If you’ve ever made a formal complaint of gendered violence, you might have felt that translating raw experience into the language of law is like describing a walk through the forest using only the formal scientific names of the trees. Whereas in lived reality, you saw the sunlight filtered green through the leaves, noted the precise shine off a beetle’s shell, and started at the sudden call of a bird, in telling it everything becomes technical, different. Whereas in lived reality, you were muddling through your discomforts, trying to use the right language to send the right signals, sometimes not sure what you wanted, the law is black and white. Did a sexual assault happen or didn’t it happen? Is there evidence?

It’s hard to translate the complexities of power, intimacy, and sexuality into a cohesive narrative for our own understanding, let alone to lodge a formal complaint. The schemas that feminists write in anti-domestic violence or sexual harassment pamphlets can seem simple, neat renditions of power and violence on the page, but when we look at some of our own experiences we may find them complex.

This complexity has been described by some as the “gray zone,” or the idea that there is a space between consent and non-consent. Katie Roiphe opined on the concept in her 1993 book The Morning After, in which she argued that college campus feminists’ activism against rape infantilized women by redefining ambiguously coercive sexual encounters as rape. Roiphe has continued to argue that contemporary feminists’ widening of the definition of rape is a puritanical infantilization of women in the guise of progressive politics. Laura Sessions Stepp, meanwhile, popularized the idea in her 2007 Cosmopolitan article about “gray rape,” or young women’s ambiguous experiences of assault or sexual coercion, often involving alcohol.

But there’s one problem: The “gray zone” idea has often functioned as a tactic to minimize or dismiss violence, and therefore evade accountability, by claiming that sex is inherently a murky, illegible realm.

Feminists on the other side of the debate respond to this by saying that consent is, after all, quite simple: It’s a freely-given, enthusiastic “yes” which is clearly and unambiguously signaled, as simple as figuring out whether or not someone wants tea.

I’ve used this consent-is-black-and-white line in my own work. And yet a dissonance remains. Just as the translation of sexual violence or harassment from lived experience to legal complaint can reveal those aspects of experience that remain fraught and ambiguous in our own minds, our experiences of gender, power, and violence are not always black and white. That is not to say that all experiences of sexual violence are somehow elusive or ambiguous; there are plenty of clear and egregious instances of violence in which the idea of the “gray zone” is a strategy used to sow doubt in the minds of victims.

But in many of our lived experiences, there is complexity. Perhaps an experience involves multiple kinds of intersecting power—class, race, sexuality, gender—or takes place in the context of an intimate relationship with power dynamics we can’t quite parse. For many of us, the complexity may revolve around the question of enthusiastic consent: Did I or my partner indicate it clearly enough?

These tensions recently came into relief in the discussion surround the Babe story on Aziz Ansari, a tale of a night of “bad sex” or sexual assault that is unsettling, yet ubiquitous. Feminist analyses of the incident emphasized that it was precisely the banality of the story that prompted pushback. If we admit that this is assault, many writers argued, we must reinterpret many of our own experiences, and that scares us; it means uprooting what we understand about intimacy, each other, ourselves. The more unflinching a gaze we turn to the violence of our own gender norms, the more we understand that coercion itself is a continuum.

There is a distinction, however, between acknowledging the complexity of gendered violence, and endorsing the idea that consent is an unknowable “gray zone.” Because power is multilayered, advocates of the “gray zone” logic argue, we can shrug consent off as an inherently flawed framework and accept that some degree of coercion in inalienable to sex. But when we think of gendered violence as complex, moments of ambiguity or discomfort don’t lead us to reject the responsibility of consent. They rather push us to ask deeper questions about how gender and power shape our intimacies and how consent itself is enabled or hindered by power relations. Experiences that feel violating yet ambiguous challenge us to think of violence as a spectrum of power and coercion, rather than a simple dichotomy between “good sex” and “rape.”

