Margaret Mead Japan China Religie en seks Moral panics Seks en robots De seksuele ontwikkeling van jongeren Seksualisering Leeftijdverschillen Geweld en misbruik Consent Sexting Sex trafficking Prostitutie PornografieIncididunt nisi non nisi incididunt velit cillum magna commodo proident officia enim.
Joseph J. FISCHEL[Deze Introduction geeft perfect weer waarover het boek gaat. Zo goed zelfs dat je de rest bij wijze van spreken niet hoeft te lezen.]
Een artikel van Gigi Engle in Teen Vogue over anale seks wordt genoemd waarin met name het communiceren en toestemming geven positief een rol speelden. De conservatieven waren furieus.
"The self-proclaimed “Activist Mommy,” Elizabeth Johnston, posted a video of herself burning the magazine in outrage (Activist Mommy 2017). The video has been viewed by millions reports Fox News, and the Activist Mommy used it to spearhead a campaign to boycott the magazine. Conservative parent activists are as impassioned as they are unoriginal, and so Johnston predictably tarred Teen Vogue as a pedophilic peddler while posturing her politics as above politics: “They should not be teaching sodomy to our children. [. . .] This is not a Republican issue or a Democratic issue. This is not a conservative issue or a liberal issue. This is a parent issue” (Starnes 2017; see also Edelman 2004, 1–32)." [mijn nadruk] (1)
"The values and lessons of the anal sex guide resonate with the arguments and provocations of Screw Consent. The more accurate and accessible sexual information for young folks, the better, and the more we can destigmatize sex talk, the more likely we are to have pleasurable, not just bearable, sexual experiences."(2)
Maar Fischel is het niet eens met Engle's stelling dat 'enthousiaste toestemming voor beide partijen nodig is om te genieten van seksuele ervaring' en zal dat verder uitwerken.
"So we can haphazardly or ambivalently consent to sex that is fantastic, and consent fantastically to sex that is resolutely unfun."(2)
De auteur legt uit dat de huidige toestemmingspolitiek eeen aantal heel vervelende bijwerkingen heeft die te maken hebben met de dichotomie die gecreëerd wordt tussen OF enthousiaste toestemming OF 'rape' (alsof het zo simpel ligt).
"A second key problem with the primacy of consent in our sex politics cuts the other way. Bad sex, even if consensual, can be really bad, and usually worse for women: not just uninspired, unenthusiastic, or boring, but unwanted, unpleasant, and painful (Loofbourow 2018; Traister 2015). That problem cannot be addressed by consent. Worse still, the problem of bad-as-in-really-bad sex is automatically deprioritized by the consent-as-enthusiasm paradigm, which divides sex into the categories awesome and rape and leaves unaccounted and unaddressed all the immiserating sex too many people, typically women, endure." [mijn nadruk] (4)
De auteur legt via andere auteurs al vast kort uit welke nadelen er kleven aan de moderne ideeën van 'affirmative consent'.
[De bezwaren van Halley die ik hieronder citeer zijn bijzonder boeiend.]
"Harvard law professor Janet Halley is one of the most vocal critics of the potential MPC revisions, affirmative consent, and, more generally, Title IX–based reforms to university sexual misconduct policies and procedures. “The campaign for affirmative consent requirements,” she warns, “is distinctively rightist” (Halley 2015; see also Gruber 2015). Among her many concerns: an affirmative consent standard authorizes broader administrative and statutory intervention that “will often be intensely repressive and sex-negative”; feminists are “seeking social control through punitive and repressive deployments of state power [and] are criminalizing as a first rather than a last resort to achieving social change”; an affirmative consent standard potentially invites women to claim as rape sex they enthusiastically desired but later regretted; the standard reinstalls gender norms of women as emotional and weak and men as sexually predatory and (yet) responsible for absorbing all risk; to the extent that affirmative consent policies will result in greater surveillance and punishment, populations already targeted by the criminal justice system — black men, for example — will disproportionately suffer under these new regimes (see also Gruber 2015, 692). Finally, the most panic-inducing consequence of affirmative consent for Halley is that the standard culminates in the criminalization of undesired sex. It is not merely forced sex, sex under threats of force, or even nonconsensual sex that will qualify as a criminal sex offense. Now, or soon, affirmative consent standards will shift the threshold from force to nonconsent, to affirmative consent, all the way to wantedness, which for Halley represents nothing short of totalitarianism (or “governance feminism” gone ballistic): “A requirement of positive consent will deliver the boon many feminists are seeking: sex that women have that is dysphoric to them at the time will be punishable” (Halley 2015; 2006, 20–22; see also Gersen and Suk 2016, 923). Halley is not alone in her outspoken dissent." [mijn nadruk] (5-6)
Overigens voegt Fischel hier al allerlei nuances toe aan dat soort standpunten. Een en ander zal worden uitgewerkt.
