Sexual Choices (and the introduction of tooltips)

Before I start this very late friday/saturday post, I’m quickly going to share two new features I’m going to add at least to all upcoming posts- I’m going to add tooltips every time I introduce a piece of jargon to that post, allowing you to better understand what I’m saying in my essay posts just by hovering your mouse over a piece of jargon, without you reading every previous post, or me cross-linking my own posts or linking wikipedia extraneously to explain jargon. This becomes more and more necessary as I move into cool advanced topics like sexual agency, homosexuality, polygamy, relationship assumptions, youth sexualisation, and all that cool stuff. I’m also adding a glossary to collect these terms in, with attribution where I can figure it out. Anyway, on with the show. (and yes, the necessity of these new features is partly why it’s so late)

Sexual liberation as a concept/philosophy, or the belief in sexual freedom, is based on the foundation that sex acts should be founded and evaluated on mutual and equal consent, and the right to sexual agency of the partners involved. Sexual liberation as a concept grew out of sexual liberation as an event¹- that is, the widespread availability of effective birth control.

Because it assumes that everyone in a sexual relationship is equal, sexual liberation necessarily overlaps with women’s rights and gay rights- women’s rights because it rejects male domination of sexual relationships and asserts the right to deny sex, and gay rights because it evaluates partnership based on consent and self-utility, not based on community standards or social norms.

Feminists maintain the necessity of adequate birth control for gender equality because of the inherently disproportionate impact of pregnancy. Sex, it is argued, is not a choice for women so long as it is a choice tied so inherently to pregnancy. The low risk of pregnancy with redundant birth control grants women sexual agency in straight or bisexual relationships².

Sexual liberation also implies not just the ability to make sexual choices, but the evaluation of those choices based on how informed they are. Consent cannot be said to be mutual if one person is more informed than another, so all decisions must be evaluated not only on the degree to which all people involved agree, but also the relative understanding of all parties that agree. Some people may not be informed enough to make many decisions without some serious psychological growth- such as children- and thus can’t be said to be capable of complicated choices. This likely informs our views on the sexual agency of children, and sheltered adults, and adults who are relatively speaking extremely inexperienced.

Sexual agency faces many opposing beliefs- for example, the conception of women as gatekeepers to sex, the belief in marriage as the only form of sexual consent, the view of non-harmful sexual choices as taboo, and the implication of (selective) sexual non-agency.

As a fair warning, if you find sexual liberation to be a concept you can’t support, you’ll likely find most of what I write on this blog extremely distasteful.

¹As a historical event, sexual liberation refers to the availability of various types of temporary birth control, but most notably the condom and the combined contraceptive pill. This availability spawned the philosophy of sexual liberation.
²Yes, I know a bisexual relationship requires at least three people. Monogamy (not to be confused with exclusivity) is not only a sexual assumption, but also a sexual choice, and therefore optional if we buy into sexual liberation.

note: Until an explanation tag is included in HTML specifications, I do not want to hear about my blatant appropriation of abbrevriation tags. Those of you who do not know what HTML is can now return to your regularly scheduled blog.

Why rules are awesome and exceptions suck

Deborah over at The Hand Mirror has an excellent post from a while back on how a tiny exception in Act’s proposed tax cuts devalues women’s labour, by hitting part-timers (who are disproportionately female) with extra tax. This hits on a vein that’s essential to my feelings about not only feminist thought, but also queer rights, race relations, disability issues, and even economic productivity/fairness, so I’d like to expand on Deborah’s objection to an exception that hurts women more than men.

This is a great example of why in all types of complex systems- from Human Rights laws to the tax code to social progression- ideas that can be elegantly expressed as rules that have no exceptions make the best guidelines to live by. (I should point out that adding just a few “inclusions” to a restrictive rule is effectively the same thing as making a more inclusive rule with lots of exceptions, it just cuts down on admin costs a little more.¹)

Our current tax code is riddled with exceptions and vulnerabilities that allow the wealthy to pay about the same tax as everyone else while we’re forking out for the extra administration required by a progressive tax system. I would greatly like to ditch every single exception, and perhaps lower the overall take a little, or pay out some more significant welfare- perhaps even a universal basic income- instead of adding costly exceptions, like the proposal Act has for taxing part-time labour more than full-time. This is typical economics-before-social-concerns thinking that I’ve lamentably come to expect from act- part-time work enables people to contribute to charities, raise kids, maintain a healthy partnership, work on their own car/computer/hobby, all of which have value that’s external to usual economics.