Katie Roiphe argues as much herself, albeit with the wrong conclusion, in her 2011 New York Times article, “In Favor of Dirty Jokes and Risque Remarks”:

The so-called rape epidemic on campuses is more a way of interpreting, a way of seeing, than a physical phenomenon. It is more about a change in sexual politics than a change in sexual behavior . . . We all agree that rape is a terrible thing, but we no longer agree on what rape is . . . The lines between rape and sex begin to blur.

Roiphe is right: It’s not that suddenly, more people are being sexually harassed or sexually assaulted. It’s that we’re now labelling a lot of experiences as sexual violence when we didn’t previously understand them as such. And it’s true: That creates uncertainty about the meaning of rape, and of gendered violence more generally, and calls into question the “normal” idea of sex.

But here’s where I (and many of us) differ from Roiphe, and it’s a big difference. Whereas she takes the expanding definition of violence to indicate a society of puritanical paranoia, we take it to indicate a serious and important interrogation, in which violent gender norms can be revealed, reevaluated, and changed. This interrogation calls for us not only to expand our idea of violence, but to expand our critique of norms around gender and sexuality in general. If it is a normal experience for women to feel violated during sex, there is something wrong with “normal” sex. That doesn’t mean all patriarchal sex is rape. That doesn’t mean all sex which is uncomfortable, violating, or even coercive can be or should be criminal. That does mean we have to expand not only what we consider sexually violent, but how we respond to sexual violence.

If we understand sexual violence as necessarily committed against an innocent woman by an evil man who must be punished with years of jail time—then yes, it will be difficult for many of us to understand our own, daily experiences of violation as rape or assault. When we understand sexual violence as a coercive violation of someone’s bodily autonomy which is enabled by social power imbalances—which can be addressed through multiple processes of justice—we give ourselves the space to articulate our own experiences in all their complexity.

I don’t think consent is always simple. Power and intimacy are as complex as we are, and at the end of the day human intimacy is more fraught than tea time. But that doesn’t mean that consent is a useless framework, that sex occurs in some amoral “gray zone,” or that we’re somehow off the hook for ensuring that our own encounters are enthusiastically consensual. It means, rather, that when we acknowledge the complexity of our lived experiences of power and violence, we find that creating genuine sexual equality requires much more than firing a few men or sending them to jail (though these things can be important). It requires the creation of a new normal.

Read the original piece at Feministing. Header image: 2018 Women’s March in New York City, Wikimedia Commons.

Last month, in response to a profile of pornography literacy programs, conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote an op-ed entitled “Let’s Ban Porn.” In it, Douthat argued that banning porn was not just feminist but also the logical conclusion of the #metoo movement’s quest for better sex. After all, Douthat argues, “It was only a generation ago that the unlikely (or was it?) alliance of feminists and religious conservatives made the regulation of pornography a live political debate.”

Douthat was immediately criticized by progressives for his argument, and there is a lot that remains to be written specifically about how his argument perpetuates stigma against sex work. But right now I want to take a closer look at Douthat’s argument that there should be an alliance between the #metoo movement and a conservative position on sexuality. This suggestion reveals a lot about the contradictory attitude toward sexual violence that we’ve seen in debates around #metoo.

Here’s the paradox. While most people will tell you they’re against sexual violence, most people, in practice, condone it. I don’t mean that all people actively support or commit sexual violence. But many of us have excused violations of consent through our words or actions (jokes, comments, dismissals). We’ve watched abuse happen and refuse to intervene. Plenty of people voted for Roy Moore.

This contradiction — that we as a society both deplore sexual violence and, in practice, mostly tolerate it — is one of the central tensions of #metoo and its backlash. I think understanding this contradiction requires getting to the root of why, precisely, we are against sexual violence. Why do we believe sexual violence is wrong? What assumptions are we operating from?

Much of the time, as a society, I don’t think we actually mind violence so much. Instead, I think what really bothers us about sexual violence is sex. Hence Douthat’s argument that #metoo and a conservative anti-pornography position are natural bedmates: Because implicit in our culture’s condemnation of sexual violence isn’t actually a condemnation of violence — it’s a condemnation of sex.