"Yet I am also inclined to agree with Susan Appleton and Susan Stiritz (2016) that there is no such thing as pre-regulated, “ordinary sex” on college campuses; that sex is always already shot through with norms; and that in the United States, those norms are often informed by sex education curricula that are homo- and erotophobic, are medically inaccurate, and reinforce traditional, restrictive norms of femininity and masculinity." [mijn nadruk] (9)
[En daar zit een enorm probleem, vind ik. Zolang dat soort waarden en normen niet veranderen blijft alles problematisch.]
"Finally, despite the thoroughness and incisiveness with which Professor Halley criticizes the American Law Institute and the State of California for potentially injecting an element of desire into their respective definitions of sexual consent, I do not see it. California, along with a few other states, has legislated that its colleges and universities adopt a standard of consent requiring “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.” Given that the standard is an expressive one, a person could very well be reluctant, ambivalent, or even uninterested in sex, yet the sex will not be rendered assaultive (or rendered in violation of a school’s misconduct policy) so long as the person in some way performs something — some behavior, some cue, some token of willingness — beyond frozenness or silence (Westen 2004, 65–93). So desire is not an element of consent; communicated willingness is." [mijn nadruk] (10)
"None of my criticisms of these criticisms are full takedowns, since some of the federal regulatory and university administrative trends in the governance of sexual misconduct are worrisome, not least of which are the secretive hearings with sometimes-arbitrary rules that threaten due process rights of defendants (Kipnis 2017a; New 2016). But it strikes me that the main problems regarding sexual violence, harassment, and discrimination are that incidents still go largely unreported; that women are still largely disbelieved; that student defendants are rarely expelled for violating their universities’ sexual misconduct policies; that police, prosecutors, and medical examiners routinely neglect victim complaints or discourage rape victims from pursuing charges; that arrest rates, conviction rates, and sentencing terms for sex offenses are still so thoroughly racialized (Corrigan 2013; Hefling 2014; Kingkade 2014); and that sexual violence, harassment, and discrimination are epidemic (Gavey 2005, 50–75; but see Gruber 2016, 1031–39)." [mijn nadruk] (10)
"In the real world structured by sex inequality and regressive gender norms, we must much more deeply question the voluntariness of all allegedly voluntary sex and the supreme transformative power we assign to consent. MacKinnon is not alone in her observation that women’s consent in no way guarantees women’s freedom or equality, let alone their pleasure (see also Pateman 1980; West 2000). " [mijn nadruk] (14)
"For the reasons raised by MacKinnon and many others, consent is a pretty crappy legal standard for permissible sex, as both a practical and philosophical matter. But it is also the least crappy standard from the menu of options (desire, consent, force; see Schulhofer 2015). Insofar as an affirmative consent standard requires neither enthusiasm nor mutuality nor desire, but rather an indication of agreement beyond silence and frozenness, then we should, I believe, adopt such a standard into the criminal law of sexual assault, despite Janet Halley’s concerns from one direction and Catharine MacKinnon’s opposing concerns from the other (Schulhofer 2015, 669). " [mijn nadruk] (16)
"A feminist, democratically hedonic sexual culture — by which I mean a culture that facilitates and more equitably distributes its possi- bilities for pleasure and intimacy — requires a whole lot more than the check of consent (see also Cahill 2016, 755). Student activists and all others campaigning against sexual violence should undoubtedly advocate for sex that is fulfilling, respectful, and participated in enthusiastically by all parties. But it is politically mistaken and phenomenologically dangerous to stuff those defensible values into the small, legalistic box of consent."(18)
"Consent talk fundamentally cannot address drinking and hookup culture on campus; fraternity and sorority culture and their concomitant cultures of sexual pressure; impoverished sexual education; people’s sexual skill set or lack thereof; the routinized violence of homosociality; (consented to but sexually abusive) hazing; or better ways to communicate in the sexual encounter itself in order to enhance possibilities for pleasure and decrease possibilities for discomfort or regret." [mijn nadruk] (18)
[Dat kun je toch allemaal als de achterliggende context zien waardoor 'consent' een probleem kan worden? Dat 'consent' niet zo simpel ligt als 'nee' is 'nee' of 'een nadrukkelijk ja is vereist' begrijp ik van de andere kant wel. En dat je niet allerlei waarden moet willen vatten onder 'consent' snap ik ook. Vermoedelijk bedoelt hij dan ook dat we over al die contextzaken zouden moeten praten zonder het zo nadrukkelijk over 'consent' te hebben. Zoiets als een rolverdeling is een groot probleem waarover als zodanig uitgebreid gepraat zou moeten worden. Dat dat probleem ook doorwerkt in het 'geven van toestemming voor', het toestaan van seks is niet de essentie maar één van vele gevolgen.]
