Consent - is it a meaningful concept?

[Beachcomber]

On the recent ‘Invisible Men’ thread, the concept of consent came up and was discussed. I posted referring to the following quote from Catharine MacKinnon in which she questions whether consent in male female sexual relations, within the context of a patriarchal society which is founded on dominance /submission is a meaningful concept; and she concludes that it is not. Which is quite a statement.

Quite a few posters expressed an interest in having a thread on the subject of consent and MacKinnon’s analysis of it. I have been meaning to start the thread for a while, so here it is.

Here is the quote from MacKinnon. It is from her book “Toward a Feminist Theory of the State”, specifically from the chapter ‘Rape: On Coercion and Consent’ which you can read Rape: On Coercion and Consent here (It does help to read the whole chapter which is a searing piece of feminist analysis from an utterly brilliant woman. )

"The deeper problem is that women are socialized to passive receptivity; may have or perceive no alternative to acquiescence; may prefer it to the escalated risk of injury and the humiliation of a lost fight; submit to survive. Also, force and desire are not mutually exclusive under male supremacy. So long as dominance is eroticized, they never will be. Some women eroticize dominance and submission; it beats feeling forced. Sexual intercourse may be deeply unwanted, the women would never have initiated it, yet no force may be present. So much force may have been used that the woman never risked saying no. Force may be used, yet the woman prefer the sex - to avoid more force or because she, too, eroticizes dominance. Women and men know this. Considering rape as violence not sex evades, at the moment it most seems to confront, the issue of who controls women's sexuality and the dominance/submission dynamic that has defined it. When sex is violent, women may have lost control over what is done to them, but absence of force does not ensure the presence of that control. Nor, under conditions of male dominance, does the presence of force make an interaction nonsexual. If sex is normally something men do to women, the issue is less whether there was force than whether consent is a meaningful concept."

Another text which was brought up in the discussion was the section on sexual intelligence by Andrea Dworkin in the chapter “The Politics of Intelligence” from her book “Right-Wing Women”.

Here is a link to a pdf of the book, I’m afraid the quality isn’t great. The relevant section starts on page 50 of the pdf (page 54 of the book).

www.feministes-radicales.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Andrea-DWORKIN-Right-Wing-Women-The-Politics-of-Domesticated-Females-19831.pdf

I can’t select the text due to the format so have typed up a section from my copy of the book – please forgive any mistakes! The entire chapter and book is brilliant feminist analysis so I urge women to read it – it is one lightbulb moment after another and wonderfully written, Dworkin’s pace is incredible and her clarity of thought exceptional. (I have added some paragraphs in order to make it easier to read.)

“Sexual intelligence asserts itself through sexual integrity, a dimension of values and actions forbidden to women. Sexual intelligence would have to be rooted first and foremost in the honest possession of one’s own body, and women exist to be possessed by others, namely men. The possession of one’s own body would have to be absolute and entirely realised for the intelligence to thrive in the world of action. Sexual intelligence, like moral intelligence would have to confront the great issues of cruelty and tenderness; but where moral intelligence must tangle with questions of right and wrong, sexual intelligence would have to tangle with questions of dominance and submission.

One preordained to be fucked has no need to exercise sexual intelligence, no opportunity to exercise it, no argument that justifies exercising it. To keep the woman sexually acquiescent, the capacity for sexual intelligence must be prohibited to her; and it is. Her clitoris is denied; her capacity for pleasure is distorted and defamed; her erotic values are slandered and insulted; her desire to value her body as her own is paralyzed and maimed. She is turned into an occasion for male pleasure, an object of male desire, a thing to be used; and any wilful expression of her sexuality in the world unmediated by men or male values is punished. She is used as a slut or a lady; but sexual intelligence cannot manifest in a human being whose predestined purpose is to be exploited through sex.

Sexual intelligence constructs its own use: it begins with the whole body, not one that has already been cut into parts and fetishized; it begins with a self-respecting body, not one that is characterized by class as dirty, wanton and slavish; it acts in the world, a world it enters on its own, with freedom as well as with passion. Sexual intelligence cannot live behind locked doors, any more than any other kind of intelligence can. Sexual intelligence cannot exist defensively, keeping out rape. Sexual intelligence cannot be decorative or pretty or coy or timid, nor can it live on a diet of contempt and abuse and hatred of its human form. Sexual intelligence is not animal, it is human; it has values; it sets limits that are meaningful to the whole person and personality, which must live in history and in the world.

