unquietpirate:

Up Close and Personal: Consent as a Felt Sense and the TSA

[…] The woman who patted me down last Sunday was so good at making the encounter feel consensual — or more consensual than usual, or perhaps “minimally non-consensual”, anyway. I can’t put my finger on exactly what it was she did, how she moved, how she inflected her voice and when and where she made eye-contact specifically, to inject a sense of non-violation into the situation. But it was something about her own gently expressed awkwardness in combination with her unquestionable competence and professionalism that did the trick.

She made me feel like we were both humans stuck in a bad situation that neither one of us was happy about, but that it was also sort of funny in a sad way, and that it was a worse situation for me than it was for her, but we were agreed on the point that we mostly just both wanted to get it over with and get on with our lives without either one of us causing the other undue hardship.

[…]

And this is my point. Even though every TSA agent uses the exact same words and touches the passenger in the exact same places, some of those encounters feel more consensual than others. According to a legalistic definition of consent as permission, every encounter I have had with the TSA pat-down has been identical in terms of consent. But there is absolutely no question in my mind that this is not the case. “Consent” is an experience much more nuanced and rich and complex than a simple question of whether I said “yes” or “no.”
Link to the rest of Unquietpirate's essay

I love that you’re talking about this. And because I thought you’d find it interesting, I wanted to chime in with a story of my own. ( Read more... )

( Click for context. )
[Addressing the OP directly because that’s how this post flowed.]

Here’s a shitty fact about straight society: there are a lot of things that don’t explicitly mean “do you wanna have sex with me?” that do, in fact, often mean “so, wanna have sex with me?” It’s confusing, I know. A lot of women turn down offers to do stuff that they wouldn’t actually be averse to doing, like … you know, meeting someone in a private place for coffee, because they have a diffuse sense of social discomfort that warns them they might not be hearing exactly what the other person is implying. And yes, straight men set up this dynamic, in order to make sexual offers to straight women and not be turned down directly.

When everyone’s on the same page, it sort of works. Like, “I turned down his offer to grab some coffee together after dinner, and we can both pretend he didn’t just covertly proposition me.” Or “I can agree to have coffee with him, and the rest of the room can pretend we didn’t just have a conversation about how we’re going back to his place to have sex.” It’s not fair of straight men to get their reaction to hearing their own secret codes used in a non-sexual way all over your fabulous gay self. That sucks.

I would be all in favor of said secret codes being a lot more publicly accessible, or abolished entirely, because it’s dangerous for, say, socially awkward or neuroatypical women (and everyone who didn’t grow up with English as their first language) to have to navigate a world where people are offering one thing and believe they’re obtaining consent for another. But it clearly also creates problems for you, as a gay man who wants to have literal coffee with man friends and keeps being misunderstood.

On those grounds as well, help us dismantle the patriarchy. :)

Tags: sexuality, feminism, consent, psychology

[Discussion truncated.] I have not found “For the most part, this semantic expansion of identity space has been embraced and celebrated” and “it seems generally accepted that it’s a good thing for people to have lots of different words to talk about ourselves with” to be true. I have encountered (as in run into, not as in people did it to me) quite major amounts of backlash around these things, from ‘why do you need labels anyway’ to all the issues people take with demisexuality to invalidation or policing of non binary identities to mockery etc. Which is all gross, but I really have seen it a lot.)

Meanwhile, semantic expansion of identity space is important and excellent. So. Thank you. --lyricalagony

I haven’t either. There’s a lot of anger from people who don’t consider themselves part of the queer politics social bubble and don’t see any reason for the enormous proliferation in terms. Part of it is certainly coming from regressive, “don’t rock the boat” types. But I’m concerned that the emphasis on popularizing ever more specific words may be yet another way for career activists to look busy and a thing that’s encouraging people to be apolitical and self-absorbed: identity politics taken to the extreme where everyone has a list of labels a mile long and accepts or mistrusts other people primarily based on what they call themselves.

Rolequeerness seems to be clearing the way for actual, concrete changes. I like what Unquietpirate and Maymay are doing with it and I see the use of it. But it’s overtly political in a way that most labels aren’t. It’s embracing the ways that it confronts existing structures. And it feeds into more direct challenges to sexual Business as Usual, in the context of Consent as a Felt Sense. That is, it’s being popularized in a situation where the people exploring it aren’t boasting that their identity is omg, so radical, while in practice fleeing from risk and conflict. That, to me, makes it quite different from most labels.

