The privilege of consent

If you're going to read this, read the article first. Make sure you know what you think (agree with, disagree with) before getting on to what I think: I don't want to influence anyone. Done? Good. Now let's begin.

First, briefly, the few things I agree with. For convenience, a quick rundown:

1) Agreed that "slut" is a compliment. Always said so. Trouble is, now that it's recognised as such, it will be thrown around like confetti, showered on people who are manifestly unworthy of so sacred a designation. Semantic erosion through overuse, the usual story. Sooner or later we're going to have to invent a new term to honour the priestly caste of women who are blessed with the gift of enjoying sex bareheaded, without the encumbrance of steeple hats and without imposing unrealistic expectations on partners. Suggestions welcome (but don't send them here. Nobody reads this. You may as well send them to Santa Claus).
2) Agreed that when it comes to pickup routines, people tend to go by what they've observed, what they've been told, what they've seen in movies and Roosh V videos, what they've read in a well-thumbed paperback with shingled yellow cover called "100 Sure-fire Pick-up Lines" found in a gym changing room, etc. Agreed that this is less than optimal. Agreed that it would be nice if there were some sort of established, enlightened social conventions in operation to guide people towards mutually beneficial hookups - some way of making the whole "dating" business somewhat less fraught. I'll have more to say on this later, I expect.

Now to what really, really pissed me off.

Let's start with the background. As far as I understood it before reading this article, #metoo was all about the great mass of women, the previously silent overwhelming majority, being emboldened by the #Weinstein case to speak out about the horrific sexual abuses "they too" had suffered at the hands of #men, who routinely exploited their position of power and privilege in society to terrorise, rape, harass, stalk, abuse, bully, traumatise and silence them. Now that, at long last, this shift in the Zeitgeist allowed their voices to be heard, naturally they came forward to recount those experience which had haunted them and ruined their lives for so long. In which case, given the seriousness of all this, far be it from me to trivialise or cast doubt on these experiences, by. e.g. suggesting that some of these women, in their desperation not to be left out, were dredging up old memories of "bad dates or near misses", in order to try to extract some belated victim mileage from what were, in essence, merely disappointing or embarrassing encounters. In particular, I would have to be a monster of cynical misogyny to write something like the following (my italics):

"It is as if women are watching the film of their lives from a different vantage point, searching for something they missed at the time. Stop. Rewind. Look again."

All I can say is I'm glad I won't have to take the heat for writing that. Still, the italicised phrase is rather telling. Let's try to imagine how this might play out in practical reality. Hinsliff, the writer of this article, mentions a Tory MP who allegedly touched a woman's knee "so briefly it was almost deniable", but I think we can do better than that. Here's an everyday story: a teacher colleague of mine, let's call her Juana, one afternoon, some years ago, is leaning over to fill a cup of water from the cooler in an empty staffroom, when a hand suddenly whacks her on the behind so hard that the water is spilt. Turning, she sees a colleague, a new male teacher who had recently joined the school, snickering at her. "Hi, how's it going," the aggressor enquires mockingly. "Fine," she replies, with a sickly attempt at a placatory smile, and exits with her half-empty cup of water as fast as possible. End of story. She doesn't mention it to anyone higher up or make a fuss, resolving simply to avoid any close contact with that particular colleague in future. Years later, however, she reads in the press or on social media that incidents as trivial as this one are now taken seriously, as cases of "sexual harassment at work". If she wants, she could name names, maybe land that former colleague in hot water (although the colleague in question, an American, lasted only a year before moving on to a better job in his country of origin). Hinsliff, as far as I can tell, thinks she should go ahead and make a splash on Twitter. I disagree. Reasons follow.

First, it's not worth making a fuss about because it's just not that important. While Juana was upset by the incident, it didn't have any lasting consequences. Because no one else at work saw or knew about it, it didn't affect her professionally in any way. The burly American aggressor only worked there for a year, leaving with a good reference. There were no further incidents, since Juana went to elaborate lengths to give the arrogant creep in question a wide berth for the rest of that year. It didn't ruin her life. In fact, if it weren't for all the endless anecdotes arising out of #metoo, she probably wouldn't have "stopped, rewound and looked again" at the incident at all.

Then there's mens rea. It's unlikely that the creep in question, while clearly a repulsive, entitled individual, intended to cause Juana any genuine distress. He may even have thought that his manner of breaking the ice with a virtual stranger (scarcely ten words had previously been exchanged between them) would be welcomed. Of course, if this is true then Ms Hinsliff would have harsh things to say about a toxic social cripple so clearly unable - or unwilling, or a combination of both - to "read the room". And I wouldn't necessarily disagree with her on that. Still, it's questionable whether someone who was possibly "just trying to be friendly", albeit in an inappropriate manner, deserves to lose his job and reputation years after the event over such an insignificant faux pas. That's my feeling about it, anyway.

