate it is generally a good idea to pick not hate, and if you have a choice between instrumental sexuality and not instrumental sexuality it is generally a good idea to pick the latter.

(Disclaimer Time: I’m not talking about mutually enjoyable BDSM that simulates instrumental sexuality here– I’m going to talk about that later, but suffice it to say that playacting disrespect and objectification is not the same as disrespecting and objectifying someone, as every good dom knows.)

Partially, this is because instrumental sexuality tends to lead to assorted kinds of asshole behavior. If you treat other people as a means to your orgasm, it’s very easy to be like “well, they consented, whether they’re happy about it afterwards is their own business.” Or “well, they consented, I don’t really have to care about whether they liked it.” Or “well, they consented, never mind I had to ask them half a dozen times first.” Yay, you get the coveted Not A Rapist Award,** go you.

And partially because I’ve noticed– in both my case and the cases of people I’ve talked to– that sex is actually the most fun when we have it with someone we like and want to be happy. Sex we’re having for validation, or as a conquest, or because everyone else is doing it, or out of a sense of duty or obligation, or to prove something to ourselves, or because we’d feel like a loser if we didn’t, or out of desperation, or because it’s something you’re supposed to do– that is, instrumental sex… well, it’s just less good sex.*** I’m a utilitarian. I want there to be more good sex in the world!

This is not, of course, to say only relationship sex or sex where you’re in love with your partner is good sex. You can like someone and want them to be happy and want to fuck them if you met them two hours ago! You can certainly like someone and want them to be happy and not be in love with them or want to date them. Conversely, you can be in love with someone or in a relationship of long standing with them and have all the instrumental sex.

*Please note that I mean “enjoying themself” in the broadest possible sense– for instance, someone can enjoy giving their partner pleasure, or playing a particular role, or exploring the limits of what their body can take, or whatever. Talk about what you want out of sex ahead of time! This message brought to you by Sex-Positivity.
**Except the third person, who gets the Possibly A Rapist Depending On The Exact Circumstances And What Definition of Rape We’re Going By Award. ***Every time I make a generalization about sex I get at least three people in the comments telling me that they are, in fact, completely the opposite of my generalization. So this footnote is to say that if you have sex for those reasons and it works for you and you aren’t hurting anyone else, great, knock yourself out. I dunno how much you’ll get out of the rest of the series though.

Why I Hate The Word “Sex-Positive”

Okay. I’m sex-positive, I guess. I absolutely adore the work of Heather Corinna, Jaclyn Friedman, and Cliff Pervocracy. I think slut-shaming is bad, rape culture is worse, people doing what they want with their own bodies is awesome, and everyone’s sexuality is a beautiful and unique snowflake.

But dear God I hate the word.

There are lots of things I’m positive about! I’m consent-positive! I’m autonomy-positive! I’m people-being-happy-positive! But I’m not really sex-positive. I’m more sex-neutral, really. If people want to have sex, then they should have sex; if people don’t want to have sex, then they shouldn’t have sex. As long as everyone involved is happy, I don’t really feel entitled to have an opinion about whether other people have kinky lesbian orgies or hold each other’s sleeves because they’re not yet emotionally ready to hold hands.

Like. I feel like I should make a list. Things That Are Totally Ethically Neutral As Long As They Are Performed In An Emotionally And Physically Healthy, Consensual, and Honest Way, And That You Should Not Feel Like An Inferior Person For Doing:

  • Celibacy
  • Monogamy
  • Polyamory
  • Kinky sex
  • Vanilla sex
  • Casual sex
  • Relationship sex
  • Sexless relationships
  • Refusing a sex act you don’t like
  • Having orgasms
  • Not having orgasms
  • Having sex for pure physical pleasure
  • Having sex as an expression of love
  • Having sex to make someone else happy
  • Having sex for money
  • Having sex for literally any other conceivable reason
  • For that matter, not having sex for literally any conceivable reason
  • Having anal/oral/PIV sex
  • Not having anal/oral/PIV sex
  • Watching porn
  • Not watching porn
  • Being so uncomfortable with porn that you choose a partner who doesn’t watch porn
  • Masturbating
  • Not masturbating

The problem here is that sex-positivity… well, it kind of sounds like it means “sex is awesome and you should have sex.” It’s bad enough when people assume that “sex-positive” means “sex is awesome” and then start talking about how they’re not sex-positive because they think women should have the right to refuse anal sex, pegging, or learning to squirt. But it’s really awful when people look at the word “sex-positive” and are like “of course I’m sex-positive! I love sex! Sex is awesome! All those prudes and virgins just need to loosen up and have more of the kind of sex I like!”