Women have found the development and exercise of sexual intelligence more difficult than any other kind: women have learned to read; women have acquired intellect; women have had so much creative intelligence that even despisal and isolation and punishment have not been able to squeeze it out of them; women have struggled for a moral intelligence that by its very existence repudiates moralism; but sexual intelligence is cut off at its roots, because the women’s body is not her own.

Okay. The OP is pretty huge so I will leave it at that and post my own thoughts in subsequent posts. This one is just meant to provide the material for discussion. I suppose this thread should really be in the feminist theory section of MN but I don’t really agree with the existence of that section so here it is in the regular feminist hang out!

In most mammals though sex isn't as pleasurable for the female is it? Why should it be different for us? :(

Selma struggled to make a coherent argument.

Are you sure most female mammals don't enjoy penetrative sex? I thought some did. I'm not certain though. Some apes are very keen on sex for its own sake incl the females. Although some use sex to keep the males in the community happy and prevent violence breaking out.

Because we have a choice for things to be different?

Most mammals for example kill or abandon disabled young. Many humans don't do that because we can do better.

This is an illuminating thread. I really learn so much from the MN Feminist section.

The thing that I learnt today is that I was definitely raped. It feels so strange to say this. CailinDana, I had an experience very similar to yours. I was a virgin in a society that prized virginity and made it clear that I did not want PIV sex. This was years and years ago. I don't think it left a lasting damage and I actually stayed in the relationship for a while. But immediately afterwards I felt like something very precious was taken from me without me having any say in it. I felt devalued and sad, and has PIV sex afterwards with a "who cares now?" attitude.

And the issue of consent bothered me for ages, but I could never find the right words for it, to the point that I called myself "sort of raped." But the point that women are presumed to be in a permanent state of consent voice here did it for me. It is very illuminating.

I'm sorry Autumn

It's ok, Juggling. I would bet my house that many of us have something like this in the past or present (nice excuse I am making for being ok,eh?).

I can't even blame him much. He was a nice guy, apart from being an entitled fool when it came to sex. But what was partially responsible for making him an entitled fool is all this unreflective swimming in the patriarchal cesspool that we are all in. And my boyfriend was not the sharpest tool in the toolbox. . . . . The next person who tells me that postmodernism and all its musings about discourse have no power to push for social change will get it.

Something else that confused the issue of consent for me in an abusive relationship, but that possibly also applies to a certain extent in non abusive relationships, is the way in which women's bodies can react physiologically to kissing, foreplay etc, even if you don't actually want to have sex.

In the relationship I was in, but I am sure this must be the same for some others, there was an assumption on the part of my ex that if he could do whatever he needed to do, perhaps whilst I was asleep, to get my body to react so there was enough lubrication for sex, then whatever I said when I woke up, I must want sex because of how my body was reacting. Sorry if tmi but this does seem very relevant, and I wonder how many young women are aware that their bodies can respond in that way even if they don't want full sex, and that it does not follow that you 'have' to have sex just because it seems your body is 'ready'.

MatildaWhispers, this is seriously creepy, but true. Women are reduced to their automatic biology.

Men in this situation are also often reduced to automatic biology, but most of the time it's in their favour. For instance, a man explain that he did not heed the word "no" because he was in such a state of passion and arousal that he just could not control himself.

There was a thread about that recently Matilda - the general consensus was that it's only abusive men who claim this, as you'd have to be very ignorant or living under a rock not to know that physical symptoms of arousal don't always mean wanting sex, and that abusive men tend to know this but conveniently forget or ignore or "misunderstand".

But then there are a lot of women feeling guilty because they were raped but because they had physical symptoms of arousal they feel they "must have wanted it" deep down :(

So fucked up... all of it.

Seems important to acknowledge people's experiences though Autumn,
even when shared in the context of a wider discussion x

Sorry to hear you experienced something similar Autumn. I mainly feel pissed off at the guy who did it - I'd love to explain to him why it was actually rape and make him feel guilty about it, I'd love to dent his sense of entitlement just a little bit. That said he'd probably think I was just a crazy ex mouthing off.