Thirdly: consider what you are buying into with #metoo. It is not about delivering wrongdoers into the hands of the law, where they will be afforded due process and their day in court, hence something approximating to "justice". With #metoo, the law is irrelevant, since the only tribunal before which the accused will be dragged is that of "public opinion" (you know, that one where you have 140 characters to summon to your defence), leading to "public condemnation", leading to the usual: employers unable to distinguish between this threatening tsunami of "public feeling" and their consumer or client base, hence forced to kowtow against their better judgment, and sack their kindest, gentlest employee on the basis of dubious hearsay. And - as discussed in recent posts - while one may approve of building communities that effectively bypass the state, the defining feature of a healthy community is, let us never forget, the personal responsibility willingly assumed by its members, while the clearest defining feature of #metoo is lack of same. Anyone can accuse, and if they are lying, there are absolutely no consequences. Nor are we allowed to question their motives for accusing. You may have motives other than malice, such as neutralizing a potential threat to future victims, or fostering "awareness", but you can hardly deny that you are entering a theme park for the congenitally malicious and the pathologically attention-seeking. Are you any more comfortable in such company than you would be in an empty staffroom with a leering creep? I wouldn't be.

Now, I know that, in saying all this, I will be accused of insensitivity and of trivialising women's experience. So I perhaps ought to admit here that I've been leading you up the garden path slightly on this story. In reality, the disgusting, arrogant, entitled creep referred to above was female, not male. Also, the teacher referred to as Juana was in fact male, not female. In fact, "Juana" was me.

Does this make any difference? Well, in one respect obviously yes: there has been no #metoo for the majority of men. If I could accuse another male of sexually harassing me, I might just get a bit of sympathetic attention, since my experience could be chalked up to the same "men are bad" narrative as the rest - but to claim a man can be sexually harassed by a woman invites only mockery, indifference or disbelief. If I told this story to Ms Hinsliff, she'd probably refuse to accept it as genuine: at least, it's clear that the idea of men having to go through the same sort of experiences the women she mentions go through, in comparable numbers, has never even occurred to her. I suspect that if not Ms Hinsliff herself, many feminists would regard my slap on the bum as a highly satisfactory instance of "sauce for the gander" - this, despite the fact that I wouldn't do that to a woman even if I had been married to her for twenty years, nor do I personally know anyone who would. (Collectivists are like that: individual differences don't matter, you stand for everyone they hate.)

Now, this in itself isn't what gets my goat. It doesn't get my goat because, if I'm honest, the anecdote mentioned above does not belong to any discernible pattern from which I can draw general conclusions. I have sometimes felt fleetingly uncomfortable with female colleagues crossing my personal boundaries, touching me when I didn't want to be touched, etc, but have never experienced anything else comparable to that one "Juana" incident in a work environment, or if I have I've forgotten about it. (Not that the world of language instruction is a haven of progressive non-sexism: in the last university language department I worked in, it was announced in a staff meeting by the female boss that thenceforth the only staff toilet we had, a pokey single-user affair with a loo and a washbasin at the end of a corridor, would be strictly for female teachers only: men, we were informed, could "go behind a tree". No reason was given for this reversal of previous gender-blind restroom policy). Of course, if you saw what I looked like, the information that I have not been terrorised throughout my life by drooling, horny female colleagues trying to rip off my clothes would strike you as less than astonishing. Point being, I have no way of knowing how much female-on-male sexual harassment goes on.

Nor, I suspect, does anyone. A couple of links in the Guardian send me to a TUC report on sexual harassment in the workplace, and a previous study by law firm Slater and Gordon: both of these studies, considered as eloquent with regards to the plight of women, are based on questionnaires directed explicitly and exclusively at a single gender, a stipulation which to me seems no less bizarre than specifying, for example, that such questionnaires should only be answered by people with a certain blood group. What, pray, is so terrifying, or so morally egregious, about inviting men into a conversation about unpleasant experiences at work that anyone might have - even a physically repulsive social cripple like me - especially when, like me, they have never held any "power" of any kind whatsoever? Is it simply that we would have to acknowledge that men, sometimes, can find themselves in a role that is not that of the aggressor? Is it the idea that men might have vulnerabilities, might even be capable of experiencing shame or embarrassment or fear? Is that what scares people so?

