Sexual assault, things we do, and who we are

[cos]

I considered locking this to friends-only, but I think it's important and I want people to link to it and re-share it and that's not going to happen unless it's public. Please read it, and share it?

I'll start with a story, something that really happened though I changed the names and some details for anonymity. Ella was good friends with a couple, Bob and Cate, and they flirted and kissed. Sometimes they attended the same sex and BDSM parties and scened with each other. One time, years ago, at such a party, Ella was having sex with someone and Bob came over. While she was giving the other guy head, Bob went down on her after what he thought was a nonverbal okay from her to join in. Ella actually would've rather he didn't, but she didn't think she minded much and she was having too much fun to interrupt what she was doing and tell him to stop, so she just enjoyed herself and let it go. Later, however, she realized that it was more of a problem for her than she knew at the time, and it made her feel icky and a little bit violated. Wanting to keep her friendship with Bob healthy, she told him about it. Not only did Bob get defensive, but Cate really freaked out. She seemed to interpret this as an attack, an accusation that Bob was a bad person, and she knew he wasn't! They weren't able to reconcile this and the friendship fizzled.

It's been on my mind lately, partly due to attending the "Addressing Sexual Harassment in Our Communities" panel at Arisia and the hours of fascinating post-panel conversation with a few people. Not long after Arisia, a friend told me about finding out from someone close to her that, a long time ago, she'd had sex with the person thinking it was consensual when actually this person did not want to and wasn't able to tell her so and just went along with it. I've long known that it's possible that I've done something like that sometime in my past, despite trying to be very careful never to do so, and I might've really hurt someone, and if it has happened, I may never know. In fact, after that post-panel discussion, I told one of the people I'd been talking about one instance where I worried, after the fact, that I might've made a mistake and crossed someone's boundaries even though the interaction seemed good while it was happening. It's on my mind because I know that any of us - including most of you who read this - may possibly have done this to someone, and may never know for sure.

My reason for writing this post is my belief that our very efforts to combat harassment and assault and rape are exacerbating this aspect of the problem, and I want to explain why, and what we can change to stop doing this. Here's another anecdote to help me illustrate what I'm about to say...

A guy I know, Ian (again a pseudonym), is thoughtful and gregarious and well liked in his group of friends. Once, someone new in that social circle told someone else in that social circle about getting into a conversation with Ian at a party, where due to his body language and mannerisms, he effectively backed her into a corner where she felt she could not easily get away, and it made her feel uncomfortable and a bit scared. Although he responded well upon finding out, and apologized, and said he didn't intend that and would pay more attention in the future to try to avoid making someone feel trapped at a party like that, getting the message from her to him was challenging. In the ensuing discussion, I noticed and pointed out an element that I thought was problematic: the use of the term predator, and the idea of identifying someone who did something bad as "someone who does bad things". I made the analogy to the way conservatives like to label "someone who crossed a border without authorization or who overstayed their visa" with "an illegal" - it's not about a thing they did, it's about who they are.

Now I want to be clear: there are sexual predators. They exist, and talking about them is important. We have studies and surveys that begin to help us understand some things about them, and one piece of the emerging picture is that while predators are a relatively small subset of the population, they repeat what they do so often, and are able to get away with it so easily, that they account for a very large proportion of assaults and rapes. So we do need to pay attention to them and figure out ways to disarm them.

However, another piece of the emerging picture is that the large majority of people who assault - not necessarily the majority of incidents, but the majority of people who do it - are not repeat predators. Many of them, and possibly even most, are clueless, or naive, or even good thoughtful people who made a mistake that one time. It's them who I'm writing this post about. By which I mean, it's us who I'm writing this post about.

While some people avoid the issue or don't think about it much, some of us want to make an active effort to prevent this from happening - and we can. We can learn, and pay attention, and adjust how we act, and greatly reduce the probability of hurting someone in this way in a sexual or intimate interaction, or violating their boundaries. We can't reduce it all the way to 0, though. And worse: there's an obstacle that many of us put in our own path towards preventing: Our dichotomy of predators vs. good people.

In this dichotomy, those who rape or assault or harass are the bad ones, the predators, the creeps; those who are good, who are working to prevent rape and assault and harassment, they don't do it. Ergo, if someone does it, they're in that first set - it's not something they did, it's how we identify them. chaiya rather powerfully presented at the Arisia panel the dissonance and conflict caused when one of our friends is revealed to have done something like that, and we feel like we have to mentally reclassify them into the bad set in order to deal with it. That is why it was so hard to tell Ian about the relatively minor mistake he made at that party, and why the discussion around it was so fraught.

Bob and Cate got caught in this trap. They didn't hear Ella telling them about a mistake Bob made, so that he'd know and correct for it; they heard Ella accusing Bob of being a creep and a rapist, and they recoiled. They strove to redefine what happened rather than redefine Bob. Since Bob and Ella had a pattern of sexy play together, and she seemed inviting at the time, and she could easily have objected and he certainly would've heeded her objection, it couldn't have been a serious transgression, right? Lost on them was the fact that Ella actually wasn't claiming it was a serious transgression; she accepted it as an honest mistake by a well meaning person who she wanted to remain friends with, but they didn't seem able to see that. Our dichotomy of goodguys and predators doesn't leave any room for something being both "unwanted sexual contact" and "honest mistake by well meaning person". Since those two things cannot overlap, Ella's insistence that this was in fact unwanted sexual contact was a horrifying accusation they rejected wholly.

Which is a common and understandable reaction, and possibly the biggest reason why Ella was the exception; most people in her situation don't tell. Whether they understand this reason for it directly or not, they know on some level that telling isn't likely to lead to anything good, most of the time. It'll be awkward, possibly scary; they'll offend people, and they'll lose friends, and they won't be easily believed. Someone who hears this kind of thing needs to be skeptical of the complaint in order to avoid being forced to think of themselves or their accused friend as a creep or a predator. The way we talk about these issues forces that choice on them, one or the other: either your friend (or you) are a monster, or the complaint has to be minimized and dismissed.

You can see how this makes it harder for us to improve. Harder for us to learn how to better prevent making mistakes that hurt other people. When we're not ready to hear about what we've done wrong, and about what our friends and colleagues have done wrong, we coerce those who know - those who've been hurt - into not telling people about it. Then we don't learn from it, and we're more likely to do it again, and still not realize it.