"My fear is that by packaging our substantive and wide-ranging sexual values into the procedural and winnowing talk of consent, we are sacrificing a far more capacious project that could zoom out of sex and zoom in on sexual culture (see also Graybill 2017, 176). What values, norms, and practices in our culture facilitate mutually fulfilling, creative, nonrote, nonblah sex? What values, norms, and practices in our culture enable unpleasant, unwanted, or even assaultive sex?"(19)
[Ja, ben ik het mee eens.]
"Perhaps I sound as panicky and cranky as the critics I consider earlier, but I worry that the more we equate consent with desire, pleasure, or enthusiasm, the more students will feel themselves as sexually assaulted when sex does not go well, or when it is not as rock star as they had hoped. Sex that is OK, regretted, unenthusiastic, and not pleasurable will be retroactively experienced as assaultive if nonregret, enthusiasm, pleasure, and better-than-OK are culturally conceptualized as necessary ingredients for consent."(19)
"As it currently circulates among activists, students, and university administrators, consent talk splits the sexual world, rhetorically and perhaps experientially, into two realms: sex that is enthusiastic, mutually desired, fantastic, and thereby consensual and sex that is unenthusiastic, maybe a bit drunken, ambivalently desired, thereby nonconsensual, and thereby classed as sexual assault. Lost in this unforgiving binary are better ways to talk about and redress sex that is not good yet not assaultive (which, let’s face it, is a lot of sex)." [mijn nadruk] (20)
Fischel geeft een overzicht van wat hij in de diverse hoofdstukken wil bepleiten.
"Some human practices on or with other humans, even if those practices are superduper and affirmatively, enthusiastically consented to, should be impermissible because those practices are incompatible with humans’ well-being and -doing in the world and incompatible with humans’ capability to co-determine their sexual relationships, their sexual autonomy. Kinky sex practitioners, activists, and scholars often argue that if consent legitimates the violence of physical contact sports like hockey and football, so too should consent authorize rougher forms of sadomasochistic sex. I argue that the analogy is more convincing in the opposite direction: rather than extending the consent defense to rougher, more pain-inducing kinds of kinky sex, we should eliminate the consent defense for American football, and we should probably ban the sport as it is currently practiced, marketed, and corporatized." [mijn nadruk] (23)
"These problems, and not the problem of nonconsent, form the connective tissue across #MeToo stories and scandals. Querying how and why powerful men constrain (indexically) women’s autonomy and access, rather than presuming all such sex nonconsensual, is more generative for our feminist politics. When nonconsent is proffered as the thread that ties together #MeToo moments, skeptics once again predictably sound alarms that we are hastily lumping all regretted, regrettable, or bad sex as rape. Some contend this conflation belittles rape and infantilizes women. I think the conflation belittles bad sex, and misdiagnoses as assaultive sex men’s sense of sexual entitlement and superordination. If the problem is misdiagnosed, therewith the proposed solutions. " [mijn nadruk] (27)
[Wauw, kritisch en apart. En zo staan er nog wel een aantal andere goede opmerkingen in deze inleiding, maar die komen allemaal verder uitgewerkt terug in de hoofdstukken.]
"Throughout this book, I draw comparisons to consent in the context of sexual activities with consent in the context of nonsexual activities to question both the moral utility of consent and the presumptive specialness of sex."(28)
"In chapters 2 and 3, respectively, I argue that we might make sex a little more special than we do. In proposing that we categorically outlaw sex between a parent’s intimate partner and the minor child of that parent, regardless of consent, I am suggesting that sex is a bit more special than, say, basketball, car washing, or any other nonsexual activity. It should not be a crime for a parent’s intimate partner to ask the parent’s child to perform any number of activities or to perform those activities with the child. But sex should not be on the list of acceptable requests or activities."(29)
"Fetishists fetishize consent. Practitioners and sympathetic scholars routinely defend and celebrate kinky sex — BDSM1 — for the moral primacy it places upon consent. Certainly BDSM is praised for other reasons too — for eroticizing otherwise flaccid publics, for contravening stale norms of “harmonic” intimacy, for helping practitioners work through earlier traumatic experiences, and for theatricalizing and thereby subverting hierarchical social relations. But nearly all advocacy for BDSM starts with consent as moral square one. Whether conceptualized as a “contract,” a “safe word,” or something far more communicatively cumbersome, con- sent not only exonerates but also extols BDSM sex. This is consent unbound. "(31)
"The fetishists’ fetishizing of consent looks like this: as consent transforms what would be rape into “sex” (Hurd 2005, 504; Baker 2009, 97), so consent transforms sex with violence, scenes of hierarchy, role-playing, or other forms of explicit power exchange into kink (Weinberg 2016, 15). "(33)
[Precies. En Fischels idee is terecht dat je gewelddadige seks toch kunt veroordelen ook al was er toestemming, namelijk op basis van morele maatstaven voor wat humaan is en zo verder. De toestemming is niet het enige probleem aan bepaalde seksuele praktijken.]