But that still isn't what really pissed me off in the article. No, it was this:

If sexual encounters can be divided into roughly three categories – happy and consensual; rape; and a hazy area of acts you did not want to do but to which you ended up giving in – then it is the third that now consumes attention. It is the things women go along with out of politeness, pity or embarrassment, or because, as Nigella Lawson put it recently, they were taught that, in rejecting any overture, “we mustn’t make a man feel bad about anything”.

(italics mine). You get the picture. Leaving aside the questionable assumptions underlying the proposed division of sexual encounters (if you are not "happy", does that always mean you have either been raped or have "given in"?) what leaps out at me from this paragraph is the assumption that if someone has "given in", or has "gone along with it" "out of pity or embarrassment", then that person obviously has to be a woman, since the idea of a man "giving in" to sex is patently ridiculous. And the reason this makes me angry is not just that it is demonstrably wrong, indeed back to front, but that it negates, at a sweep, at a few keystrokes, a problem that defines the comprehensive failure that my own life has entirely been: the problem of a being man who is unable to say no to a woman, whether in or out of the bedroom, providing only that the woman is willing to resort to the nuclear option of shedding tears in order to get her way.

I have another post in preparation on this: it's half written right now, but when it's ready, it won't be light reading. But here's a rundown of the problem. Over my 56 years of existence, I have had nine relationships with women, varying in duration from a few months to (in one case) over a decade, which had, apart from the combination of sex and living together, one thing in common: I never wanted to have that relationship in the first place, and wanted it less with every day that passed, but didn't know how to extricate myself from it without, presumedly, causing my partner unhappiness, something I couldn't bring myself to do. In addition, each of those nine women, at some point in the relationship, usually very early on, responded to an attempt on my part to "cool things off" with tears. And on every one of those occasions, I found that, faced with a crying woman, I would instinctively and automatically back down, assuming the situationally bizarre but deeply instinctive role of protector, denying everything I had just said, swearing eternal devotion, and basically inviting her to use me as Queen Elizabeth might have used Raleigh's cloak. And every single time I did that, the woman in question would dry her eyes and move in with me the following day.

The obvious question of how someone can keep up a long-term cohabiting relationship based on little more than the categorical imperative of  "not making [her] feel bad about anything" is one I'll leave to the next post. My point is simply that it happens. A man can agree to a date with a woman of his acquaintance out of politeness, can feel pressured into saying certain cautious, forced, clenched-teeth sweet nothings as a result of his hand being grabbed across a table, especially where the elaborate arrangements (kids engineered out of the house, soft lights, bottle of wine) denote the sort of effort that inspires a vague mixture of tenderness and pity; he can acquiesce to a blow job from a parrot-nosed, squeaky-voiced, limp-haired co-author for whom he feels no more stirrings of lust than he does for the nearest waste-paper bin, out of sheer embarrassment and desire not to offend or create a "scene"; he can try a dozen or so broad hints that maybe the elephant-thighed ex-student in front of him perhaps ought to be heading home, before giving up and accepting the inevitable, that she is resolutely not going anywhere, and he is going to have to go to bed with her and try to figure out some way of not throwing up in the midst of that vast sea of gelatinous flab; he can then find himself (after the inevitable tear-filled "I thought you wanted me" interlude the next day) wearily"going out with" her for a period of eighteen ridiculous months. He can find himself in a foreign country, taken in by a woman and paying for lodgings with sex, trying to weave into his everyday behaviour the pretence that this is a "romantic relationship" and not just rent payment. Or how about this:

I was 22, and my girlfriend (the first-ever one, the feminist) had a rented room across the corridor from mine (the Chi, in Chester, if you must know). We had separate rooms, on her insistence, as ours was an "open" relationship, and she needed privacy to entertain the succession of soi-disants "airline pilots" she had taken to inviting back from seedy bars. That morning, I arrived home after an abortive attempt to hitch-hike to Spain: I had got as far as Calais, then turned back, having no more money, had hitched all night up the M1, M5?6? was it? Holmes Chapel Services anyway, and thence to Chester, arriving home at around 10am. I greeted her, flopped into bed and was out like a light. When I woke up, an hour or two later, there was a one-armed, red-headed gay bloke called Barry in bed next to me, feeling me up with his one hand. Apparently Yvonne (for that was her name) had given him my room key and told him I was secretly gay and secretly attracted to him. I ended up giving him (or rather attempting to give him: he wasn't really up for it) a blow job, simply as a desperate ruse to extend the distance between his hand and my junk without having to admit that sex with a man was the last thing I was interested in. What else could I do? Yvonne was a woman, she was my girlfriend, so I wasn't about to tell a perfect stranger that she was a liar. The curious thing was that, although it was clear she had tried to get me raped by proxy - presumably out of spite arising from my attempt to take a few days' holiday in a sunny country - we never discussed it afterwards: I was just too embarrassed and disturbed by the whole thing.