Another anecdote. Recently in a group discussion, a friend commended me in everyone's hearing for the time that she and I were in bed together, turned on and both wanting each other, and I told her that I would not have sex with her because her consent seemed ambiguous to me, and I was not convinced that she knew how to say no. It's something I've done a number of times with a number of potential partners, actually. In telling people about it she was sending a few messages to the group. Among those messages, intentionally, she was letting them know that I take extra care about consent and that I'm safe. [Edit: another overt message is "here's something you too could do", a way of both praising and describing good practices.] Unintentionally, she was making it even harder for anyone to whom this message spread to ever tell me, or any of my friends, about any occasion in which I didn't take enough care and got it wrong. Because they know that other people may perceive me as safe and good to a greater than normal extent, they also know that it's even less safe to make accusations about me to people who have that impression. People who will go further to protect their idea of me, by attacking someone who says something that would redefine me. In other words, I'm in a position of power - part of it unsought and mine by default, and part of it legitimately earned through actions and effort over time - and that position of power stands as an obstacle that can prevent me from finding out the very things that would help me improve.

I certainly didn't always know that when someone initiates sexual activity and says "yes", and I really want to have sex, it's possible that she is conflicted and following through would hurt her. It's something I learned, as an adult, after I'd already had sex many times with several people. I'm glad I learned it, and I know it has helped me prevent harm, but learning it also lets me understand how I might have caused harm in the past in situations where I would not have understood that it was even possible. What's more, I'm still learning. I'm still getting better at this. Which means, I'm quite sure, that there are things I don't yet know.

Going on this learning journey requires understanding that we all have some power, to varying degrees, to harm people, and that our responsibility isn't to be innocent. What we actually want to do is connect with people, and have sex, and have powerful and positive sexual and intimate interactions, and at the same time prevent to the best of our ability the harm that we risk when pursuing those things; harm both to ourselves and to others. We need to learn what our power is, and what it can cause, and strategies for mitigating risk and preventing harm. We can't do that if being innocent of wrongdoing is our goal, because the only way to be sure to be innocent is to be ignorant.

For the past few paragraphs I've been talking about people who actively want to learn, and the obstacles that this predator/goodguy dichotomy causes for such people. But it's the people who aren't actively trying who are at much higher risk of harming their partners and others, and the obstacles we're creating are much higher when it comes to getting through to them. Innocence through ignorance is the common defense against being a creep, predator, or rapist, when it comes to people's personal identity. If they don't know their power and they don't understand what mistakes they might make, they can keep their self-image on the good side of that hard line, the side where they've never done "it", where the monsters are other people.

People go to great lengths to protect this innocence through ignorance, and I believe that's the main reason why there's so much resistance to education about sexual assault and rape, and to many related parts of feminism as well. Particularly when it comes to gender relations (though not just when it comes to gender relations), a lot of this is about the power men have and how it hurts women. In order to accept this, men have to accept the idea that they do have this power - even though they didn't consciously seek it - and the possibility that through this power, they have in fact hurt women, though they may not have intended it. Going down that path leads to the thoughts I talked about above, and they're not comfortable. If you're steeped in a predator/goodguy dichotomoy, going down that path is not possible, because you'd have to re-classify yourself as the predator. Most people will never do that. So they have to defend themselves, just as Bob and Cate did, and as Ian's friend's struggled with, and for a lot of people, that defense means rejecting the whole cluster of associated ideas.

To put it another way, if my goal is to be innocent, and someone tells me I violated someone's boundary when I didn't think I'd done that, my priority is to dismiss that claim, because I know I meant well and I know I'm good. Hearing what I did wrong will threaten that image of myself. It's only when I know that I can mean well and be good and still fuck up and that doesn't create a new identity for me, and when my goal is not to be innocent but to learn how to do better, that I can hear what they're telling me and learn from it and adjust accordingly for the future.

If we want to move forward, I believe we must reorient how we talk about these issues, not only to accept that someone who does a bad thing isn't automatically a predator, but to actively encourage the thought that most people who do these bad things are good people who need to hear constructively about what they did and how to avoid repeating it. At the same time, we need to still be clear that some people are predators, and they repeat these actions without changing, but that it takes more than an occasional mistake to cross that line of identity - it takes a pattern. We need to create space, both in ourselves and in our communities, to welcome hearing about these mistakes, apologize for them, learn from them, and change what we do to avoid repeating the same ones... without that preventing us from calling out actual predatory behavior. We've been focusing a lot on the latter, and it's understandable, because it's been a hard thing to do; predators have a lot of social support. But while working hard on improving one side of the problem, I think we're making the other side worse, so let's think about how to integrate our approach and move forward on both.


Edit: Several commenters are getting from my post ideas about there being a range rather than black/white, and that's part of it, but my real emphasis is the distinction between talking about actions and how to change them, vs. labeling people and treating actions as identity.

Comments

[rightkindofme.livejournal.com]

Can this be put on fetlife? This is really well explained.

[cos]

Good thought. I'm at work right now, and don't access fetlife from work, but I'll post it there when I'm home.

[aroraborealis.livejournal.com]

This black-and-white thinking is harmful, and it's in play across the board, not just in personal relationships.

It's this kind of thinking that made a lot of smart people say a lot of dumb things around the Julian Assange and Roman Polansky sexual assault cases: people have a hard time saying, "I like and value [some aspect of] this person's work, and therefore, I value him, and therefore, I can't/don't want to think of him as a horrible person, and I'm not capable of holding both elements in my notion of him simultaneously, so she is a lying bitch."

It's a big problem.

[jered]

I don't have time to write something longer right now, but we're having pretty much identical issues in the Burning Man community. Every time we try to have an honest discussion about how things aren't just black and white and we need to talk openly about that, some do-gooders swoop in to shush the whole thing "out of respect for the [victims|accused]".

[drwex]

At the BARCC training they presented the notion that interpersonal behavior always falls on a spectrum between clearly acceptable and clearly unacceptable. We can all agree that the spectrum exists, but for each person any given interaction will fall at different points on the spectrum. The trainers emphasized that behavior isn't isolated incidents - that problematic interactions are part of a pattern - and that each of us can see when things are tending toward the unacceptable end. The emphasis then is not on individual acts but on shifting patterns of behaviors.