But it’s not just tax where this is important. This principle informs so many decisions about progressive policy: Violence is bad- even if it’s a parent hurting a kid. Marriage is between two people that love each other- even if they’re the same sex. Sex is a choice- for both genders, not just for men. Qualifications and skills should determine pay- even if you’re not one of the straight white guys.

I’ve argued before that exceptions are okay in cases where they combat pervasive, systematic discrimination. I still believe this- but I believe that we can often achieve the aims held by an exception by using a rule, if we’re smart enough. For instance, the Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand helps collect the capital and rights to natural resources that fund business ventures by Maori, for Maori- and the focus on building these resources in the long-term fights inequality in a systemic way that is so much more effective than mere golden handshakes over historical grievances could be. It also builds awareness and importance of New Zealand history, and the role that both colonial and Maori influences played in forming our nation as it is now.

¹ Yes, I’m looking at you, heterosexual-only marriage laws!

Note: My post tommorow is also going to be up late at night, as I have a slightly busier schedule than usual.

In which consent is clarified

I mentioned earlier when I covered social attitudes to rape that meaningful consent has to be “explicit and free”. Many a man interested in exploring the murky deeps of gender politics from a male perspective dives into the issue of consent in straight sex, which I find almost painfully simple, and comes out with some sort of slippery slope argument attempting to deconstruct the basis of consent because they don’t really want to understand it, because that would mean serious evaluation of the concept from a female perspective, which like, defeats the whole point of my college newspaper article, man.

What makes consent explicit? Well, essentially it’s saying that she has to be clear in her desire to go ahead. There should be no doubt. If she says “mmmm, okay” and doesn’t start jumping on you, then she hasn’t given explicit consent. She’s probably just engrossed in Scientific American Mind, that glossy magazine she’s reading, and hasn’t heard you. If she says nothing and sits still, not engaging at all in whatever you’re trying to do to initiate sex, then she’s not consented. If she says “no” clearly, but continues to do something that really gets you going, she’s still not consented, and under certain circumstances you may be authorised to complain about teasing. If she does some stupid hollywood stunt where she says “no…” softly and then starts with the passionate kissing, she’s probably a fan of chick flicks and/or romance novels. If that scares you, I recommend you get to know a nice girl-racer instead.

What makes consent free? Just to be clear, I don’t mean free as in “free beer”³ here. It’s probably possible for her to charge you for it in some way or another and yet still have meaningfully consented. No, I’m talking about “free speech”- she has the same right to freedom from the influence of others in her consent as she does in the expression of her political views.

That has some pretty powerful consequences, however. It means that unless you’re confident drunkenness hasn’t impaired her judgement, a woman who is totally wasted cannot confidently give you consent. If you’re a gentlemen, you’ll kiss her and put her to sleep in a convenient bed and hope you catch her later without her being frustrated that you didn’t do what she went out to get drunk to get you to do. Of those sorts of mind games are born complaints about manipulative bitches, and as the stereotypes assure me, Mr. Average Dude, you do not want to get involved with those, so let’s move on.

It also means that relationships with huge power imbalances do not clearly have consent for sex. It’s possible that this informs our reactions to paedophilia, incest, relationships with large age gaps, highly controlling relationships, emotionally abusive relationships, and even relationships where one person controls the couple’s money.². This is because the threat of abusing that power can have a very large influence on your partner’s ability to say no without major consequences- a non-sexual relationship like parenthood, siblinghood, or an older mentor can be withdrawn as emotional blackmail, a controlling partner can withdraw other freedoms or economic support, or an emotionally abusive partner can decimate individuality or self-confidence to make a contrary decision.¹

I feel it’s also this principle of power imbalance that informs our disgust with violent rape. Death or injury as a consequence to refusing submission doesn’t turn it into sex. Someone looking at you threateningly with a weapon near their hand takes away responsibility for your actions from you to a certain degree. Unless of course you like to roleplay that kind of thing, in which case you ought to take some basic precautions that anyone who’s actually into that scene can elucidate you on rather quickly.

The difficulty in recognising consent is not because the idea is tricky or legalistic. It’s because it involves realising that everyone deserves control over their own body and their own actions, and that consent is much more about the people with physical or emotional power passing that threshhold of maturity about their own responsibility to acknowledge that fact fully than about complex analysis of someone else’s motives.