To understand this, let’s delve a little bit into the history of American attitudes towards rape. Historically in American law, rape was never actually considered a violation of someone’s autonomy or an issue of social equality, but a property crime. By taking a woman’s “chastity” without lawful entitlement to it (husbands, as rightful owners of a woman’s sexual labor, weren’t convicted of rape until 1976), a man robbed that woman of her value, thus committing a crime against family and community. Since for much of American history women effectively had no legal identity beyond their father or the husband, a woman’s consent wasn’t the major factor in determining whether sex was ethical or legal (and men legally could not be considered victims of rape).

It wasn’t only who you had sex with that mattered; it was what kind of sex you had. Alongside the notion that women’s sexuality was the rightful property of her husband was a schema for what kinds of sex were acceptable and unacceptable, and even legal and illegal, based on ideas of sexual morality. A whole host of sexual acts — queer sex, anal sex, pedophilia — were grouped together as deviant. Under this framework, it didn’t matter whether particular sex acts were consensual or not; doing them at all was bad, and people who did them would corrupt “moral” society.

For example, anti-sodomy laws, only struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003, tended not to make a distinction between consensual anal sex and rape. This reveals an emphasis on what kind of sex you’re having and with whom rather than whether all partners consented. And it’s this thinking that gave us, for example, the longstanding stereotype that gay people molest children; since both sodomy and pedophilia were considered deviant, there was no differentiation between consensual adult queer sex and assaulting a child. Under a feminist framework, on the other hand, the former is okay because it’s consensual, and the latter is wrong because the power imbalance between adult and child makes it inherently non-consensual.

Sodomy laws have been struck down in the United States, and rape is now considered a crime against the victim themself, not their male relatives. But the remnants of this system of thinking about rape, in which sexual deviance and social roles matter more than consent, stubbornly cling to our collective notion of sex and violence.

Douthat’s suggestion that #metoo and a conservative anti-porn stance are natural bedmates comes precisely from this kind of thinking. The notion that we should ban porn is inherently anti-sex because it assumes that sex is more naturally obscene than any other topic and thus deserves to be singled out for censorship. It also suggests that abusive labor conditions should specifically be outlawed in the porn industry, but apparently tolerated in other industries. We can tell, then, that the root of the argument isn’t a problem with violence — it’s a problem with sexual violence. Emphasis on the “sexual.”

I think this confusion between condemning sex and condemning violence explains a lot of our ambivalence toward rape. Even the broad category used by many in the media during the #metoo reckoning — “sexual misconduct” — carries with it the suggestion of sexual impropriety rather than sexual discrimination — implying a harm to good manners rather than a harm to equality.

We can see this thinking lingering in how we as a society talk about different instances of sexual assault. The same man who would explode if someone raped his daughter may joke about someone raping a sex worker. The same woman who is sympathetic toward a friend raped by a stranger may minimize a friend raped by her husband. An “innocent” victim of sexual assault may gain more sympathy than someone assaulted in jail.

In each of these cases, we can see that the values we make decisions about can be based more on our idea of social propriety — who is a worthy victim or a “bad” one, what kinds of sexual violation are acceptable and unacceptable — than on a commitment to justice. If we’re focusing on consent, on the other hand, the above scenarios are all wrong, and violence done to more socially vulnerable people may even be worse.

So: Is #metoo a moral panic? No — but it can easily be hijacked by concerns of sexual morality rather than sexual equality. Making sure it doesn’t requires that we examine our own reactions to news of sexual violence and the reasons and motivations behind these reactions. If we equate sexual violence with sexual perversion, focusing on lurid stories rather than the social harm they cause, #metoo will become a moral panic. If we take some kinds of violence more seriously than others based on a vague notion of the “respectability” of the victim, #metoo will become a moral panic. If politicians declare they’re against sexual violence because they “have a daughter” rather than because all people have a fundamental right to equality and autonomy, then #metoo will become a moral panic.

But if we stick to our ethical guns, examine our own motivations, and prioritize an understanding of power, #metoo is a revolution.