Which is to say I don't disagree with your formulation, but that I'm trying to change my way of thinking to use BARCC's model and maybe that model will help you too.

ETA: And I have to say that this whole thing is fantastically difficult to approach as a Person With Major Privilege because I'm not sure whether I'm doing well or just waving my privilege around and getting away with stuff.

[cos]

Thanks, that is a useful addition. Also, though, see the edit I just added at the bottom of the post.

> ETA: And I have to say that this whole thing is fantastically difficult to approach as a Person With Major Privilege because I'm not sure whether I'm doing well or just waving my privilege around and getting away with stuff.

That's part of why I wrote this. I worry that when I make a mistake people won't tell me, and I want it to be easier for them to tell me.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

Fantastic post! I'm going to incorporate the gist of this into my next Welcome Party intro talk.

[dreams-of-wings.livejournal.com]

Since you want this shared, might I do so with my students, with or without your name attached, as you feel most comfortable?

[cos]

I do not mind whether my name is attached or not, since it's already up here on the Internet with my name on it. Please do share, either way!

[totient]

Also complicating how to model behavior is that preventing assault is IMO best accomplished by being aware of subtleties such as you describe, but coping with assault is often best accomplished by denying them.

[tisiphone.livejournal.com]

I'm curious to know how you determine that

However, another piece of the emerging picture is that the large majority of people who assault - not necessarily the majority of incidents, but the majority of people who do it - are not repeat predators.

Numbers are difficult, but best-efforts studies suggest that something like five times as many women are sexually assaulted or raped as men admit to doing so, and those studies are organised to encourage disclosure of forced sexual acts through a variety of methods. This suggests that, indeed, the majority of people who assault (by which I mean "actually sexually assault someone," not make them feel creeped out) would indeed be repeat offenders. Anecdotally, I'm not sure that it's true, either, that accidental-creepiness incidents are one-time things, either.

[mzrowan.livejournal.com]

Those numbers could also be used to support cos' thesis -- that many men are committing sexual assaults without having any idea that they did so.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

I spent the last hour or so of my forms practice letting this perc, and I think I'm just going to put down a set of observations and/or vignettes..

* Similar dynamics can make it much more difficult to deal with situations around domestic abuse. It's not just the good/bad thing, there's a whole cultural script that assigns all power to the man, casting the woman as weak and hapless (and frankly, a lot of women are pretty reluctant to cast themselves as weak and hapless) and pretty much denies the possibility that things are more complicated. And things are almost always more complicated, and it's pretty easy to see your case as therefore being different from the cases you hear about.

And yeah, this is me talking about my own life. A former partner didn't hit me often, though I think he attempted to intimidate me rather more often. (And I responded mostly with overt scorn. It's pretty much saying "I don't have a rational argument, so I'm just going to try to bully you," I figured.) The first time he did hit me... for a long time I didn't know how to talk about it, because there's not a lot of room for this if you aren't then immediately throwing your partner out or running to a battered women's shelter. Immediately afterwards - he'd managed to knock me onto the floor - I rolled back onto my feet, pinned him into a corner, and just kept repeating "You will never do that again. This is not okay." Over and over. And he clearly knew he'd crossed a line, though... well, it's not like I had reason to believe he wouldn't cross it again. Promising things and not following through was kind of a hallmark.

I'm a martial artist (as was he). I wasn't an instructor, then, but I wasn't clueless. For a long time the reason that I didn't go directly from "this guy is trying to physically intimidate me" to "I should not live with this person" was that I was fairly convinced that if it came right down to it, I could probably take him. But there's a difference between living with someone who will treat you well, and being able to respond well if someone attacks you. (And that's aside from the fact that my assessment of being able to take him assumed a fair fight. Which is just dumb. Fights usually aren't. He got me on the floor the first time because my feet got tangled up in his dirty laundry.)

We were in counselling together at the time - and it was like six weeks before I mentioned the incident to our counsellor. It was years before I mentioned it to friends. Because there was no way to talk about it that wouldn't blow up, that wouldn't spin hugely out of my control. (I'm not saying my assumptions were good - but I think they were correct.)

[tylik.livejournal.com]

I've been dealing with a related dynamic recently, in one case with a close friend, in one case with an ex, and it's had me thinking a lot about some of the cultural models around listening. And particularly around how much a person assumes they have the power to dismiss something being said to them.

The dear friend and I spent something like a year working through some of this stuff. From my standpoint, the central issue was that he was utterly unwilling to hear me say that something he was doing was hurting me and may not benappropriate. He's someone who puts a lot of work into how he relates with people - I think in large part with the aim of making sure conflicts never happen. And he has little experience with prolonged close contact, and working through conflict. Working through it was pretty gruesome from my standpoint, and frankly I wouldn't have stuck with the process had there not been other factors that made it hard for me not to interact with him on a day to day basis.

One of the hardest parts of this interaction was that even if I put things in asnmeutral terms as possible "When you do neutrally worded foo, it seems to me like neutrally worded bar is going on, and I feel really bad and I would like you to stop it" his response tended to include telling me that I was wrong, and not only was I wrong but that only a psychological messed up person would ever think such a thing. (A real turning point came when I asked him "Hey, I've noticed you've now said this particular thing to me seven or eight times this week, what's up with that?" And he got really mad and accussed me of questioning his motives. I stood there and stared at him for some minutes and then said "Well, yeah, I am asking you a question. About your motives." And you could just see the pieces coming together in his head. Huh, yeah, when you put it that way, that sounds completely reasonable.)

But the dismiss, devalue and belittle thing continued for a long time, and still occasionally crops up. Things are a lot better. It really helped to get better at describing it, and it was surprising how hard that was. I'm usually a pretty outspoken bitch. I've generally thought of myself as boundary girl. It felt to me like there was some big thing in my head - upbringing, socialization, whatever - where there was kind of an assumption that yeah, of course men would assert from themselves the ability to cast judgement on anything a woman says rather than address the content of what she was saying.

(I'm not saying this is limited to this set of gender interactions, just that this is the aspect of it I've had my face in, recently.)