¹These possibilities should be kept in mind when someone refers to the idea of rape within marriage. Just because you love someone doesn’t mean they can’t mistreat you in a way that takes away your ability or desire to say yes to their advances. If marriage were a “get sex free” card rather than just another flavour of (sexual) relationship, divorce and annulment would possibly be a lot less common.
²Whether your feelings are positive or negative on each of those matters, keep in mind that opinions that come from gut reactions are very hard to fairly evaluate and we need to be very careful of rationalisations after the fact. I’m looking specifically at anyone reading this who has ever justified anything by saying “(s)he was asking for it.” Clearly that was not literally true, or you wouldn’t have bothered to use the clichéd phrase.
³You may now know I am a fan of open-source software if you’re familiar with the ways they clarify the three or four meanings of the word “free”. So go download firefox, which meets more than one of those meanings. Either that, or I really jerked you around by mentioning free beer in my post. Muahaha.

Green Party: A very representative list.

For those of you who don’t follow politics closely, the Green Party¹ released their party list recently. Because party members vote directly for their party list, it’s been nowhere near as secretive as is usually the case for other parties.

Worth noting is that five of the first eight (there will be a minimum of four female Green MPs in Parliament if they cross the 5% threshhold) Party List candidates are women with excellent activism and social support experience.

With a policy that guarentees both a male and a female co-leader of the Party, the Greens are showing their credential on women’s issues from the very start of this campaign. Let’s see if other party lists are as representative.

¹In the spirit of full disclosure, I am a member of the Green Party.

Police ignore sexual misconduct

Idiot/Savant over at No Right Turn has an excellent piece on the fact that police have ignored the recommendation that they include guidelines on power abuse and other sexual misconduct in their Police Code.

Shame on the police- writing something like this into their code is an extraordinarily easy commitment to meet, and could have wide effects on the police culture. The police spokesperson contended that sexual misconduct ought to be covered by their general guidelines on respect for people and property, (which one covers women, do you think? ) but they seem to be missing the point that explicit mention of sexual misconduct and the steps taken to avoid it when entering a potentially imbalanced relationship are very necessary to remind officers of their responsibility.

People do not connect general statements about principles like respect and proper conduct as relating to specific examples- it’s just a sad reality of the way people think. Try telling a five-year-old that they’re not to open a door, and you’ll start seeing them try to get their siblings to open it for them

We’re all in this together

One of the most frustrating things for me to explain as a feminist and queer rights advocate (and occassional opponent of racism, although as a white male geek I am pretty out of touch on this one, even if one of my family members is in a relationship with a Maori woman) is that injustice spills over from one category into another.

The most obvious starting point of how injustice defies simple categorisation is convergence: Consider a butch, fat, Maori lesbian. She doesn’t only suffer from racism, which is notable especially in the isolation from more peer groups with more emphasis on acadamic achievement and in the systematic discrimination in the enforcement of laws and regulations, but she also suffers multiplicative reinforcement of how different the brownness of her skin makes her. She has to deal with not just being a dyke, but being a fat dyke- stereotyped as unhealthy both physically and emotionally. Because she does not want to act like a stereotypical woman, she will often be isolated from the support of her fellow women in dissuading sexism, and because she’s a lesbian she is likely to lose support from her fellow Maori in solidarity against racism. And because she converges these concerns, her allies against any of her problems- gender roles, body shape, sexism, homophobia, or racism- will also be tarred with the brush of all of those problems.

This is a particular barrier against interracial couples, for instance, especially with Pakeha or white women in relationships with men from cultures that do not accept women’s liberation as a norm- leading to a sort of permanent tension in the relationship between racist undertones and sexist ones. That these kinds of couples succeed and deal with those tensions at all is a wonderful reminder of how small these issues can be when we just acknowledge them and resolve to listen to each other.

Convergence means not only that you experience two types of discrimination, but that those types of discrimination feed off each other and become more than adding up two parts of a whole: discrimination against black women keeps the usually challenged racism, whether invisible and systematic or overt and individualised, disguised under the convenient umbrella of sexism having “achieved its goals”, with the issues holding back women in income being excused as related to education, (despite women doing significantly better than men in formal education) a fair chance to sue for systematic pay discrimination dismissed as frivolous litigation. (women in the United States are currently regarded as having to file within 180 days of the first incidence of this systematic discrimination in order to be eligible to have their case heard)

There’s also what I call overflow. (I’ll admit that I haven’t seen any literature on this one yet. I’ve probably just not looked hard enough) This has created the image of radical, man-hating lesbian feminists that permeates the most brutal sexism. Because feminists support women who have been sorely emotionally traumatised by men and cannot accept them, they are conflated with man-haters. Because feminists have begun to listen to lesbian concerns, feminists are now suspected as being gay in disguise to hide their real agenda. Likewise, men who support feminism are viewed as closeted gays, transsexuals, as being too girly or “not manly enough”, because some male allies have come to the table this way.