"I recount these sex-positive objections to concede that my seemingly simple normative claim — consent, on its own, should not morally or legally green-light any eroticized activity whatsoever, however injurious or impeding — is proposed not in a social vacuum but against a sexual regulatory landscape historically hostile to sexual minorities."(35)
De vergelijking tussen BDSM en American Football wordt aangepakt.
"Indeed it is not absurd to suggest, as Almond does, that football contributes significantly to white Americans’ racist worldviews and, in particular, to the fatal stereotyping of black men as animalistic and aggressive (186–87; see also Shor 2014). "
"American football subscribes boys and men to the most unforgiving masculinity norms.
Football “prizes physical dominance”; trains, socializes, and desensitizes boys and men to physical dominance; and discourages empathy, sensitivity, and other forms of emotional connection (Almond 2014, 97–99). Attendant to the habituation of dominance, what lubricates and extends that dominance is a casualization of racism, misogyny, and homophobia that constitutes (or, less polemically, may constitute) the psychic stuff of the successful football player (94). In turn, football masculinity, which is to say players’ sense of self-worth (and monetary worth), is indexed through successful subscription to a norm of domination and brutality." [mijn nadruk] (41)
"Not to mention, American football assigns women to the narrowest of femininity norms too: women “can either dance around on the sidelines as a half-naked sex object or sit in the stands cheering on [their] man” (Almond 2014, 89). " [mijn nadruk] (42)
"Football is predatorily capitalistic and exploitive."(42)
"Football diminishes boys’ and men’s ability to be and do in the world."(43)
Het leidt tot blessures, soms tot handicap of overlijden. Deelnemers studeren niet af omdat ze 40 tot 60 uur per week de sport bedrijven.
"Footballers all consent, or maybe they do, and consent is what is supposed to morally and legally exonerate the game. (...) Did they? Do they? What are the other viable options for upward mobility for children in the neighborhood?"(45)
"Of course, the actual reason that the consensual violence of football is permitted whereas the consensual violence of some sex is proscribed is that only one of these activities generates astronomical profit for white men."(45)
"Because American football disproportionately objectifies or otherwise degrades black men and boys; because American football subscribes men and boys to the most unforgiving, narrowest, and violent forms of masculinity; because the current corporatization of American football exacerbates social, economic, and educational inequalities; and because American football diminishes boys’ and men’s abilities to be and do in the world on account of both physical and nonphysical damage, we should probably ban the sport."(47)
[Prachtig betoog, maar 'probably'? Waarom zo voorzichtig? ]
"Neither consent nor serious bodily injury nor dignity can explain in full why some mutually consensual, agreed-to injurious behavior ought to be prohibited. Yet some such behavior should indeed be prohibited. Protecting one’s long-term interests to do and be in the world, one’s capability to make, and make again, decisions for one-self and one’s relationships, is the best (or least bad) rationale for proscribing some forms of consensual violence."(57)
"Should consent be an available defense to family members and intimate partners of family members superordinated in vertical status relationships over complainants, especially if the complainant is a minor?
Had Quashana been fifteen, not seventeen, Powell could not have claimed his niece consented, given the state’s age of consent law. But what difference does a two-year age difference make when the complainant is still a financially dependent minor and the perpetrator is her uncle, in a position of authority and trust?"(65)
"But if we are willing to prohibit psychotherapists from having sex with their patients why not prohibit people from having sex with the children of their intimate partners, such as mothers’ boyfriends?"(66)
"Demonstrated in this chapter is that consent is insufficient for permitting sex within certain status relations."(67)
"State status sex laws are (still, if waningly) grounded in traditional morality and concerns surrounding consanguinity (blood relations). In the chapter’s second section (following the lead of other political philosophers and legal scholars), I propose instead that status-sex laws should target abuses of authority, as do parallel laws in the United Kingdom and Canada (Eskridge 1995, 66–67)."(68)
[Met andere woorden: als er sprake is van een verticale relatie tussen mensen waarbij de ene kant het gezag heeft en de andere kant afhankelijk is van dat gezag, dan is het niet van belang of er sprake is van 'bloedverwantschap' en dan is seks niet toegestaan zelfs al zou er sprake zijn van 'consent'? Dat laatste is dan geen onderwerp van afweging meer, omdat er dan automatisch sprake is van machtsmisbruik? Denk aan therapeut - cliënt, denk aan leraar - leerling, denk aan vriend van moeder- dochter van moeder, en zo verder. Hm, daar ben ik het niet zonder meer mee eens. Kun je bijvoorbeeld nog van machtsmisbruik spreken als de 'zwakke partij' instemt met wat er gebeurt? Van de andere kant: kun je wel van instemming spreken als er zo duidelijk sprake is van machtsmisbruik?]
