Redefining rape

[Jux]

Right to Equality . org are hoping to redefine rape in law. This, afaics, is the specific bit.

"World-renowned feminist legal scholar and advisor to Right to Equality, Professor Catharine A. MacKinnon adopts a transformative approach to redefining rape in laww*. MacKinnon argues that consent is an intrinsically unequal concept and should be eliminated from the law of sexual assault. To redefine rape as the crime of inequality that it is, the prohibited act should centre instead on a concept of force that, beyond physical force, incorporates multiple inequalities of power such as age, race, disability, celebrity, caste, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex/gender when used to coerce a sexual interaction. Instead of focusing on what he did to her or what she ‘allowed’ him to do to her body, the court should scrutinise the context in which sex happened: Was the sex willing, wanted, respectful and mutual?"

I'm interested in what you think of this.

I should also say that this org includes Jo Maugham and Rachel McKinnon.

Yes this idea of no sex between unequals is completely impractical and the elimination of consent entirely is what pushes it into complete batshittery.

Whatever this was published in, is it peer reviewed? Because it’s really concerning if peer review these days consists of dimwits rubber stamping effluence such as this.

Any TRA Keen to "redefine rape in law" just gives me such the ick I xantteven begin.

This is the same TRA who's literally a doctor in "why you don't need to know what you're talking about".

The whole thing smacks of "women's boundaries? What boundaries?!"

It's not that McKinnon. This McKinnon is a woman.

Similar reasoning in this article - your rights and ability to defend them should depend on your level of privilege. Insane and unworkable.

www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/human-rights-equality-law-regressive-goals-trans-equality/?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1669985817

Exactly, the paper was written by Catherine MacKinnon which is a nom de plume for Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan and The James Barr Ames Professor of Law (long-term) at Harvard Law School. She served as the first Special Gender Advisor to the first prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for four years.

Oops no I misunderstood the * Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law is some honorary position, her name is actually Catherine MacKinnon. Here is a photo of her.

Here is a link to her page at the University of Michigan
It has some of her other academic papers linked on it of anyone is curious as to her other opinions/thoughts.
michigan.law.umich.edu/faculty-and-scholarship/our-faculty/catharine-mackinnon

The starting point of a liberal approach to law is that every individual should in general have the right to make decisions about our own bodies and lives. We should be very cautious about removing that fundamental freedom, and we should do it only when there is a strong argument that meaningful consent is impossible, as it often is for children.

Adult women are not children. Though men often put us under pressure to make decisions that suit them, nonetheless we have fought for, and in many places won, the right to decide for ourselves how to vote, whether to take a job, to go (or not go) to university, to leave the country, to cover - or uncover - our hair. And although men may sometimes make it difficult for us to consent freely, unless consent is impossible we should still have the right to consent to sex, or not consent to sex, and to have our autonomy respected.

To argue that no woman can give meaningful consent to a man is to take away something even more valuable than sexual equality: women's right to be treated as autonomous humans. The law has no business taking away adult women's right to sexual consent except in the most exceptional circumstances, such as between prisoners and guards, where the consequences of refusal may be horrific and women have no way to remove ourselves from the situation.

The other glaring concern is that once we take away women's right to individual consent and replace it with a collective social judgement about whom women can have sex with, why would we expect that the law - especially in America - would restrict itself to using that power in ways Prof. MacKinnon approves of? Incels and MRAs argue it is women who abuse their sexual power. If the law were to take away from individual women the general right to decide whether to say yes, how long until the US Right demands the ability to decide to whom women can say no?

Rushed but as you can see, MacKinnon worked on sex (sex!) discrimination and she worked with Dworkin. I wouldn't usually link to wiki but for speed I will. Butler not a fan of hers:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CatharineA.._MacKinnon

I thought it might have been the case that latterly, she'd gone to including males in the definition of women. But it's always been on the to-do list, to go and check! Still not got round to it.

Anyway, any court judging:

Was the sex willing, wanted, respectful and mutual?