And here’s where I start complaining about The Ethical Slut (which is a great book, and one I highly recommend). The Ethical Slut defines a slut as ”a person of any gender who celebrates sexuality according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you”; thus, it implies, anyone can be a slut. Except… for a lot of people, sex isn’t nice. There are rape and sexual assault survivors who don’t think of sex as nice (as well are survivors who do, of course). There are people who have internalized slut-shaming to the degree that they can’t see sex as “nice” for themselves and while, yes, that’s bad, they are hardly the enemy. And, most of all, there are people who think sex is boring, or who liked it for one part of their lives and not anymore, or who would really just rather have a cup of tea and a book.

Dear God sex-positivity has such potential as a movement. I want a movement that talks about accepting what you don’t want as much as it does about accepting what you do. About “some people like sex just fine without orgasms, some people even prefer sex without orgasms, and that’s fine” as much as “learn how to have an orgasm! Now how to have a more intense orgasm!” About prude-shaming (internalized and externalized) as much as slut-shaming (internalized and externalized).

Up-Goer 5, Part Two

Also known as: Ozy Thought Of Some More Words That Need Defining.

Intersectionality: Some people are part of more than one group that has bad things happen to them. Those people hurt more and in different ways than people who are only part of one group that has bad things happen to them. But some of the bad things that happen to them mean that people don’t listen to them as much, which is bad, because they’re hurting more. It is good to make sure you listen to people who are part of more than one bad-things group.

Rape Culture: Some people think it is okay to fuck people who don’t want to fuck them. Even though not many people fuck people who don’t want to fuck them, lots of people act like it is normal or okay to fuck someone who doesn’t want to fuck you.

How do you act like it is normal or okay to fuck someone who doesn’t want to fuck you? Lots of ways! You might think that it is okay if someone did a bad thing and then got fucked when they didn’t want to, because they did a bad thing. You might say that people can’t stop themselves when they see someone pretty, so they have to fuck them. You might say that only bad people fuck people who don’t want to be fucked, and your friend is not a bad person, so they didn’t fuck someone who didn’t want to be fucked. You might say that while it might be bad to fuck someone who doesn’t want to be fucked, it’s okay to touch someone who doesn’t want to be touched. You might say that it is hard to tell when someone wants to be fucked, or that some people pretend not to want to be fucked as a game. You might say that some people always want to be fucked.

Femmephobia: Some people think that women are worse than men, which is bad. Some people– even people that know that women are just as good as men– think that things that more women like are worse than things more men like. It is bad, they say, to want to be pretty or to like keeping things clean or to cry. But all those things are good things! They are only bad when someone thinks that women have to like them because they are women. Some people think that hating things women like is a way of hating women, just more hidden.

Derailing: Some people are concerned about things. They think, “this thing I am concerned about is very important! In fact, it is so important that I should talk to these people, who are talking about something kind of like my thing, and tell them all about my thing.” But those people do not want to talk about the other person’s thing, and it makes them sad that that person is making them talk about it.

Sometimes, the people really are ignoring a very important thing that they shouldn’t be ignoring. They might talk about how women need to pay cleaning women so they can work, but ignore that the cleaning women are women too. That is good to point out! But you have to make sure that it is an important thing that matters to the conversation the people are having, and not just something you like to talk about.

Erasure: Lots of people think of some kinds of people as Normal. The most Normal people are white men who want to fuck women, have never had everyone think that they were women, have as much money as most people, and have bodies and brains that work the way most people’s do. The less Normal you are, the fewer stories people write about you– both true stories and made-up stories. It That means that people who are Normal don’t know what it’s like to not be Normal. And people who are not Normal are sad because they don’t get to read stories about people like them.

Neurotypical: Some people have brains that work different than other people’s brains. Sometimes their brains work less well, sometimes they work better, sometimes they work better in some ways and worse in other ways, and sometimes they don’t work better or worse at all, just different. If your brain works the way most people’s does, you are ‘neurotypical’.

Ableism: Some people have bodies or brains that are different from most people’s bodies or brains. Because their bodies or brains are different, they might need different things than most people do. But since everything is set up for people who don’t have different brains or bodies, people with different brains or bodies find it hard to do lots of things that people who don’t have different brains or bodies can do easily. But people with different brains or bodies can do lots of things if you set things up with them in mind, not with other people in mind.