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

I raped a guy once. It took me several years to realize I'd done something wrong and a couple more to be willing to call it rape. And I think I only got to that point because I did it on my own without anyone coming at me with accusations. I was young and naive and I still bought into the idea that "an erection means he wants it" so I argued against his "no" until it turned into "yes". I didn't use physical power (he was stronger than me) but I did use the power of the cultural myth that men always want sex.

I've brought this up occasionally in conversations where I feel like people are being unreasonably hard-line about how to deal with rape to say "hey, if all those things are rape and people who do them are rapist who deserve to go to jail then you're saying I should go to jail for what I did. And I don't think I should*". And I do get a sense of the thing you talked about here - that people feel like they need to either classify me as a "rapist" or a "good person" and they ask me if I've ever done anything like that since, and I tell them I'm pretty sure I haven't, and I get "well that's OK then - you learned from it, you're good". Not in so many words exactly. And this makes me feel a little bit weird because I'm doing a difficult thing by admitting to doing something I think was really wrong and it's being dismissed. (not always, but often)

* Note: I looked up the legal definition of "rape" for the state in which it happened and to my non-lawyer opinion it doesn't meet it so don't go calling the authorities on me. I'm talking about conversations with people are claiming the legal definition should be expanded to cover cases like what I did.

[cos]

Thank you for posting this comment.

More people feeling like they can say what you said is one reason why I want to get this post out there.

Another reason, though, is that I wish people who heard you talk about this wouldn't react simply with "that's in the past and over and done with", but would actually see what it means for the future: You, and they, could make another mistake. You haven't learned everything yet. They haven't learned everything yet. There are prevention strategies they don't know right now, and not knowing them might be what makes it so they hurt someone unintentionally, and they need to acknowledge that it's possible, and be open to the idea that they don't know things and therefore should seek out information. Information that might reveal to them, next year, that the thing they're about to do next month is actually problematic, but they won't know that next month.

[klingonlandlady.livejournal.com]

This is why I think the way someone handles it after the fact is particularly telling. Someone with good intentions, if you approach them by saying "this is what I feel happened and it was not good for me", will have some reaction like "OMG, i didn't mean to do that at all, I'm so sorry, how can I make this right?" ...I sure would. Wouldn't you?

OTOH is there a pattern of repeat behavior? Is their reaction some form of "I did not- bitches be crazy"? then watch out.

[cos]

What you say is true, and I think it goes further than that: Part of what I'm arguing here is that we're setting a lot of people up to fail in how they react after the fact. So then they fail, and yes that is bad on them and bad for us and we should call them on it. But it would be better if we set them up to not fail in the first place. We can do that by replacing the predator/goodguy dichotomy in our public discourse with a model that has space for good people who sometimes do bad things unintentionally, and can acknowledge it without admitting to being monsters. The more we do that, the more people will react constructively when told, rather than defensively.

Not everyone. But more people than now.

[whipchick.livejournal.com]

This was an excellent read, and I think your point is sound - not all unwanted sexual interactions are RAPE I NEED COUNSELING YOU BELONG IN JAIL!!!, and an experience can be unpleasant/unwanted without being a life-changing trauma. When we separate out what someone did from who they are (if we can do that), we can have an actual discussion about what consent is and how to obtain it clearly and give it safely.

[klingonlandlady.livejournal.com]

Yes!

[(Anonymous)]

I am anonymous because I do not want to be public about my flaky sexual history.

When we're not ready to hear about what we've done wrong, and about what our friends and colleagues have done wrong, we coerce those who know - those who've been hurt - into not telling people about it. Then we don't learn from it, and we're more likely to do it again, and still not realize it.

This hits hard for me because I am one of those people who doesn't set firm sexual boundaries and don't always know what I want and have occasionally gotten myself into sexual situations that I realized later (or while I was in them) that I wanted out but couldn't bring myself to take the initiative to stop. I do not blame others for this.

I had a boyfriend who was generally sweet and caring and his exes said good things about him but he didn't always read social signals well. One night we were talking about some stress in our sexual relationship and in an emotional moment I admitted that there had been times when I'd had sex with him when I hadn't really wanted to. His reaction was to get angry at me. While farther removed from that moment I understand that he could rightfully feel betrayed by my lack of trustworthiness, his anger just served to tell me that this was my problem and not his and telling him about it was a mistake. And makes it that much harder for me to ever bring up something like that again.

[ladymondegreen.livejournal.com]

I think examining the grey areas is incredibly valuable. There are a lot of honestly clueless people out there and it's true that on any given day, we can do things or say things that make others uncomfortable.

In the last two years I have been being regularly harassed at cons by a specific person, and in talking to people about it, I am seeing a specific dichotomy between 'oh yeah, they are creepy {story that illustrates this}' and 'oh, no, they're just harmless and clueless {similarly creepy story}'. The fact that similar incidents are being labeled as either indicative of bad behavior or as harmless is remarkably disturbing.

I don't necessarily think this person is a rapist, or even a sexual predator, but the stories I've heard involve this person being asked to leave kink events, or being told that they were engaging in harassing behavior, or even in one case, having sex with a sleeping person (albeit that one was inside a relationship, so it's a very grey area, and the person later suspiciously retracted the story upon being told about my experiences), so I think it's passed beyond clueless and into a realm of either inability to learn a better pattern or, more disturbingly, knowing that these tricks only work on certain people. A large part of it is also the fact that some of this person's actions or more specifically, their style of non-con flirting is attractive to some people.

I am both worried about continued harassment by this person, and about what this person might be doing with/to others who are less willing to say 'take your hands off me' and who are less willing to get up and leave if this person arrives at a party and makes a beeline for them and hangs around trying to touch them.

I am thankful that my friends have been very good about supporting me on this issue. Many of them have run interference and have expressly said things to this person to try and convey that the behavior is harassment. So far, I have protected this person's identity, because I would like to think that they can learn from this, but my patience is wearing thin, and I may have to say something more strongly worded and explicit at some point soon. With backup.

[cos]

In case it's muddled behind some of the discussion around it, I just want to re-state that my main goal is to make it easier for everyone to both challenge people when they do things like this, directly, and to tell others about it; also to make it easier for people who are challenged to hear that, and respond constructively, so that more people do so, even though not everyone will do so. You're describing someone who may not do so even if people are more open about challenging him or talking about his actions with others, but even if he doesn't, if we could remove some of the weird reluctance people have to say it, it would make it easier to sanction him when he fails to improve, and it would make it easier on the people who he's bothering, and who may not get enough social support currently.

