The other day, the essay I co-wrote with unquietpirate, “You Can Take It Back: Consent as a Felt Sense,†was linked on MetaFilter. In our essay, we argue that understanding consent as a form of “agreement†or contract is at the root of many patterns of violence, including but not limited to rape culture and the overwhelming, global epidemic of sexual assault. That is to say, rape is widespread and normalized because a fundamental component of the experience of rape, namely consent-violating behavior, is also widespread and normalized. Finally, we propose that understanding consent as “being okay with an experience one is having or has had†rather than legalistically as “permission to do a thing†might go a long way toward mitigating and ultimately healing from this widespread violence.
This should hardly be a controversial assertion. Who can claim to have never experienced unwanted coercive influence on our decision making process? Who can claim to have never said “yes†to anything under threat of violence? Only a fool or a deity could possibly claim such a thing, and even then the fool’s ignorance of his or her or their position on the business end of the guns does not change the fact of the gun’s presence.
Yet our essay is reliably controversial and reliably inspires the most vicious sentiments. This blog got a surge of threatening comments after MetaFilter linked to it, and the thread on MetaFilter itself quickly ballooned to nearly 100 comments, largely filled with hate-spew but also some remarkable gems of critical thought.
There is a pattern to the hate-spew. Aside from the ad-hominems (“maymay is a horrible person,†which may be true but doesn’t change the merits of the argument), the hate-spew follows three basic lines of thought.