Tags: discourse consensus reality sexuality changing things

"So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me ‘arch priestess of the sightless,’ ‘wonder woman,’ and a ‘modern miracle.’ But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics—that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world—that is a different matter! It is laudable to give aid to the handicapped. Superficial charities make smooth the way of the prosperous; but to advocate that all human beings should have leisure and comfort, the decencies and refinements of life, is a Utopian dream, and one who seriously contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind."
—Helen Keller (letter to Senator Robert La Follette, 1924)

funny how the most popular narrative about helen keller is a harmless little girl who learns to communicate and then the story ends for some reason gee i wonder why that is
--callmeoutis

Gee. Why does the popular narrative end before she became a communist? So strange! And the Martin Luther King Jr. narrative does the same thing! What a coincidence!
--malachite-in-corvidae

Also, that the narrative is generally about the abled teacher helping her and how amazing she was to be able to do it. As the wikipedia article frames it: “The story of how Keller’s teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become widely known through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker.” So even the story about Helen Keller is often not really about her.
--ami-angelwings

Reminds me of a quote by Hélder Pessoa Câmara, late Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Brazil, that is often paraphrased as “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they called me a Communist.”

Tags: economics, capitalism, civilization created poverty, artificial scarcity

I've been running into one particular misunderstanding a lot. I'm going to write out what I think is the antidote as a bulletpointed list.

-The fact that you're being abused doesn't keep you from being abusive.

-The fact that other people exercise unfair power over you actually makes it more likely that there's someone you're exercising unfair power over.

-Being aware that this is a thing can help with not perpetuating it.

-Asserting "you're not being abused! What's happening to me is way worse!" is the opposite of helpful.

-Often, it makes the other person feel like they have to challenge the importance of your abuse to prove that what's happening to them is worth bringing up or caring about.

-A lot of people who are being abused and exploited in different ways antagonize each other with this kind of misdirected anger.

-We need to acknowledge that people whose struggles are different from ours have valid struggles, and face real injustices, without letting the conversation turn into a false dichotomy where abuse against a particular group is the only abuse worth talking about.

"In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. "Remember Auschwitz" is not an acceptable response.

In short: Israel, in the world's eyes, is a normal state, but one behaving in abnormal ways. It is in control of its fate, but the victims are someone else. It is strong, very strong, but its behavior is making everyone else vulnerable. And so, shorn of all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its supporters today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This - the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic - is regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel's trump card. If it has been played more insistently and aggressively in recent years, that is because it is now the only card left.

The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts: Ariel Sharon used it with characteristic excess but he was only the latest in a long line of Israeli leaders to exploit the claim. David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir did no different. But Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized - but then responds to its critics with loud cries of "anti-Semitism" - it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews.

In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel's reckless behavior and insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia. But the traditional corollary - if anti-Jewish feeling is linked to dislike of Israel then right-thinking people should rush to Israel's defense - no longer applies. Instead, the ironies of the Zionist dream have come full circle: For tens of millions of people in the world today, Israel is indeed the state of all the Jews. And thus, reasonably enough, many observers believe that one way to take the sting out of rising anti-Semitism in the suburbs of Paris or the streets of Jakarta would be for Israel to give the Palestinians back their land."

Excerpt from Tony Judt's article, The Country that Wouldn't Grow Up

This was published in Haaretz in 2006, but it's only gotten more relevant and urgent since then.

Last year, my brother was hit by a motorcycle. We were crossing the street and the light changed before we got to the other side and these guys on motorcycles just gunned their engines and one of them hit him. We are incredibly lucky, because my brother was completely unharmed. He fell on top of the motorcycle and it skidded sideways and started leaking fluid. ( Click for the rest of the story )

I was reading an interesting article a couple of days ago in Arab News, the less tendentious of two English language newspapers in Riyadh. Here's the crux of it:

"With Saudi Arabia's changing economic environment, higher costs of living, inflation, and a population of over 25 million -- over 50 percent of whom are women -- women's participation in the workforce is no longer a social issue; it is an economic one. Single income families can no longer afford to accommodate the needs and wants of an average-sized family."

Hmm.