[sandhawke.livejournal.com]

Brilliantly written, but I don't entirely agree with the conclusion about labeling actions vs labeling people. I think to a first approximation it's fair to call someone who committed rape "a rapist", even if it was a long time ago and they regret it a lot.

I also think it's okay to call someone who committed murder (in either the first or second degree) "a murderer". But it's not okay to use that word for somone who committed manslaughter or neglegent homocide.

And I think that's the problem here. With murder it's clear when someone has died, but it takes a lot of work to figure out whether someone killed them, whether they meant to kill them, whether there was some socially acceptable reason to kill them (cf the Stand Your Ground debate), etc.

With sex, sometimes it's clear whether there's consent, and sometimes it's not so clear. If we don't make this kind of distinction, we end up in the situations you and the other commenters describe, where someone can become a rapist without even knowing about it. So I think we should start making that distinction.

It seems to me that in the situations you're talking about, we're in that not-clear-if-there-is-consent situation. It's not like the women in question didn't think the men in question had been aware of their objection and continued anyway. So by analogy, we know it's not murder, but there's still an important question about whether it's accidental homocide or neglegent homocide.

The line for neglegence is an evolving social one that I suspect depends on community context. I've been at parties where there is a clearly announced rule that you do not touch someone without first asking their permission. There, the line is in a different place than in a couple's bed. And in one couple's bed, it may be okay to have sex with a sleeping partner; in another's it may not. To me, these seem like the neglegence/accident line, not the murderer/innocent one.

Clearly Ella was not accusing Bob of "Murder", and I think you're saying Elle wasn't even saying he'd committed a neglegent sexual trangression. She was saying he'd committed an accidental sexual transgression. In the homocide analogy: it's like if you're driving perfectly legally, and the brakes fail in your new car, and someone dies. You feel horrible. If you'd been more clever, you might have figured out a way to swerve -- maybe steer into a telephone pole? -- and no one would have died. But still, you have no legal culpability, and most reasonable people wont blame you. You've commited accidental homocide, not neglegent homocide, and not murder.

Note that none of these cases deny the victim's experience. In the homocide analogy, the victim is still dead,even if it was an accident. In these sex stories, someone still had a negative -- perhaps intensely negative -- experience, even if the other person involved turns out not to at fault.

So I guess I'll propose some terms:

- deliberate sexual activity without consent (he knew better)
- neglegent sexual activity without consent (a reasonable, competent person would/should have known better)
- accidental sexual activity without consent (only a special or lucky person would have known better)

Shorter, catchier terms welcome. I suggest avoiding use of the word "rape" here, for several reason, including that rape involves a degree of severity (sexual penetration, generally), and this distinction could apply to a something much more mild.

[cos]

> I think to a first approximation it's fair to call someone who committed rape "a rapist", even if it was a long time ago and they regret it a lot.

I didn't say or mean to imply anything about fairness. What I'm saying is that we're not ready to accept that almost all of us "are rapists" even though it's almost certainly true. So, fair or not, creating a dichotomy where there are "rapists" and "not rapists" and everyone who ever did whatever falls into your definition of rape is in the first set, and everyone else has never ever done so, creates an obstacle that prevents us from addressing problems and causes people to resist learning how to prevent some preventable assaults and rapes. It paints an illusory world and that painting is harmful.

Whether it's fair isn't important to me, and I don't object to calling it fair. And if we could accept a painting where almost all of us are rapists and we know that about ourselves specifically and accept it, then it might be both fair and pragmatic. Most people aren't going to accept that about themselves, and for the most part not about their friends either.

The same applies to whatever terms you come up with. If they're identity rather than action, people will protect themselves from those identities through denial, so promoting an exclusively identity-based model of this (which is what I think a lot of us do) is a way of promoting denial.

[tacky-tramp.livejournal.com]

This sounds a lot like the perpetual meta-conversation about how we discuss racism. Since white people tend to freak the fuck out whenever anyone says anything that remotely sounds like "You are a racist," conciliatory folks are always suggesting that we talk about these subjects differently, to avoid triggering the caucasian panic. Except you know what? There is no way to explain to someone that they've done something racist, and guarantee that they won't flip. Jay Smooth's much-repeated suggestion to say "You did something racist" instead of "You are racist"? Doesn't work 9 times out of 10, in my experience. They still act like you've accused them of being evil. If you take the time to explain to them that you're not saying they're a bad person or anything -- and mind you, this is when they have just done something racist that was possibly deeply hurtful to you -- they refuse to listen. I really don't think the solution is for us all to go on an education campaign where we gently explain to white people that good people can do racist shit, too. What a massive exercise in privilege that would be.

And that's kinda the vibe I'm getting here. Maybe I'm off, but your post seems to be addressed to the people who have been assaulted, not the people who committed the assault. You say "we" have to change how "we" talk about this. Who's the "we"? People who consider themselves part of the ongoing fight against rape and rape culture? Or everyone, including people who never think about assault and consent? If the "we" is everyone, don't "we" have to change the way we listen?

Finally, if the plan is to break down the predator/good person dichotomy and spread the idea that you can accidentally rape someone and still be a cool person, what are your action items? How do you and I go about this project? Do we add something novel to conversations about rape? What do we say? What do we say that doesn't sound like rape apology and doesn't hurt survivors by suggesting it was all a big misunderstanding? I agree that good-guy/bad-guy dichotomies cause all kinds of problems, but I'm really not seeing a practical way forward here. Frankly, I think most people can't process the ethical nuance involved in "Rape is bad but people who have raped are not always bad." There's a reason good-guy/bad-guy dichotomies have so much traction.

[cos]

> Maybe I'm off, but your post seems to be addressed to the people who have been assaulted, not the people who committed the assault.

Neither. Many people are in both categories, and I'm addressing everyone in some way, but most especially, who I'm addressing is in the second paragraph, which I summed up with:

"It's on my mind because I know that any of us - including most of you who read this - may possibly have done this to someone, and may never know for sure."