People believe lots of bad things about people who have different bodies or brains. They might think those people are broken or stupid or going to hurt people. They might think that anyone who has a different body or brain is strong and very very very good, just for doing things a person who didn’t have a different body or brain would. They might think it’s okay to laugh at someone who is different. They might think anyone who is friends with someone with a different brain or body is very very very good for putting up with someone with a different brain or body. They might think that they know more about what the person is going through than they do, or that just because they’re different the person had to tell them all about being different. It hurts people with different brains or bodies when you think those things.

“Consent Is Sexy” Is Gross

“Consent is sexy” is, in fact, the grossest.

I have a very core problem with this sentence, to wit, I don’t think we should have to lead people around by the boner to get them to treat other human beings with basic respect. I mean, imagine if we applied this strategy to everything else. “If you don’t punch dudes in the face, they’re more likely to suck your cock!” ”Tip your waitress, she might ride your face in the back room.” ”I hear if you don’t sing along when you’re watching Les Miz in theaters a naked oiled Hugh Jackman appears.”

“People doing sexythings they like is sexier than people doing sexythings they don’t like, and if you don’t rape people they will be more likely to do sexythings they like with you!” is the exact. Same. Fucking. Thing.

Sometimes, indeed, consent is sexy. There is not much sexier than having sex with someone who genuinely wants to have sex with you. But the issue is not  ”should I have sex with people that want to have sex with me and that I want to have sex with?” Except for a few busybodies, everyone is pretty much down with that! (And even the busybodies are mostly concerned with why you shouldn’t want sex that they don’t like.)

But in most of the situations where consent culture matters, consent is very clearly not sexy. If you get rid of the social pressure for college students to have casual sex, fewer college students will have casual sex. If you stop making asexuals feel broken because they don’t want sex, fewer asexuals will have sex. If you stop slapping female submissives on the ass without asking them, you don’t get to slap as many female submissives on the ass. If you refuse to have sex with people who don’t want sex with you, your pool of potential sexual partners shrinks.

How many times do you have to have sex for sheer abundance to outweigh the fact that it’s less hot when your partner doesn’t want it? Fifty times? A hundred? A thousand?

(Not to mention that if you do it right you can convince them to grit their teeth and fake enjoying it, for you, because anything’s better than another tantrum…)

Some people, a few of whom have the nerve to call themselves part of the sex-positive movement, seem to have a primary goal of maximizing The Sexy. Consent is all well and good, they think, because rape is certainly not sexy. But it is very clearly a means to an end here. When abandoning consent culture leads to an increase in The Sexy, they will gladly abandon consent culture. And I think “consent is sexy” plays into the same damn mindset.

To me, consent culture is not a means to sexiness; sexiness is a means to consent culture. If you let people do what they want with their own bodies, some of the things they do will be sexy things, and that’s awesome! The expectation that the things they do should be sexy things? Not awesome! Seriously, when your anti-rape slogan reinforces rape culture, you have made a wrong turn somewhere.

My Mental Illness Is Not About Your Boner

Tumblr decided, in its infinite wisdom, to show me this article. (Which is apparently two years old? Whatever, it’s not like BPD stigma has changed much in the past two years.) The subheading includes the phrase “the mental illness that can lead to wild sex.”


["dis gon be gud" gif]

It’s pretty standard stigmatizing nonsense. This one dude has a girlfriend who is really great in bed, but she also cuts herself and screams at or attempts to break up with him over minor disagreements. Ozy flinches in recognition. Pop stars are diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. The phrases “femme fatale” and “intoxicating womanchild with a dark side” occur. It is explained that some common traits of borderline patients include a history of child sexual abuse, eating disorders, self-consciousness and a need for control, and giving doctors boners.

Not kidding about that last part. An assistant professor of psychiatry named Peter Freed says, “Though it hasn’t been studied, there is a sense among doctors that many patients tend to be attractive, which can trigger a vicious cycle. Being beautiful induces the world to treat you like an object, which naturally gives rise to questions about whether you are loveable, which in turn makes you long for confirmation.” I just… I literally have no response to that.

I mean, it’s pretty excellent to be classified as a femme fatale. Here I am, with hairy legs and boxer shorts and an Existentialists Do It Pointlessly shirt with a hole in one of the armpits, but apparently I’m goddamned Catwoman because of my diagnosis. I don’t even have to put on lip gloss!

On a more serious note, talking about how awesome and uninhibited borderlines are in bed is really disturbing. One of the symptoms of borderline personality disorder is impulsive and self-destructive sexual behavior. (Well, okay, impulsive and self-destructive all kinds of behavior, but sex is perennially popular.) “I’m a bad person so I should punish myself by having unprotected sex with a stranger!” “If my best friend’s girlfriend has sex with me then she must REALLY LIKE ME because otherwise she wouldn’t hurt Best Friend so much.” “I’m going to have sex I don’t want and that makes me feel sick and dirty and violated inside so that my partner won’t hate me.” “Everything hurts and the only way I can fill up the emptiness inside is fucking.”