"The problem comes down to line drawing as it so often does: which vertical relations are too vertical to permit sex? If we disallow a consent defense for Anthony Powell, must we commit to criminalizing sex between employers and employees? Professors and undergraduate or graduate students? Financially asymmetric spouses? (...) where do we draw the line on proscribing sex in vertical relations of authority, trust, and dependence?" [mijn nadruk] (68)
[Precies. Zijn onderzoek laat zien:]
"Sexual assault within vertical status relations is not an exception but a prevalent pattern. And it is not just fathers but uncles, grandfathers, and mothers’ boyfriends who leverage the verticality of close, supervisory, or dependent relationships to commit sexual assault, typically but not exclusively against girls. "(73)
"All states codify a range of age of consent laws. In most states the age of consent is sixteen, though the majority of states also include age span provisions; for example, sex between a sixteen-year-old and an adult of any age (or another teenager) may be permissible, but sex with a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old may be permissible only if the older partner is nineteen or younger. Some states retain a higher age of consent explicitly for relations of trust, authority, and dependence. The age of consent for the general population might be sixteen, but the student-athlete must be eighteen, say, before his coach is permitted to have sex with him (Lowder 2011; Phipps 2003, 441–45)."(73)
"So too, teenagers and young adults above the state’s age of consent but financially dependent and still living with their parents or guardians remain unprotected (like seventeen-year-old Quashana), at least by age of consent statutes. Finally, there is a normative issue. The problem I am pointing to is that sex across vertical status relations is also often sex across age difference, but the problem is neither age nor age difference alone. To prosecute a thirty-five-year-old man for sex with the fourteen-year-old daughter of his girlfriend on the grounds of age and age difference misses (part of) the point. The legal wrong should be, chiefly, sex procured through leveraging (his) superordination and (her) isolation and dependence." [mijn nadruk] (73-74)
"Moreover, consensual sex between a seventeen-year-old and an actual, not just legal, adult stranger with no other status difference or dependence seems neither morally nor legally problematic. But allegedly consensual sex between a seventeen-year-old and a legal stranger who is actually a guardian or partner of a guardian seems both morally and legally problematic, since it is a relationship in which “consent might not easily be refused” (Lawrence 2003, 578), a point to which I return later. " [mijn nadruk] (74)
[Ik vraag me af ... Zitten hier niet allerlei negatieve waardeoordelen over leeftijdsverschillen en over de handelingsbekwaamheid van jongeren? Worden de mensen aan de onderkant van de verticale relatie niet te gemakkelijk als slachtoffer neergezet hier? Dit zijn van die opvattingen die je ziet bij sommige feministes of in de #MeToo-beweging.]
"My argument, already intimated, will come as little surprise: there are better reasons — liberal, feminist, sexual autonomy–based — for barring sex between psychotherapists and their patients, sex between minors and the intimate partners of the minors’ parents or guardians, and sex between teachers and students than for barring sex between, say, adult first cousins or even adult siblings."(78)
"For now I state simply that I draw the line here: sex between all minors and adults superordinated in positions of authority, trust, or dependence over those minors — including parents, adoptive parents, stepparents; intimate partners of parents; uncles and aunts by full blood, half blood, or no blood; teachers, coaches, and counselors — should be legally proscribed. I draw the line more or less where Canada and the United Kingdom draw theirs."(83)
[Ik vind dat dus geen geweldig standpunt. Te veel vage termen ook als 'positions of authority, trust, or dependence']
"A proposal to expand state power over sex across a greater number of vertical status relations poses serious problems for progressives committed to social and sexual justice; namely, criminalizing nonnormative sex and its practitioners and bloating the already-bursting system of mass incarceration."(86)
"Not only are our country’s current laws regulating sex and status too sanguineous and biological, but they typically presuppose a nuclear family of two married parents and their genetically related offspring. Our sex laws (and our sex thinking) should account for the growing number of single parent–led, stepparent-co-led, intimate-partner-of-parent-co-led, and other kinds of blended families. Persons superordinated in positions of familial authority are no longer biological fathers alone. " [mijn nadruk] (89)
"Janet Halley (2006) coined the term governance feminism in the early 2000s, using it to describe the ways feminist actors and organizations have both turned to the state to remedy injustice and installed themselves within state apparatuses. Developments in sexual harassment law (Halley 2002) and the regulation of sexual assault and misconduct (Halley 2008; 2015) are exemplary forms of governance feminism. The costs of aligning feminist projects with state power are myriad in Halley’s view, not least of which is the cost to sex itself. Halley worries that once state policies and actors have been injected with strands of feminist thought, the state is more likely to criminalize sex and sexual expression that is nonnormative, kinky, and queer (Halley 2006; 2008). Halley likewise contends warns feminist-led efforts to revise sexual assault and sex discrimination laws, thereby expanding protections to women, may inadvertently solidify gender stereotypes of women as prudish and vulnerable and men as libidinal and aggressive (Halley 2015).