In other words, I'm addressing all of my readers, to say "you, yes you, and also I, all of us, we sometimes do these things even if we don't know it". I'm addressing everyone who reads it, in the light of "you can hurt people, and ought to acknowledge that, even if you're one of those people who are actively working against this stuff."

And yes, as a further refinement, I assume that most of my readers are among the people who are actively working against this stuff. Which is what I mean by "we" and "us" - the community that brings up discussions of harassment and assault. The people who were on that Arisia panel I started the second paragraph with, and the people who attended it, for example. And my friend who told me about finding out that she raped someone she was very close to, years ago, when that person finally told her ... because we're all possibly in that position and we don't acknowledge it much and perhaps don't know it. That's who "we" are.

You're right to point out that this is similar to the meta-conversation that happens around racism, and that's an interesting thought to mull over. I haven't mulled it over in my head enough to really address it. I do think we could deal with racism more constructively if we got the idea out into our culture that a lot of racism is practiced by people who aren't "racists", because it's systemic, and there's a difference between being neutral and being anti-racist. And that even anti-racists who think about the issues fuck up sometimes. So that's a parallel. I think it's something I see brought up more in the context of racism, though. At least in the community of people who talk about it a lot, I get the feeling that it's not missing from the discourse, the way I feel this is missing from the discourse around harassment (except as a denial/excuse tactic that is only superficially similar).

> what are your action items?

My post got into that somewhat. Some action items:

- Understand that informed, well-meaning you can do some of these bad things. Be ready to hear about it.

- Encourage people to tell when it happens. Support that telling. Don't act like there's a contradiction between believing it, vs. thinking well of the person who did it; support the idea that both can be valid together.

- React constructively when told, rather than reacting to defend someone's identity. Address the *action* rather than whether the person is good or bad. This applies to yourself/myself, not just to others.

- Practice that conversation, where it's about actions first, and not identity first. Let other people see and hear it. That's part of encouraging people to tell when they've been hurt or violated or boundary-pushed.

... add to the list?

P.S. You wrote, >>If the "we" is everyone, don't "we" have to change the way we listen?<< - and I agree that we do, and I think I included that in my post. However, I'm trying to add to an ongoing discussion that a lot of people have been part of for years, and that part about changing how we listen is one I see out there a lot. The part I'm focusing on is a part I think is both important and mostly missing from the discussion.

[antimony.livejournal.com]

I do think there's one big issue with this essay, and that's that all of the statistics (and yes, good studies on this are thin on the ground) seem to imply that a good deal of assaults are non-naive serial offenders who are taking advantage of these "gray areas" knowingly. So while I'm ALL FOR discussion of how to help people accidentally assault less, I think saying that "most" may be incorrect, and even if it isn't, it definitely derails the essay, because I got sidetracked by eyerolling at that and lost track of what else you were saying. Basically -- I think you'd be better off, instead of saying "most" or anything like that, just editing to say that you're addressing whatever segment of assaults happen in this context, and only that subset.

Especially when the same argument in a milder form comes up a lot on the internet, about awkward/geeky guys and boundary crossing that doesn't get to the level of physical assault. And that tail-chasing argument gets old, fast. Especially when it never takes into account that awkward/geeky folks can be the targets, too, and not know how to navigate the cultural minefield of getting across a polite "no".

[cos]

> So while I'm ALL FOR discussion of how to help people accidentally assault less, I think saying that "most" may be incorrect, and even if it isn't, it definitely derails the essay,

This is definitely a sticking point for a few people, but I think it's very important so I don't want to just take it out. Specifically, even though I tried to be clear about the distinction between "most incidents" (which I think are caused by serial offenders) vs. "most people" (those who do things, most of whom are not serial offenders), you're not the first person who saw the part about "most people" and read it as if it said "most incidents". Again, even though I explicitly made that distinction.

Problem is, of all the points I'm trying to get across here, the one that's hardest to get across because people are the least familiar with it is specifically the one about "most people". It's the idea that I'm talking about almost all all of us. You, me, most of the rest of the readers of those post, and most of the people they know. I very much do not want to sidestep that point; it's the one I feel the most need to make.

So, any suggestions on how to improve my wording to avoid that sticky misunderstanding without in any way shying away from what I'm actually saying?

[elusiveat.livejournal.com]

This is important stuff to say. Thanks for writing it up.

I'd be interested in sharing a more condensed form, but don't feel comfortable sharing the current form over Facebook because the first few paragraphs focus on play party scenarios that I think would be unfamiliar ("wait, people do that?") and off-putting ("why should I read this when this stuff could never happen to me?" or "I'm too preoccupied with the weird sex to notice the central point" or even "the first couple paragraphs make me feel icky; I'm not going to read the rest") to a general audience. I'd love to see a version of this that de-emphasized the play party aspect.

I don't think the play party content needs to be completely censored in order for this piece to be approachable to a general audience, but I don't think *my* general audience is ready for this in its current form.

[metalana.livejournal.com]

Hi cos, we have some mutual friends. I volunteer with Queer Ontario, an activist group. We recently published our policy on rape/harassment/etc issues at http://queerontario.org/2013/01/21/sexual-violations/ and it would be great to have some related pieces in our Think Tank online journal. So, would you be interested in re-publishing your post at http://thinktank.queerontario.org/ ? Thanks.

[cos]

I've been learning that there are pieces of my post that needs work. Some of the misunderstandings fall into clumps, where several people read similar things into what I wrote that weren't what I wrote. I'm going to try to adjust some pieces of this when I have a chance to reflect.

Yes, I would contribute this to your journal. But maybe a modified version.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

Things this made me think about:
- statistics
- racism, which I see has already been covered
- grade inflation, and how often I've wished for a system where students could interpret "F" as "you still have work to do" and not "you suck"
- how terrible I am at accepting criticism with poise, especially from close friends and loved ones, and how brittle that fact feels
- the discord between this approach to reducing rape, which seems to say we are shaming too much, and the more usual feminist approach, which says we are shaming too little; and my belief that, actually, both things are true; and my curiosity about whether shame works as a deterrent, and when
- the fact that this approach feels borrowed from another area where sex and stigma intersect, STIs -- where shame may well hamper early identification, which can harm everyone in a community in the long run
- how often we trade sex we don't want for something else we do want, and whether that is always wrong
- Christian concepts of sin and grace -- how apt "we are all sinners and should refrain from condemning each other while striving to help each other be better" feels in this context -- how portable and useful an idea that is for maintaining social harmony, and how difficult to implement

The list is long. Thanks for a thought-provoking post.