I literally do not have words for how fucked up and creepy you have to be to write an article about how hot it is when women have a mental illness that leads them to have sex they don’t want. I mean. It saves so much energy, doesn’t it? You don’t have to abuse them! Their brains already emotionally abuse them for you! You get all the sweet, sweet coercive sex and you don’t even have to face the guilt in the morning!

It’s just the Madonna/Whore dichotomy all over again. The Whore is wild and uninhibited, she doesn’t have any of those silly ‘boundary’ things, when you fuck her your toes curl and your hands tingle and you see God. But unlike the Madonna, sweet and kind and pure, the Whore also happens to be a psycho bitch. She cuts herself! She takes drugs! She screams at you when she thinks you’re with another woman! For further examination for this interesting sociological phenomenon, I’d like to direct you to Buckcherry’s Crazy Bitch:


[Lyrics.]

Except, you know, we’re sciencing it up! Because there is an actual psychological diagnosis that if you bend, spindle, fold and mutilate it enough kind of looks like “psycho bitch slut.” And then we get to write a whole article in Newsweek, purporting to educate people about borderline personality disorder, about how psycho bitch sluts are terrible. But also sexy? So you will want to sex them up?

But, you know, I am a person, not a misogynistic archetype. I spend the vast majority of my time neither fucking men senseless nor being a psycho bitch at them. In fact, most of the ways my mental illness manifests have nothing to do with fucking men senseless or being a psycho bitch at them. And I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s true of most people with BPD.

When I break down crying over not being able to hang up the laundry properly, it is not about your boner. When I get upset when my boyfriend leaves the house to check the mail because he might never come back, it is not about your boner. When I stop talking to my parents and family because I am irrationally terrified of them, it is not about your boner.

The articles about what my illness is like? Shouldn’t be about your boner either.

Ask Men’s Top 10 Cruel Things Women Do To Men

Ask Men has decided to present a Terrible List of awful things that women do to men. So I have decided to explain why this is wrong! (Warning: some of the items on this list are actually emotional abuse.)

Give you her number and never picks up the phone. Yes, in general, it is douchey behavior to reject someone with something other than an outright “no.” While lots of people try subtle rejections (especially when they’re young) because “no” is incredibly awkward and hard to say, a lot of women  do it because they’re socialized into being compliant and not making a fuss. Also, if your “convincing her” to give you her number involved ignoring her “no, I don’t want to give you her number,” then your right to complain about her ignoring your calls has gone away, you’re a douchebag.

Use men for free drinks. So… don’t buy women drinks? I don’t know, I don’t drink, but personally I like to keep flirting and sex work separate (and to be paid a bit more than a drink). “I will buy your attention with a drink!” is gross, especially if you’d call her a bitch if she refused the drink. If you’re going to be putting capitalism in human relationships, you should also put in the bit where I get to be like “no, I don’t want to sell my product to you.”

Use men as placeholders. Not much to say here. It is douchey behavior to want to break up with someone but not do it until you have a replacement.

Emotionally manipulate men. Okay, look, dude, using your emotions to manipulate people into doing what you want? IS EMOTIONAL ABUSE. You don’t need to get all cutesy about “a man’s complete incomprehension of female feelings” (quote from the article). People of all genders emotionally abuse people of all genders, and talking about emotional abuse of men as some tee-hee naughty thing women do is minimizing abuse and making it harder for survivors to recognize how wrong their situation is.

Use physical violence. HOLY SHIT WHAT THE FUCK WHY ARE DOMESTIC VIOLENCE AND USING MEN FOR FREE DRINKS ON THE SAME LIST

Criticize her men in public. Again, douchey behavior, assuming it isn’t a consensual part of their relationship dynamic (says the person whose partners occasionally jokingly threaten to murder zir as a part of flirting). But given the last two I’m thinking this article is possibly a call for help from an abuse survivor, in which case criticizing one’s boyfriend in public is yet another tactic of abuse. It’s okay! There are helplines! AskMen writer YOU DO NOT HAVE TO SUFFER ALONE.

