This is just to say

[ailbhe]

I have been reading the post about rape and consent and stuff and all the comments, and thinking about the times in my own past when I failed to make consent clear by buying into the cultural structure which has seduction as a base and by ignoring my own involuntary "No" responses as "one of those involuntary things" rather than as "oh, look, part of me said no."

And then there were the times when I cajoled, seduced or persuaded, my own self.

I think I am going to work harder to make the "enthusiastic collaboration" model of consent the default. It will make a lot of people's sex lives simpler and a whole lot more fun.

Sometimes I think I could make a bigger difference if I were raising boys.

Comments

[sashajwolf]

Yes, I think it's really important that women don't say "yes" when we mean "no" or "no" when we mean "yes" (provided we feel physically safe enough to say what we mean, of course), and that we take the part of us that wants to say "no" seriously. If we aren't clear about our state of consent when we have the ability to do so, we make it easier for people to take that ability away, we feel less powerful than we really are, and we aren't fair to decent people who do care about our consent.

[ailbhe]

we aren't fair to decent people who do care about our consent

This is the part I bitterly regret. OK, I had sex I didn't want, but that's nothing to what the other party involved ended up with!