[corpsefairy.livejournal.com]

One that works, evidently, is public awareness campaigns about consent and how not to be a rapist. There was a thing in Canada recently (I think) that had a series of posters that said, basically, "don't be that guy." And the rate of reported rates went down significantly enough for people to notice - I want to say 10%? That's a pretty big drop for a simple poster campaign.

[entirelysonja.livejournal.com]

I found this post very thought-provoking, thank you.

I do have one thought, which is that I'm not even sure it's productive to label the *actions* as "bad" in a lot of these kinds of situations.

Telling someone, "you did a bad thing," is likely to make them defensive, and may well lead to the polarized outcome you discuss here, where the accused feels that they are being accused of being a bad person, and they feel they need to redefine what happened, etc., etc.

Telling someone, "you know that thing that happened the other night? I know it seemed like I was having a good time, but it really wasn't right for me. I'd like to talk about what we can both learn from the experience," is likely to lead to a much better outcome.

[cos]

You're pointing out an aspect in which I apparently didn't do a very good job communicating clearly in my post. Like you, several other people have interpreted what I said as being mainly about how you talk to a specific individual who has done something harmful to you.

In fact I was mainly addressing all of us as people who may do harmful things, much more than I was addressing us as people who may have harmful things done to us - because the latter is so well addressed in other places, and the missing piece I'm trying to supply is much more about the former. So I'm not trying to give advice about what to say to an individual who has done something you want to point out to them.

More importantly, as some commenters have noted (commenters who, I think, interpreted my post similarly to how you did), you often can't get someone to hear you simply by using better words. And as tacky_tramp so spiritedly added, this kind of advice is prevalent in discussions of racism and turns out to be counterproductive much of the time.

What I'm trying to address is systemic rather than individual. I'm talking about the discourse among those of us who want to improve the field overall, and the messages we design that we try to get out into the wider public. What I'm trying to say is that we should open up a great space in those messages for talking about bad actions that many people who are not predators sometimes do, and the idea that even the best and most well-meaning people (including ourselves) sometimes do such things. I'm not getting into the details of how exactly to say that, just broaching the idea that we should open a space in our message for that, along with the message that many people are already actively formulating and communicating about predators and creepers (which is also important, and I don't want to jettison it).

But the key point here is that my post isn't about what words you use to talk to an individual about something specific, it's about the message we formulate and communicate broadly.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with you that the situation with Bob and Cate and Ella is complicated, but the problem there, going only on your account, seems to me that Bob and Cate are hearing their fears instead of Ella's words.

It is Bob and Cate who have decided that Ella's complaint must be all or nothing, not the lack of a middle ground in the fannish dialogue on these issues. Yours is far from the first post I've seen making similar points -- or even the 20th -- and I've also never attended a related panel where it didn't come up (though I didn't get to Arisia's.)

Short of cutting off all mention of the more extreme end of experience -- which I know you're not suggesting -- there's nothing we can do about people who assume it must be the extreme end that's meant in their case in the face of repeated clear statements to the contrary.

As to the situation with Ian, as far as I'm concerned, he was a predator. He may not have meant to be a predator, he may not always be a predator, it may not be all that he is, but a predator is one who does a predatory act, as a rapist is one who rapes, and to let people off the hook because it was a first offense does not, to me, prevent minimizing complaints -- it IS minimizing them. As you said, "the monsters are other people." But I don't see this as preventing that attitude, I see it as reinforcing it.

This is particularly true because I see an absolute epidemic of people who claim to be in the clueless group when I know for a fact that clue has been delivered to them, they just have not accepted it.

They have a narrative in their head that makes all the previous instances not count because of their circumstances -- the other people misunderstood, or they had past traumas that made them oversensitive, or they had heard negative rumors about them that made them assume the worst, or they were really jealous, or upset about a breakup, etc.

Sometimes the clue was delivered so gently that they could convince themselves it wasn't so bad. Sometimes the clue was delivered so harshly that they could get angry at what they felt was a disproportionate tone to the offense, instead of focusing on the content. Sometimes the clue was delivered indirectly - by a friend or a loved one, who they choose to believe must have their own agenda, or by people who turn pale and leave the room whenever they enter it, instead of confrontation.

These people may really sincerely believe that they are not predators, but intent is not a magic get-out-of -jerk free card. If some guy hurts me and didn't mean to, I am no less hurt than if he did mean to.

And if we make it more important what he meant than what I experienced, what that tends to do is reinforce the societal attitude that says he doesn't have to think about how what he is doing might feel to the person on the other side, because what he intends is what matters.

I agree with you that "Innocence through ignorance is the common defense against being a creep, predator, or rapist," but I disagree that we're creating higher obstacles to that. To the contrary, I think creating a bright line, in which we say what is not okay loud and clear, is reducing that obstacle. Replacing that bright line with a world in which even praising good practices is not okay makes it much MORE likely that they "don't understand what mistakes they might make," not much less.

[cos]

As to the situation with Ian, as far as I'm concerned, he was a predator. He may not have meant to be a predator, he may not always be a predator, it may not be all that he is, but a predator is one who does a predatory act, as a rapist is one who rapes, and to let people off the hook because it was a first offense does not, to me, prevent minimizing complaints -- it IS minimizing them.

That's the most troubling part of your comment to me, so I'll focus on responding to that.

What you seem to be saying is that it is inherently impossible to challenge an action as unacceptable unless you also label the person who did it as unacceptable. What you're saying is that if we don't always, every single time, consider this to be about who and what that person is, that's equivalent to "letting them off the hook".

What you seem to be saying is similar to the message that a lot of people already get. And because they get that message, it's preventing them from challenging unacceptable actions, or from accepting such challenges when they're made. Because, faced with a choice between dismissing the problem entirely on the one hand, or accepting that the action in question was unacceptable and also declaring the person who did it to be unacceptable, most people in a case like Ian's will pick the former. That's what actually "letting him off the hook" looks like.