Several years after Halley put governance feminism to analytic work, Elizabeth Bernstein (2010) coined the related phrase carceral feminism, governance feminism’s eviler twin. Here the issue is not simply turning to the state to redress sex-related injuries but turning to its criminal justice arm — putting allegedly bad men in prison to solve sex inequalities. Carceral feminism both individualizes problems that are more about neoliberal political economy than about predatory pimps (sex trafficking) and exacerbates an already-racist system (putting more black and brown men in prison — see “The Race Problem” above). " [mijn nadruk] (91-92)
[Ik denk blijkbaar in lijn met Halley en Bernstein.]
"The question is: Which regulations are better than others? From the perspective of sexual autonomy — that is, from a pro-sex feminist perspective that takes as normatively central people’s capabilities to co-determine their sexual relationships — along with a commitment to people’s abilities to access intimacy and erotic experiences, I have suggested doubling down on sex in some vertical status relations and decriminalizing sex across horizontal relations." [mijn nadruk] (92-93)
[Hij zit dus inderdaad in die feministische hoek met opvattingen over seksuele autonomie waarover ik mijn twijfels heb. Die opvattingen zeggen in feite dat mensen aan de onderkant van een verticale relatie nooit seksuele autonomie kunnen hebben, zelfs niet als ze instemmen. Dat is betuttelend en op een verkeerde manier vrouwvriendelijk. Zie Halley.]
[Sla ik over. ]
Over een groep mannen die seks had met paarden. Toen dat bekend werd kwamen er meteen 'antibestiality laws' in de VS. Waarbij gesteld werd dat het dier geen toestemming had verleend.
"Senator Pam Roach is incorrect about animals’ capacity to consent, Limbaugh says (and Zoo implies). If animals’ refusal to consent were ethically relevant, we should be far less concerned with interspecies sex than with, say, mass meat consumption, factory farming, and the fishing industry. And if “interspecies sexual assault” has any meaningful referent, it would not be a horse topping a man but men and women anesthetizing a horse and removing its testicles." [mijn nadruk] (118)
"Consent is undeniably a human construct in relation to human transactions under conditions of human cognition."(118)
"However, even without a clear-cut definition of what consent means or should mean among humans, it suffices that consent, conceptually, presupposes a combination of expression, information, reason, and reflection that is unavailable to nonhuman animals." [mijn nadruk] (121)
"Indeed, these approaches shore up the idea that our aversion to human-animal sex is ultimately about human intent — a presumptively peculiar desire — not animal welfare."(122)
[Inderdaad. En in het algemeen vinden we dat mensen geen seks moeten willen hebben met dieren. Of met lijken. Toestemming is natuurlijk ook niet aanwezig en evenmin relevant als het gaat om seks met dode lichamen zoals Fischer daarna uitlegt. Ook dat is een vorm van seks die over het algemeen afgewezen wordt.]
"subjecting a corpse to a consent inquiry is nonsensical because corpses are not persons, in any ordinary sense of the word person."(124-125)
Maar wat dan met seks tussen volwassenen en kinderen?
"Throughout the 1970s, feminist activists garnered major national attention for child sexual abuse. At the end of the decade, David Finkelhor, now a renowned expert in child victimization, published his article “What’s Wrong with Sex between Adults and Children?” (1979). His answer: nonconsent."(126-127)
"And yet the motivations for and shortcomings of Finkelhor’s argument — grounded in nonconsent — anticipate a recurring definitional crisis of “child sexual abuse” and point to the uncomfortable fact that there is no reliable answer to the wrongness of adult-child sex (which does not mean such conduct is permissible). For if consent is immaterial when it comes to animals and corpses — that is, if consent is a product of sloppy thinking as we inventory our ethical encounter with animals and corpses — why would it be any more relevant for young children?" [mijn nadruk] (127)
Voetnoot 11 hierbij
"11. Another presumption of this chapter, for the sake of argument, is that young children are incapable of consent. For my critique of the blanket classification of minors as sexually incompetent, see Fischel (2016). " [mijn nadruk] (213)
[Dat is nogal een uitgangspunt ... Maar allereerst: 'young children' is vaag, welke leeftijd wordt bedoeld?]
"Finkelhor’s moral and political commitment is liberal. The wrongness of adult-child sex, he writes, cannot be (tautologically) rooted in unnaturalness, as traditional morality prohibits all kinds of sex, including gay sex, that liberals accept. Nor can the wrongness of adult-child sex be located on the supposed premature sexualization of otherwise innocent children. Contra Pam Roach, kids are sexually curious, innocence is a social construct, and protecting children from sex tout court (even from sexual information and education) only exacerbates their vulnerability (Finkelhor 1979, 693).