Ok throwing another thing out there - the pill. I can't deny the fact that it helped to liberate women.

But.

The pill is also known to cause loss of libido, weight gain, depression and mood swings, all of which can lead to a lack of sexual desire. These side effects are often dismissed by doctors as though they're not important. But what on earth is the point of using contraception that's going to stop you wanting sex?? Unless the tacit assumption is that the pill makes you available for sex. Being a woman, you don't need to actually want it, do you?

This thread is very interesting to read particularly as it is a mix between theory and personal experiences. I think the discussion on being in a perpetual state of consent unless forcibly withdrawing consent has got to the heart of the matter. This does not happen in other areas where consent is required. Eg back to my teenager doing forced homework analogy - if the teenager sulks, tries to watch TV while simultaneously doing homework, complains of needing to have dinner first and uses various other tactics to make it clear he/she does not wish to do the homework BUT finally, when threatened with no outing at the weekend, picks up a pen - no emotionally intelligent human would seize on the picking up of the pen as "meaningful consent" but would instead appreciate this was "forced consent." Recently, there has been public debate over whether organ donation should be changed from the current situation where people must give consent to donate their organs before they die to a system where consent is assumed unless withdrawal of consent has previously been made clear - and this has caused a lot of public concern and debate. So why is consent to sex not afforded this level of seriousness, why are we always consenting unless we forcibly withdraw that consent? This does suggest that sex is a fundamental male right in our society and so is used to control women and their bodies.

Which is why PIV is seen as "real sex" and the most important thing etc etc. I remember going off sex after the birth of one of my children for a long time but reading this thread has made me realise that I did not go off sex - I actually just went off PIV, but blocked all other forms of sex because I didn't realise it was OK to do all the other things without the finale of PIV. It did cause hurt and misunderstanding in the relationship I was in at the time and, looking back, I think if both of us had not been under the cultural exepectation that real sex = PIV and that sex is something women allow men to do, then it would have been a much more minor issue and/or, in fact, not a problem at all.

Hey everyone. Lots of new posts. Have had a busy day, am off to read.

Really interesting thread.

Must read more Dworkin.

Thinking about CailinDana's point about the pill liberating women for sex - I remember a fairly reactionary friend I had years ago opining that the pill had liberated women's bodies for use by men.

I was a bit uncomfortable about it because the assumption there is that women don't like sex for its own sake, but of course that was seeing it through the prism of assuming that PIV sex is sex.

Why did sexual liberation for women happen because of the pill? How come men suddenly became all in favour of it? For centuries they could have allowed us sexual liberation instead of locking us up or killing us for expressing any sexuality outside of a patriarchy-approved version, they didn't need reliable contraception to become enthusiastic about women's sexual liberation.

The only thing is, it would have had to be non PIV sexual liberation, so funnily enough they weren't that keen on it. They only became keen on it when the sex they we were free to have, was the sex they defined as sex - the PIV sort. Coincidence? I don't think so. I'm beginning to think that woman had a point.

DH and I would definitely have a lot less PIV if we used condoms. I wonder what the stats are for couples who use condoms/diaphragm vs hormonal/vasectomy.

Yes I have heard feminists arguing that the pill was not a real benefit for women. It removed a reason for women to not have unwanted PIV, and brings its own health risks.

The pill enables a woman to control her own fertility, I do think that's very important.

Woman as gatekeeper goes hand in hand with woman not wanting to be unwed mother, I suppose. So now the second link is broken by reliable contraception, the first should fall away, but it doesn't.

Dworkin writes about the so called sexual revolution in Right-Wing Woman.

As you can imagine she is quite scathing . I'll try to quote a part of it later on when I have more time.

Contraception is a funny one; yes it allows women to have more control over their fertility - but at a cost. I don't think the pill was developed to liberate women, I think it was developed to make women sexually available to men for PIV.

Most forms of contraception are pretty ghastly when you think about it, especially hormonal ones and ones that are placed in the woman's body. There was a thread on MN recently about the implant and it creeped me right out. Lots of women had had awful side effects from it and problems with the thing snapping and having to be removed in pieces, leaving them with scars. I always feel like I'm reading a section from Brave New World when I read about the implant, same goes for the coil.