Not that she really needed a proxy. I still remember quite vividly one curious occasion early in our relationship, when we were both still students and a great deal of time was spent in my student lodgings. We had already had sex that day, I forget whether once or twice, but I was exhausted and wanted to sleep. She wanted more. She went on and on, pestering me. I kept saying no. She started getting nasty: I forget the words, but there was bitterness and spite and irritation in her voice: she couldn't conceive of the possibility that a man might be worn out and genuinely not want anything: she, after all, was God's gift to the masculine libido. Eventually something snapped, and I shouted at her: "all right then, all right, I'll try". She was already on top of me. What was bizarre, looking back, was how, once I had performed (or attempted to, I honestly can't remember) she went into a huff lasting the best part of three days, based on the fact I had "snapped" at her: in other words, that I had been less than gracious about being wheedled, cajoled, browbeaten, emotionally blackmailed into a humiliating sex act I had already clearly and directly informed her I did not want. In fact, this alleged rudeness on my part became a starred item in that regular litany of ancient-history grievances which certain women are trained to accumulate against their partner, and to air on regular occasions as a psychological weapon of domination.

This kind of thing forms the substance of my life, at least in its relationship aspect, in its sex aspect: a tragicomedy of diffidence, shame, embarrassment, faking it, acquiescing, being bullied, desperately attempting to please or at least to not "make her feel bad about anything", feeling forced to play a role from which there was no respite other than blessed solitude.

Now, I'm not saying that I am the bog-standard typical male. I don't know if I am or not, because what I do know is that if other men were like me, then they, like me, would keep very quiet about it. In any case, that isn't the point. I'm simply saying that if you are going to write articles about the "new" rules of dating - whether the ones that have recently sprung into being or the ones you hope will spring into being - with the emphasis on heterosexual encounters, you had better consider fairly how things might look from both sides of the gender divide. This, Ms Hinsliff signally fails to do, preferring to content herself with a grotesque, unexamined stereotype of "men" as brash, thoughtless, arrogant sexual predators, devoid of empathy, for whom the consent of the other is a mere preliminary formality. In her enlightened view, there is only one person in a sexual encounter whose feelings and desires matter, and who had therefore better make sure she "articulates" them properly; there is only one person who needs to educate himself in order to correctly interpret those signals and act accordingly. There is only one person, likewise, who needs to give consent, and only one who needs to make sure the right sort of consent has been given before he presses on. And of course, there's only one partner whose pleasure needs to be "unashamedly centre-stage". One thing's for sure, this vision of relations between the sexes certainly couldn't be accused of being adventurously egalitarian.

In short, there is, potentially, a new, enlightened approach to dating that is waiting to be laid on the line in a Guardian article, but that article clearly will not be written by Ms Hinsliff, whose mentality remains steadfastly Victorian. This becomes especially clear when we turn to the question of consent. Here she quotes with approval, for example, an apparent resuscitation of Marie Stopes:

What young men should look for, Tillman argues, is not the potentially ambiguous absence of “no”, but the enthusiastic presence of a “yes, yes, yes” or affirmative consent.

(my italics) Elsewhere, we are told that "no means no" puts undue pressure on "the person in the most vulnerable position", who, in case we weren't listening, is revealed in the next paragraph to be, always and invariably, the woman. Once again, the possibility that a young (or not so young) woman might also "look for" affirmative consent from her male partner, or might want to take his "no" seriously, or see him as equally vulnerable to her and in some cases more so, is not even considered. His "consent", affirmative or not, is a given: after all - Stopes II insists - he is the predator, isn't he? Whoever heard of a lion turning down a freshly-killed gazelle?

What this attitude reveals, fundamentally, is a refusal to take responsibility. On the feminist view, if a woman has a bad time during a sexual encounter, it is the man's fault; if a man has a bad time, then it is his own fault. If she fails to express enthusiastic consent, then the man is guilty of, at the very least, a culpable lack of sensitivity; if he fails to express enthusiastic consent, well, who cares, you're not gonna try and tell me he didn't enjoy it. He's lucky to get anything at all, and should be grateful for anything he gets.

And if Ms Hinsliff sees no reason to examine these presuppositions, it's because they are those of the dominant culture, reinforced through innumerable stereotypes. Once again, feminism reveals itself to be less a genuine challenge to ingrained attitudes than the endlessly wagging finger of a purse-lipped Victorian governess. I think we can do a lot better than this.