Overflow is what makes discrimination against any group a problem for all groups- people who cannot acknowledge their own privilege start to view any significant engagement with the concerns of oppressed groups as wrong, and those of us who are privileged get obstructed by entrenched attitudes for trying to give up advantages we have no right to take for granted. Taking the case of male feminist allies in particular, being the one I’m familiar with, overflow doesn’t just get in the way of things you do to shed your own privilege.

It also involves in people challenging your manhood and conflating you, justified or not, with the groups you sympathise with- because men laugh about these type of things, we’re supposed to joke about clingy ex-girlfriends, and agree Helen Clark is some sort of robotic feminazi dictator machine, because it’s a matter of fact, not of perception- never mind that accepting the factuality of a label involves a certain amount of confirmation bias, because it takes a lot more mental flexibility to turn around labels- like slut, for instance- to apply equally to all groups. And even when this IS done, usually we qualify said labels differently. “Man-slut” is a great example- the qualification implies that men are an exception to the rules- much like calling a bussinessperson a “working woman”. Because apparently it’s unnatural for women to work, or workers to be women

Motherhood issues

The Standard has a good post on how well we’re doing in providing for mothers in New Zealand. (note: The Standard is a partisan blog for the Labour movement, so the post is not politically neutral) Steve notes that New Zealand is ranked the 4th best place to be a mother by the report, (Sweden, Noway, and Iceland take out the top three spots in that order, and Niger is worst) and we’re rated as the second best place to be a woman in general. (Sweden beats us again) The report is fascinating reading, and shows that while New Zealand is doing incredibly compared to other countries in key indicators of female welfare, we have a lot of room for improvement, and we should be worried about backsliding in some areas such as female representation.

Worth noting is that in terms of children we fall down all the way to 20th. While New Zealand has a long history of being on the forefront of women’s rights, we haven’t yet afforded the same respect to children, and it shows in more than the recent s59 debate, which largely ignored the issue of children themselves and focused on parents.

The confusion of politeness

So, one more post about the reaction to this whole Fritzl thing. This ought to be the last though, I think. Having reminded several people I’ve talked to about this news that yes, sex without explicit¹ and free² consent is rape, and weasling out of calling it such is just perpetuating this weird social attitude that while rape is not okay, we don’t necessarily have to condemn it explicitely. As you can imagine, the internal cognitive dissonance of this self-contradictory position makes it pretty funny to even write it down, let alone say it out loud.

One objection I’ve repeatedly heard (although fortunately not yet from people whose opinions I trust and value on this sort of matter) is that rape is not a term that is okay for public discussion. I pushed on this a bit harder and was told we should use the term “non-consensual sex” in the public arena. Why? While rape is a term that covers an emotive subject, it’s not inherently offensive, the word itself has no religious or cultural bias, and there are no strong taboos associated with it. Every bit of revoltion we feel when we hear the word rape is directly merited by the concept. What’s more, I feel that “sex” implies consentuality. The term “non-consensual sex” seems about as appropriate for rape as “non-violent violence” does for mental abuse. I pushed further for clarification about why rape is so objectionable a word to use. Apparently rape is “impolite.” And that one word explained everything I needed to know.

Weekenders 2: Thank you, Reuters.

• Shakesville noticed that someone at Reuters took out the dictionary and discovered that there was an entry in there for sex without consent.
• Erica Barnett fills my screen with links to the insidious sexism surrounding Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
• Feministing passes on the tragic claim that the NYPD will look harder for lost dogs than black women who are reported missing. My enthusiasm for taking systematic discrimination to the courts is curbed by the terrible details of the incident in question.
• Marriage laws discriminating against homosexuality have unintended consequences, but at least some workplaces disagree.
• Kiwiblog’s take on the morning after pill is elucidating in its misguidedness- apparently making a pill more accessible removes the likelihood that people will ever consult doctors about it when they have a choice to. (Beware of the comments, there is a lot of sexism to wade through)

Why Women Have Lots of Opportunities

Uh, sorry, I mean Why Men Earn More. It’s a fascinating read. In the spirit of full disclosure, the author of this article, Warren Farrell, is actually the disenchanted feminist I mentioned back in my primer to men’s rights. He’s certainly on my watch list for future reading. I say it’s a fascinating read- that doesn’t, however, mean I entirely agree with it. In fact there are some prominent assumptions he makes that just don’t check out.

He’s absolutely right to point out that that women have some excellent employment opportunities. There are a lot of fields, such as administrative support, teaching, linguistics, translation, psychology, speech analysis, transcription, etc… where women dominate the field, or earn more on average than men in comparable conditions, and that making women aware of these choices actually empowers them to consider what they want in a career and pick out something where they feel confident of success.