Posts by Deborah
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Well... the reason I first fell into my (now) husband's bed, with enthusiasm, was because he turned to me and said, with *that* look, "Let's have an affair." So we did. Though I guess we can't really call it an affair anymore after 22 years living together.
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Blue Milk writes a fabulous feminist, and feminist parenting, blog.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Based on what you have written (which is not to imply that it's not correct, just that I wasn't actually there so I don't actually know, 'though I'm happy to take your word for it)... No, a person that drunk can't give consent. So yes, that does imply rape, and I would hope that if he wanted to, he would be able to press charges.
Gender roles reversed... I don't know, but then again, I don't know how many women are able to successfully press charges in those circumstances. That doesn't make it right, of course, for either men or women.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Thank you, Russell. I was writing my comment as you posted yours, so I didn't see your comment before posting mine.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Moz,
@Moz:
You never mentioned that you’d stopped, only that situations had arisen when you doubted consent but chose not to explicitly ask.
That is reading an unbelievable amount into what I wrote, and it's reading something very nasty into what I wrote. I talked about 'looking back' and interrogating my own past behaviour and I explicitly said this:
and never one where I persisted when he said ‘No’, or even, ‘I don’t really feel like this.’
It's right up there in black and white. Go take a look.
This is an incredibly difficult topic to talk about, and up until this point, people have been very careful about what they have said about other people. I feel that you have said something quite horrible about me.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Moz,
I was talking about the specific sexual relationships that I have had, Moz, all three of which I recall very clearly, one of which is on-going. So there's a whole context behind what I said w.r.t. the couple of situations where I felt that my partner may have been obliging me. As in, I was keen but he wasn't so much, but was happy enough to carry on. And when he said he wasn't, I stopped. I wasn't making any generalisations about men, and really, I'm pretty upset by what you're implying about me.
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One of the scary things with looking back and wondering if you did the wrong thing is how utterly terrifying it is… for women. Most appear to have never thought about obtaining consent, let alone about what consent might look like if they had it.
Hmmm.... for me, the scary part lies in looking back and thinking about a particular event and realising that my participation was at least somewhat coerced, and my clear verbal, 'No, I don't want to do this', was disregarded. It was not a good relationship, one where I was very much overawed and unable to cope with my somewhat older, and very manipulative, boyfriend.
Looking back, I can think of a couple of incidents where I think my partner was obliging me, but never one where he was drunk or under the influence of drugs, and never one where I persisted when he said 'No', or even, 'I don't really feel like this.'
Also looking back, the first time I had sex was with a man who knew I wasn't all that sure about it (I blame the nuns), and he made a huge amount of space for me to make up my own mind about what to do.
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Oh, Craig. This is awful. It makes me want to race up to Auckland and sit with you and weep, and scream rage into the wind.
I do recall Doug Graham's opinions about rape-rape and not-really-rape too: the ability to be massive twatcocks is definitely cross party. I wish the Labour party hierarchy would just remove the damned billboard/campaign thingy. Would it really be so hard to do?
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Che Tibby,
- think about whether you’re already guilty of it
That's a very scary thing to do i.e. to interrogate your own past behaviour. It could be crushing. But it's worth doing, in the positive sense as well, working out when you handled a situation right, and what was right about it, and why, and reflecting on how you will handle a similar situation again.
Getting back to something Emma said in her first comment...
I'd like to see ONE discussion where people talk about what they - and everyone else - can do about rape prevention.
... and thinking about Ben's story above, have any other people got stories about when they did something positive to stop rape or harassment or abuse or violence? There might be some common threads which we could draw out as the beginnings of a primer on positive steps towards preventing rape.
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I've linked to Catherine Deveny's piece about slutwalk over at The Lady Garden, but I think it's worth linking to from here too: Slutwalk: for the free woman in all of us.
And this one is doing my head in, mostly because it was linked to from Arts and Letters Daily, which in Denis Dutton's day did seem to regard feminism as a very dirty word indeed: Slutwalks and the future of feminism, by Jessica Valenti.
(@Christopher... what Hillary said about Endnote. Right down to reverting to a word document to get it all looking okay.)