Read the original article on Feministing.

Check out the original piece at Feministing.

The more we realize that sexual violence is not a series of isolated, one-off occurrences, separate blips on the radar screen, the more we have to contend with the violence of the everyday.

Isolated, spectacular violence warrants isolated, spectacular justice. But how do we imagine justice, and healing, and survival, and love, when much of the violence we deal with is committed by people close to us, in situations that are too common to be spectacular and too familiar to bear?

As many writers have already argued in the wake of the recent reporting about Aziz Ansari, the “Grace’s” story in Babe freaked people out so much precisely because Ansari is not a monster. He’s a normal person, a normal man, choosing to do normally violent shit, in a system of violent norms. That’s why the story resonates so muchwith so many women: because we’ve experienced shit like this, maybe at the hands of people we care about, again, and again. Because this steady drip of dehumanization which we have been told is normal sex, and normal love, is often precisely what breaks us down.

Confronting this is so hard because it means confronting our lovers, our friends, ourselves. The cracks and discomforts that we may rather ignore. The inequalities. The fact that yes, that feeling that lingered in the pit of our stomaches once after sex where he wasn’t listening to us — that was rape, and we may even still love him. Confronting the fact that he wasn’t just having a bad day — he was being abusive. It means confronting the fact that we care about people who cause harm. It means confronting the fact that we, too, may have caused harm. 

We survive in a world where our simple desire for pleasure, or intimacy, or love, is stacked against us, structured by violence which is both subtle and pervasive.

We have the courage to love when the social script for love includes our own subordination.

One of the many straw-man arguments against the #MeToo movement, and especially the Ansari report, is that feminists — and particularly young feminists, like yours truly at Feministing — are all chomping on the bit to throw every last man in jail for every last act of sexual violation. This kind of thinking, as Meg reminds us, refuses to acknowledge intimate harm because it sees justice in the most binary of terms: there are good people and there are bad people, the good people have good sex all the time and the bad people rape, and the bad people should go to jail.

The truth, of course, is more discomfiting: good people do harm and are harmed; perpetrators have often been victims. The law and the justice system is a tool in our hands, but it is one of many. Not every unethical thing is illegal, and our thinking on justice is much more profound than these fearmongering diatribes give us credit for. Feminists have been committed to a profound critique of the criminal justice system, carcerality, and models of retributive justice way before Caitlin Flanagan every decided to pick up her keyboard in faux concernfor intersectionality.

Which brings us to the fundamental fear animating the Caitlin Flanagans of the conversation: when violence is spectacular and committed by a monster, we can cast the monster out. But when violence is daily, banal, and committed by people we know, recognize, and may even love, we cannot merely exorcise it. We are, instead, forced to grapple with the terrifying proximity of pleasure and violation in a world structured by patriarchal power.

Feminists are used to the allegation that we are the sworn mortal enemies of all love and sex. From Andrea Dworkin to Sara Ahmed to the women of #MeToo, we are called “killjoys,” uptight, loveless and sexless bitches who want to ruin everyone’s fun. Of course, we are ecstatic to ruin your fun, when your fun is based on dehumanizing other people.

But at the end of the day what we’re engaged in right now is a great act of hope. We have gathered the courage to examine the things and people and experiences closest to us. We have committed the courageous act of understanding that our relationships, our daily encounters, our very selves, have been formed and are complicit in a violent world. We dig deep and refuse to bear what is unbearable in the ordinary. We point out the problem because we have the humanity to believe in change. As Osita Nwanevu writes in Slate, the one thing the Weiss’s and Flanagans of the conversation conveniently forget to mention about the #MeToo movement are the moments of real reckoning where the naming of violence enabled transformation.

We want desperately to love, and fuck, with humanity and fullness. We get there by addressing the painful complexities of the world as it is, even and especially when they cut too close to home. It’s wildly uncomfortable and fundamentally human. But if violence is seeded through everything so too are actual seeds: We believe in the human capacity to grow.