I was recently in an interesting conversation about the psychology of violent and deliberate non-consent. The people for whom consent-awareness talks won’t resonate because they don’t want to stop forcing people. But maybe also the people who think they care about consent but change the moment they enter an actual sexual situation.
the psychology bit:
And what that conversation boiled down to is that our society teaches people that their sexuality is dirty, that wanting any kind of sex is inherently predatory, sinful, shameful. And there’s a particular kind of people (mostly men) who take that intense self-hate and project it on someone who is even more shameful according to society (a woman having a sexuality, a feminine gay man, a person of color, a trans person, a sex worker). So they project all their own self-hate on that person to the point where that person deserves everything that happens to them, because they now exist to pay for that warped man’s sins.
And like, that doesn’t describe every rapist, but it seems to describe quite a few of them.
And it may manifest particularly strong in straight men because they are trained to externalize their pain instead of owning it and at the same time they do not have access to honest vulnerable conversations deconstructing feelings of shame around their sexuality the way women and LGBT people do. Straight male sexuality has such an ever present spotlight in our culture as this constant aggressive force, that it is never seriously unpacked in all its vulnerability.
So all that shame and guilt is still there. And on top of that there is society telling men that they can act out and pointing towards groups that society claims are even more shameful for having a sexuality.
Self-Hate + outlet + target = violence.
the education bit:
So how would we set out to reach and change men like that? Particularly men and teenage boys who are somewhere on the developmental path towards becoming that kind of a person? More talking about consent isn’t going to work. In fact, if all the feminism they hear only ever talks about how predatory men are, they’re likely to become more stuck in the idea that they’re inherently terrible.
So I’m imagining that better consent education for such an audience should focus on working through men’s shame about sexuality, especially straight men’s sexuality, and on processing feelings of vulnerability and shame by feeling an expressing them instead of externalizing them by lashing out at other people.
And real consent education, what it looks and feels like and how to communicate about consent, is more like step 3, a lesson which can only be learned after it has been understood that a person that chooses to be sexual is deserving of having consensual experiences.
So sex positivity + vulnerability as building blocks to meaningful consent education. What da ya think?
QueerAnarchism 