How can we say that a woman has bodily integrity when she has a foreign object placed in her body, or is taking a chemical that changes the hormonal balance of her body. How is that 'liberating'?

I guess because it liberates women from the biological consequences of mandatory PIV. Awesome

It seems like a pretty invasive way of dealing with the problem.

On the other hand, the consequences for women who do not have access to contraception can be horrific.

Seems to me that the problem is PIV, not women's biology. Contraception (like beauty practices) carries the implication that women's bodies are faulty and need to be fixed.

(With the possible exception of condoms which highlight the fact that sperm is actually responsible for pregnancy too and that PIV is risky behaviour for this reason plus potential exposure to STDs.)

Just read through Catharine MacKinnon's chapter on rape - linked in the OP.

Sort of makes one proud to be British

Why did sexual liberation for women happen because of the pill? How come men suddenly became all in favour of it? For centuries they could have allowed us sexual liberation instead of locking us up or killing us for expressing any sexuality outside of a patriarchy-approved version, they didn't need reliable contraception to become enthusiastic about women's sexual liberation.

The only thing is, it would have had to be non PIV sexual liberation, so funnily enough they weren't that keen on it. They only became keen on it when the sex they we were free to have, was the sex they defined as sex - the PIV sort. Coincidence? I don't think so.

ITA Basil.

OK. Some stuff from Dworkin on the sexual revolution - she discusses it in her chapter on abortion, and this is not without significance. She begins the section with this;

"Norman Mailer remarked during the sixties that the problem with the sexual revolution was that it had gotten into the hands of the wrong people. He was right. It was in the hands of men."

The whole chapter is great but here are some parts from the section on the sexual revolution. It begins on page 83 of the pdf kindly provided by CaptChaos and on page 87 of the book (the quality is much better than the copy I posted in the OP)

Below the link are some quotes - I have left a couple of passages out and quoted what seems most relevant to the thread.

Link - you have to download it but it only takes a minute.

Sexual radicalism was defined in classically male terms: number
of partners, frequency of sex, varieties of sex (for instance, group
sex), eagerness to engage in sex. It was all supposed to be essentially
the same for boys and girls: two, three, or however many
long-haired persons communing. It was especially the lessening of
gender polarity that kept the girls entranced, even after the fuck
had revealed the boys to be men after all. Forced sex occurred—it
occurred often; but the dream lived on. Lesbianism was never accepted
as lovemaking on its own terms but rather as a kinky occasion
for male voyeurism and the eventual fucking of two wet
women; still, the dream lived on. Male homosexuality was toyed
with, vaguely tolerated, but largely despised and feared because
heterosexual men however bedecked with flowers could not bear to
be fucked “like women”; but the dream lived on. And the dream
for the girls at base was a dream of a sexual and social empathy
that negated the strictures of gender, a dream of sexual equality
based on what men and women had in common, what the adults
tried to kill in you as they made you grow up. It was a desire for a
sexual community more like childhood—before girls were crushed
under and segregated. It was a dream of sexual transcendence:
transcending the absolutely dichotomized male-female world of the
adults who made war not love. It was—for the girls—a dream of
being less female in a world less male; an eroticization of sibling
equality, not the traditional male dominance.
Wishing did not make it so. Acting as if it were so did not make
it so. Proposing it in commune after commune, to man after man,
did not make it so. Baking bread and demonstrating against the
war together did not make it so. The girls of the sixties lived in
what Marxists call, but in this instance do not recognize as, a “contradiction.
” Precisely in trying to erode the boundaries of gender
through an apparent single standard of sexual-liberation practice,
they participated more and more in the most gender-reifying act:
fucking. The men grew more manly; the world of the counterculture
became more aggressively male-dominated. The girls became
women—found themselves possessed by a man or a man and his
buddies (in the parlance of the counterculture, his brothers and
hers too)—traded, gang-fucked, collected, collectivized, objectified,
turned into the hot stuff of pornography, and socially resegregated
into traditionally female roles. Empirically speaking, sexual liberation
was practiced by women on a wide scale in the sixties and it
did not work: that is, it did not free women. Its purpose—it turned
out—was to free men to use women without bourgeois constraints,
and in that it was successful. One consequence for the women was
an intensification of the experience of being sexually female—the
precise opposite of what those idealistic girls had envisioned for
themselves. In experiencing a wide variety of men in a wide variety
of circumstances, women who were not prostitutes discovered the
impersonal, class-determined nature of their sexual function. They
discovered the utter irrelevance of their own individual, aesthetic,
ethical, or political sensitivities (whether those sensitivities were
characterized by men as female or bourgeois or puritanical) in sex
as men practiced it. The sexual standard was the male-to-female
fuck, and women served it—it did not serve women.
In the sexual-liberation movement of the sixties, its ideology and
practice, neither force nor the subordinate status of women was an
issue. It was assumed that—unrepressed—everyone wanted intercourse
all the time (men, of course, had other important things to
do; women had no legitimate reason not to want to be fucked); and
it was assumed that in women an aversion to intercourse, or not
climaxing from intercourse, or not wanting intercourse at a particular
time or with a particular man, or wanting fewer partners than
were available, or getting tired, or being cross, were all signs of
and proof of sexual repression. Fucking per se was freedom per se.