But, and this is Finkelhor’s most provocative intervention, the wrongness of adult-child sex cannot be premised on findings of injury, as such findings have an empirical, not moral, grounding (1979, 693–95). This worries Finkelhor since it leaves us with the unsavory conclusion that in cases where adult-child sex does not result in harmful consequences such cases would not be wrongful. The problem cuts the other way too. “Compulsory education, divorce, even going to the doctor cause harm and trauma to an important number of children” (694).
Finkelhor thus searches for a moral basis for the wrongness of adult-
child sex, and the basis he locates is consent." [mijn nadruk] (127)
[Het argument 'het is onnatuurlijk' is inderdaad zeer problematisch. De mythe van het 'onschuldige kind' is inderdaad wat het is: een mythe en een gevaarlijke ook nog. Die van verwonding etc. snap ik niet: je kunt toch de morele norm stellen dat niemand kinderen fysiek mag verwonden of schaden tenzij daar een heel goede medische reden voor is? Psychisch schaden is ingewikkelder, dat moet ik toegeven. De keuze voor 'consent' is volgens Fischer geen goede.]
"Asking whether young children consent to be bathed, be spanked, be fed, be fed vegetables they do not like, go or not go on a playdate, be or not be on time-out, get vaccinated or not get vaccinated, get circumcised or not get circumcised would be beside the point.(...)
Consent is indefensible as a sole criterion — or really a criterion at all — for sex involving children, whose lives are so thoroughly cared for, superintended, and intervened upon, precisely because they are unable to consent. We refuse children’s expressions of willingness and unwillingness as indices of meaningful consent."(128)
[Dit lijkt me wat te simpel. En nogmaals: over welke leeftijd hebben we het? Je voedt kinderen namelijk ook op om zelf verantwoordelijkheid te dragen voor allerlei zaken, je wilt ze ook steeds meer het gevoel geven dat je rekening houdt met hun wensen. De vraag is waar de grens ligt. Qua leeftijd bijvoorbeeld, maar ook dan is het ene kind het andere niet.]
"So if children do not always suffer as a result of adult sexual activity, and if consent is moot or minimally useful for our assessment of children’s activity, sexual or otherwise, what is wrong with adult-child sex? "(129)
"The first answer: rather than focusing on incapacity to consent or bad consequences, we might classify the wrong of adult-child sex as exploitation. Exploitation sounds with the way 1970s feminists framed adult-child sex: as reflective and reiterative of patriarchal domination. Whereas domination focuses on setbacks of the victim’s interests, however, exploitation concentrates on the illegitimate satisfaction of the perpetrator’s interests."(129)
[Als je het zo ziet kan seks tussen volwassenen en kineren dus nooit in het belang van kinderen zijn. Dat is gebaseerd op een normatieve inschatting die kinderen ziet als aseksueel. Bovendien is er dan heel wat meer exploitatie van kinderen door volwassenen waar je je vraagtekens bij kunt zetten. Waarom dat dan alleen afkeuren bij seks? En dan denk ik niet eens aan kinderarbeid, maar aan ouders die hun kinderen naar schoonheidswedstrijden slepen of vergaand dwingen tot topprestaties in sport of muziek of dans.]
"Except now we face what we might call the Toddlers & Tiaras problem. Doesn’t this TLC show and the child beauty pageant industry, not to mention child acting generally, unfairly benefit — financially, psychically, socially — parents, guardians, and filmmakers by exploiting the child’s (often primped, exposed, and sexualized) body? What about all those kids who hate team sports but their participation makes their parents feel good, important, parental, or young again? Might framing the harm of adult-child sex as exploitation indict an assortment of activities involving children? "(130)
[Precies! ]
"This suggests a second speculative answer to the wrongness of adult-child sex: there is no one answer. That consent, exploitation, and harm all fall short of identifying the wrong of adult-child sex indicates that we may never find a singular, summary wrong. Perhaps what is wrong with sex between adults and children is composite: the likelihood of negative consequences of many sex practices, joined with the cultural or phenomenological specialness of sex, joined with unequal relations between adults and children, joined with the probability of exploitation, joined with gendered dominance instantiated so often through adult-child sex, means adult-child sex is a particularly bad idea and a particularly impermissible form of conduct. " [mijn nadruk] (130)
[Snap ik, alleen is het zo dat op veel van de genoemde zaken kritiek mogelijk is, zoals op die culturele verbijzondering van seks - waarom wordt seks zo belangrijk gemaakt? - of die ongelijkheid tussen volwassenen en kinderen - ongelijkheid is er tussen allerlei mensen, ook mannen en vrouwen in huwelijkse relaties en waarom accepteren we die ongelijkheid wel? - of op het vlak van exploitatie - wat dus op allerlei tereinen voorkomt en waarom verbieden we exploitatie daar dan niet? En zo verder. ]
Volgt nog een stuk waarbij de insteek is dat er blijkbaar ideeën over mannelijkheid in het spel zijn in alle gegeven casussen.