You seem to want that to continue. I think that's extremely harmful. Harmful in the very ways you describe in other parts of your comment. It's how too much of our society works now, but you want it to continue. In my view, you're a part of the problem, and even though you're well-meaning, you're causing more sexual assaults to happen, and you ought to re-evaluate and change. I really do mean that as forcefully as I seem to.

[jadia.livejournal.com]

I think that talking about things in terms of actions instead of identity can be occasionally useful. However, I think people are generally just as defensive about being told "you did this unacceptable thing" as being told "you *are* this unacceptable thing." Just hearing "unacceptable thing" is close enough to make them uncomfortable and unwilling to accept the criticism.

I think what would actually be useful is for all of us to work on that natural defensiveness and try to dismantle it as thoroughly as possible. Yes, it's "not comfortable". But that's why we have to try, because that way, when someone comes to you and says that you did an unacceptable thing, you're more likely to be okay with feeling uncomfortable and therefore you're more likely to react well, instead of defensively. It's our job to deal with the discomfort, not the community's job to protect us from the discomfort by changing the discourse. Treating actions as an identity or just as an action makes little to no difference (except in edge cases) to how uncomfortable it feels to be called out.

[auros]

A few months ago, a writer at The Good Men Project attempted to address this, but did so really badly. Their example was something where a reasonable person couldn't have inferred consent (penetration while the woman was asleep), and the guy's excuse was basically just that he was drunk and turned on and he was sure she was into him. (Sorry, if you can't tell "asleep" from "consenting" while drunk, then you should never ever get drunk again. And maybe she was into you, and would've been delighted to start having fun sexytimes after she was awake; but in the absence of a prior agreement to engage in some kind of special fetish or fantasy, you should always assume that "asleep" == "NON-consent".)

Anyways, it's really nice to see this topic addressed well.

I've had my own run-in with weird consent / boundary issues. There's this woman whom I know through the sci-fi convention scene. We hooked up at a con in New Orleans in '03, and again in LA in '06. In '09, she was in the Bay Area for another con. [n.b.: I edited dates here after looking over the history more carefully. Evidently my memory had pushed some of this farther into the past than it really was.] She spent most of a day flirting with me and my then-gf (now-spouse), came home with us after a party, and after being offered the option of taking a futon for herself, or joining us in our (king size) bed, she went for the latter. When I attempted to come on to her, in what I thought was a fairly gentle way (cuddling, kissing the back of her neck), she didn't just decline; she freaked out. Like, leapt out of bed and burst into tears. Which of course freaked me out. I certainly had no intention of doing anything she wasn't into. If she'd said, "You know hon, I'm too tired for this, let's just cuddle and maybe we can all have some fun in the morning before heading back over to the con," I would've been totally fine with that. We continued to be in touch somewhat over the years, but I only recently -- like, a week or so ago -- got up the courage to ask her what had happened and whether I'd really done something very badly wrong that I was having trouble understanding. I've felt guilty over it for years.

It turns out that she had a PTSD flashback -- she has an ex-husband who was of the type who believed that (a) marriage constitutes automatic consent, and (b) it was perfectly fine to start doing things to her while she was half- or even fully asleep; basically he treated her like property. (I knew he was an emotionally abusive ass in general, but had not previously known just how bad.) When I started touching her while she was kind of happy and dozy, she went into a full fight-or-flight, amped-up, adrenaline charged state -- feeling like her ex was there and intending to attack her. She was so spun that she couldn't articulate what was going on -- what boundary I'd crossed or what button I'd pushed.

When we finally talked about it, she expressed that she felt bad about not having talked about it sooner -- for leaving me feeling confused and guilty for so long... I think we would have talked about it sooner if, in general, our culture made it easier to talk about boundary problems -- if violating boundaries did not automatically classify you as a "bad person".

Of course, there's a downside to allowing for more of a gray area: The real "bad people", the predators, want to be misidentified as "good people who made a mistake and did a bad thing". Those of us who want to end rape culture have, in response, basically made it very difficult to use that category at all. But, as you argue, that may actually help perpetuate rape culture. If you aren't actually certain how to categorize a situation, and it seems like the consequences of going with "bad person" may be dire, and you can't at least try to address the situation calmly using the "good person who made a mistake" context; then in all likelihood, the situation won't get addressed at all. Which means incidents go unreported. Even the person who committed the act in question may not understand that they did something bad; or if they do know, they may not understand how to avoid doing it again.

[sarah beaulieu (from livejournal.com)]

I was intrigued by this post as it's core question, as I read it, is "Can you rape someone without being a rapist?" If the corollary were murder, the question would be can you kill someone without being a murderer? Of course. You can kill someone by accident or by being careless. You can kill someone on purpose, either in the heat of the moment, under the influence, or with premeditation. The law allows for these differences, and the crimes are treated differently by the justice system, the media, and the public.

Much of this translates to sexual assault and violence with one very important exception. Whether it's manslaughter or murder, there is rarely an argument as to whether or not the victim is, in fact, dead. Oftentimes, with sexual violence, we base our decision on whether the victim is in fact a victim on the intentions of the offender. Whether you did it by accident, out of carelessness, under the influence, or in the heat of the moment, the experience of having consent taken away is the same - you feel raped. That doesn't mean that the "how it happened" isn't relevant to the perspective of the offender (for lack of a better word, and I mean offender in the singular sense of the action, not as a label). It is. But it's not necessarily relevant to the victim. And it shouldn't be.

Carrying the murder metaphor forward, I think the other key element in whether it's an action or identity is whether there is truly a sense of awareness, remorse, and amends. There are lots of stories about people who killed others on purpose but later realized how wrong or messed up they were and spent the rest of their lives making amends for their crimes. Sometimes the victims families forgive, and sometimes they don't. But if one is truly making amends, they will understand that doing it for forgiveness defeats the very purpose. Amends and learning from experience, like what is discussed here, makes it an action - a regrettable action - but not an identity.

At the end of the day, fear of being called a rapist shouldn't prevent you from taking responsibility for accidental miscommunication or carelessness that left someone else raped. By taking responsibility, making amends, and talking about the sticky issues around consent, we can and will find ways to bring conversations about sexual violence into the light. And I'm heartened to hear from many of the stories and comments shared here, that this process is possible.