Sexual-liberation ideology, whether pop or traditionally leftistintellectual,
did not criticize, analyze, or repudiate forced sex, nor
did it demand an end to the sexual and social subordination of
women to men: neither reality was recognized. Instead, it posited
that freedom for women existed in being fucked more often by
more men, a sort of lateral mobility in the same inferior sphere.

In the garden of earthly delights known as the sixties counterculture,
pregnancy did intrude, almost always rudely; and even then
and there it was one of the real obstacles to female fucking on male
demand. It made women ambivalent, reluctant, concerned, cross,
preoccupied; it even led women to say no. Throughout the sixties,
the birth control pill was not easy to get, and nothing else was
sure. Unmarried women had an especially hard time getting access
to contraceptive devices, including the diaphragm, and abortion
was illegal and dangerous. Fear of pregnancy provided a reason for
saying no: not just an excuse but a concrete reason not easily seduced
or persuaded away, even by the most astute or dazzling argument in behalf of sexual freedom. Especially difficult to sway
were the women who had had illegal abortions already. Whatever
they thought of fucking, however they experienced it, however
much they loved or tolerated it, they knew that for them it had
consequences in blood and pain and they knew that it cost the men
nothing, except sometimes money. Pregnancy was a material reality,
and it could not be argued away. One tactic used to counterbalance
the high anxiety caused by the possibility of pregnancy
was the esteem in which “natural” women were held—women who
were “natural” in all respects, who wanted organic fucking (no
birth control, whatever children resulted) and organic vegetables
too. Another tactic was to stress the communal raising of children,
to promise it. Women were not punished in the conventional
ways for bearing the children—they were not labeled “bad” or
shunned—but they were frequently abandoned. A woman and her
child—poor and relatively outcast—wandering within the counterculture
changed the quality of the hedonism in the communities in
which they intruded: the mother-and-child pair embodied a different
strain of reality, not a welcome one for the most part. There
were lone women struggling to raise children “freely” and they got
in the way of the males who saw freedom as the fuck—and the
fuck ended for the males when the fuck ended. These women with
children made the other women a little somber, a little concerned,
a little careful. Pregnancy, the fact of it, was antiaphrodisiacal.
Pregnancy, the burden of it, made it harder for the flower boys to
fuck the flower girls, who did not want to have to claw out their
own insides or pay someone else to do it; they also did not want
to die.
It was the brake that pregnancy put on fucking that made abortion
a high-priority political issue for men in the 1960s—not only
for young men, but also for the older leftist men who were skimming
sex off the top of the counterculture and even for more traditional
men who dipped into the pool of hippie girls now and then.
The decriminalization of abortion—for that was the political goal
—was seen as the final fillip: it would make women absolutely accessible,
absolutely “free. ” The sexual revolution, in order to work,
required that abortion be available to women on demand. If it were
not, fucking would not be available to men on demand. Getting
laid was at stake. Not just getting laid, but getting laid the way
great numbers of boys and men had always wanted—lots of girls
who wanted it all the time outside marriage, free, giving it away.
The male-dominated Left agitated for and fought for and argued
for and even organized for and even provided political and economic
resources for abortion rights for women. The Left was militant
on the issue.