Is going to have a hard time. Courts aren't for value judgements. They're to judge whether something happened beyond reasonable doubt.

Yes, drhf, I think you've really hit the nail there.

This is the kind of thinking that typically ends up restricting the rights of people who are labeled as vulnerable - with a very broad sense of what vulnerable means.

And I would argue that we already see that to some extent in our culture. More and more we see a push to extend the cases where we think two adults cannot consent to a sexual relationship. Not just teachers and students where one is quite young, but a grad student and professor, or a worker and supervisor or boss.

There is a real sense where some people seem to be incapable of understanding that adults have the autonomy to navigate adult decisions even in these kinds of scenarios, as long as there is no harassment.

I think part of the issue is that this does create a certain amount of responsibility on the people who might be considered in a less powerful position. You may need to tell someone you are not interested, it may be awkward, sometimes people may even mistakenly think you are interested when you aren't. Increasingly it seems like younger people seem unable to navigate that kind of thing. They'd rather give up their adult autonomy and be protected from discomfort.

I always think, how would it be if we treated other interactions where people need consent like sexual consent. For example, telemarketers or fundraisers, salesmen, etc.

Looks like this tweet from Maya is related:

twitter.com/mforstater/status/1599114790844084224?s=46&t=uqQuvOeGi19txj6TQaH7dg

Ooh, now that has boiled my piss! So if you're not politically engaged or a strident feminist, you're not a real woman. I know many fantastic women who have "lived as a woman", had children and are utterly unimpressed with either feminism or politics in general. Definitely women though.

I understand the point about socialisation of women in different ways to men and I have no doubt that people transitioning gender will have real insights on the process. However, that does not make a man a woman!!!!!

Socialisation is one thing but the physical, bodily experience of girlhood, teenage and womanhood is intrinsic. Very few woman can divorce themselves from their physical reality and while it does not define us, it undoubtedly influences us. Transwomen have bodily realities too which are equally valid but different.

And what about sex by deception?

Disabled woman can never have an abled man for a partner….
Eugenics

just catching up... This?!?!?!

Yeah, that bunch of bad English and word salad with a few naice buzz words chucked in as a fig leaf will be related to this.

In essence,

• Currently rape can only happen to female people. So female people have something male people are excluded from and <cue rage>

• There's a chance of people actually noticing that TQ+ identified males raping and assaulting women in prisons and finding this really unacceptable, so let's juggle around a lot of obfustication and bollocks to prevent those women being protected in ways that TQ+ male people may find to be inconvenient boundaries

• while we crack on with make it normal and appropriate to tell homosexual females to endure providing sex to male people as some kind of social duty without looking for pleasure or reciprocation themselves (McKinnon shared this interesting view on radio: this appears some kind of unpaid sex work as a birthright for having been stupid enough to be born female)

• and we work on sex by deceit not being a crime so that TQ+ people can manipulate others and then be able to not have the sexually exploited person able to report it or expect any justice because TQ+ people matter more than anyone else, and mustn't be outed or distressed regardless of how they behave or treat others.

So basically, fuck that. I am so tired of dressing up really awful, horrible, quite pathologically concerning views of smashing boundaries of others to make use of them in faux intellectual burble to hide how ruddy awful it is. There is a reason that those with views like this avoid talking in plain, accessible English.

And now link this up to Mermaids: Safeguarding is transphobic, and the hints and murmurs that standards of behaviour, legal boundaries, accountability, expectations applied to everyone else are fascist bigotry if applied equally to TQ+ people. By extension being an attempt to raise a belief that anyone identifying as TQ+ is above the law and should be permitted to do what they want without consequences. And anyone harmed in this should not protest, but accept their sacrifice for the greater good. Or something.

Lundy Bancroft could write an entire new series on all this.

Currently rape can only happen to female people. So female people have something male people are excluded from

Sorry that is incorrect and should say can only be committed by someone with a penis. Sex based. <Cue rage>