Not disclose her relationship status. I hate hate HATE this issue of disclosure, which also comes up with trans people (especially trans women) a lot. First, some people are notoriously dim about who’s flirting with them and so don’t know that they’d have to disclose. Second, people always sound so reasonable when they say “I just want to know if the person I’m flirting with is dating someone,” and then you realize that the only way they’d be happy is if people opened the conversation with “Hi, I’m Megan, and I have a boyfriend.” (And then they’d probably call her a bitch who’s making up a fake boyfriend to avoid having to flirt with him after he paid for her drinks.)

Withhold sex. No. Fuck off. Everyone has the right to refuse sex for any reason or no reason. If you want sex more than your partner does and they don’t want to talk about a way to reconcile your needs, then you are perfectly free to break up with them. (As a person who has been the higher-libido partner in several relationships, there are compromises higher-libido and lower-libido partners can make, but they have to be made on a bedrock of “you’re allowed to say no to sex whenever you want.”)

Test their men. Aaaaand we’re back to emotionally abusive tactics! Seriously, I would have so much more sympathy for this list if it didn’t randomly jump between “abuse” and “the ladies not having sex with me when I want it.”

Flirt to inspire jealousy. I’m pretty sure if one of the guidelines for your relationship is “don’t flirt with other people in front of me” and then you do that’s cheating? So okay.

Is Drunk Sex Rape?

My mention of this article on Twitter got a lot of pushback, so I figured I should talk about it in a space more suitable to… like, any nuance. At all.

First: “X can’t be rape because then I would be a rapist” is a colossally stupid argument. Most rapists do not self-identify as rapists! In fact, as Lisak shows, most rapists have reached levels of self-delusion in which “I just held down someone and fucked them while they said no, it’s not like a rapist” is a thought they actually have. So don’t make that argument! It sucks.

On the other hand, “X can’t be rape because then I would be a rape survivor” is a fairly coherent argument, as seen in the number of sex workers who have said something along the lines of “I’ve done sex work, and I’ve been raped, and the two are in no way comparable.”

Second: there is some really massive miscommunication happening on the subject of intoxicated sex and rape.

I feel kind of uncomfortable talking about this, because I’m straightedge. The closest I’ve come to being drunk is having a cup of a friend’s butterbeer recipe, which includes a splash of butterscotch schnapps. You literally could not find a person more unqualified to draw the line between drunk sex and rape. So if I talk about this kind of vaguely, that’s why.

At a certain point of intoxication, people become too intoxicated to meaningfully consent to sexual interaction, and then having sex with them is rape. (Of course, you can give meaningful consent ahead of time, just like you can with someone having sex with you while you’re unconscious.) This is literally what every feminist I have ever talked to believes about rape by intoxication. It is also what Rebecca Watson believes– to quote her post, “I’m going by the common definition here, of someone whose faculties are impaired, e.g., slurred speech, stumbling, etc.” The legal definition of rape, while it varies by area, also usually includes a similar kind of rape by intoxication.

I’m not saying that there aren’t people who believe that having some booze to loosen up before sex is rape, you can find people who believe any stupid thing, but they are clearly not the mainstream of feminism. Seriously, the closest I’ve come to meeting the “if you have a beer and have sex you’re a rapist!” feminist is a woman who thought that we should legally define all drunk sex to be rape because people who weren’t raped wouldn’t prosecute and rapists wouldn’t get off on a technicality by fiddling around with blood alcohol levels. You can have lots of opinions about that position (here’s mine: it’s dumb), but she clearly doesn’t believe that having a glass of wine and fucking is rape.

Now, you could make the case that there are lots of people who have sex while stupid-drunk and don’t feel raped in the morning. This is very reasonable. Personally, I think of it similarly to the way I think of someone initiating sex with someone while sleeping: there’s a chance the person will consent to it, in which case no harm no foul, but you still shouldn’t do it without clearing it with them first, because if they don’t consent you just raped them. Also there’s the concern that two severely intoxicated people could have sex and end up raping each other, which seems like a weird result? But then you need mens rea to rape someone, which you clearly don’t have if you’re that drunk, so I suppose you’d end up with two rape survivors and no rapist.

All that aside, there’s a fundamental disconnect here between the broad consensus of anti-rape-culture people, which is “sex with people too intoxicated to consent is rape,” and what a substantial contingent of people is hearing, which is “tipsy sex is rape.” I have no idea why. Are there multiple meanings of the word ‘drunk’? Is there another word anti-rape-culture people should be using that other people will understand better? (Honest questions: my straightedge self is not really up on you kids and your lingo.)

Short version: Anti-rape-culture advocates, please realize that when some people disagree with you it is because they literally do not understand what you are saying! People who think someone might be saying tipsy sex is rape, they probably aren’t! Thank you and goodnight.