"Rather, I am proposing that these outlier cases might dramatize something important about the state of (white, American) masculinity in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Consent as an ethical framework takes us nowhere in parsing that masculinity; dominance feminism takes us somewhere, but it’s the wrong location. " [mijn nadruk] (133)
Casus over het misbruik van een gehandicapte vrouw en de rol van 'toestemming' bij iemand die door handicaps niet in staat is om te praten. Tijdens de eerste rechtszaak werd de vrouw gezien als iemand die geen toestemming kon geven en dus werd het misbruik gezien als 'sexual assault'.
"The Appellate Court of Connecticut reversed the trial jury’s conviction, holding that because L.K. had a demonstrable history of registering displeasure or discomfort through “biting, kicking and scratching,” she could not be deemed physically helpless, as unable to consent (State v. Fourtin [2009]). The Connecticut Supreme Court affirmed the appellate court decision and Fourtin’s conviction was overturned. Thus, while the higher courts treated L.K. more like an adult woman than a horse, corpse, or child, her elevated moral status came with a pernicious consequence: letting Richard Fourtin go. "(135-136)
In het eerste deel van dit hoofdstuk wordt die rechtszaak uitgebreid besproken.
"The second part of this chapter makes the case for sexual autonomy and sexual access as more promising, less damaging concepts for facilitating the promotion and protection of intimacies and erotic flourishing."(136)
"Yet — and perhaps because our reforms are principled not on the notion of universal human dignity but rather on relational autonomy and on access to a more democratically hedonic sexual culture — we especially canvass ways the state might facilitate the sexuality and intimacy opportunities for persons with significant disabilities in particular."(140)
"Throughout this book, sexual autonomy is referred to as the capability to co-determine sexual relations, as if that is both an accepted and a well-understood definition of the concept. It is neither.
We offer here a feminist reconstruction of sexual autonomy before
elaborating the legal reforms that such a reconstructed principle might
portend."(140)
"Triangulating from Schulhofer’s sexual autonomy and Nedelsky’s relational autonomy, we reconstruct sexual autonomy as the capability to co-determine sexual relations, the operative yet unelaborated definition of the preceding pages. Each of the key terms requires brief clarification before we posit the kind of legal policies, institutional reforms, and broad-based access such a reconstructed principle of sexual autonomy entails for people across the spectrum of ability. "(146)
"We are disinclined to restrictively define the sexual. As feminist, queer, and disability studies have made clear, the borders of the sexual are porous, variable, historically and culturally contingent, not always genitalized but too often masculinist, and eroticized if not necessarily saturated by social inequality. For our purposes, it is sufficient to underdefine sexual conduct as conduct that generates or is intended to generate erotic pleasure." [mijn nadruk] (148)
"Evidently, facilitating sex for persons with significant disabilities requires more than assisting the sex act itself. Preparations must be made beforehand, and evaluations of wantedness must be recurring. In Danish group homes visited by Professor Kulick, staff organized roleplaying activities and discussion groups for persons with disabilities in order to familiarize them with modes of intimate communication and negotiation, to explain boundaries of permissible social-sexual behavior, and to help them cope with the rejection of a love interest (108–9). These sessions are exemplary in their promotion of sexual autonomy, designed to enhance disabled persons’ capability to co-determine their sexual relations. "(163)
[Zoals ik zelf indertijd ook heb meegemaakt tijdens mijn studiereis naar Denemarken rondom 'assistive technology'. Dat land is echt een voorbeeld en een model voor dit soort dingen.]
"The “private purchase of sexual services” is not simply a euphemism for hiring a sex worker; it encompasses a wide variety of activities. If they wish to pay for sex directly, persons with disabilities may also need help finding sex workers willing to meet persons with disabilities; combing through websites and newspaper advertisements for such escorts; locating brothels that are accessible; and navigating what can often be complicated and detailed menus of services and prices. Particularly for persons who are nonverbal or are intellectually disabled, or both, caretakers are often needed as “translators” for hired sex workers, since caretakers are more familiar with their patients’ communication patterns and better suited to interpret the meanings of patients’ gestures and sounds. In addition, persons with significant intellectual disabilities or mobility limitations may need to be bathed in advance of a sexual encounter, and their rooms properly prepared. " [mijn nadruk] (163-164)
"What would it look like to translate these forms of sexual assist- ance—enabling access—for persons across the spectrum of ability, including temporarily abled people?
There are sound moral and strategic reasons for democratic states— and liberal arts universities—to choose neither to subsidize sex workers for their citizens and students nor to directly facilitate, mechanically, sex and masturbation for folks without significant impairments. One reason is limited resources. Another is conservative blowback. Another is erotic totalitarianism. [Ik neem aan dat dit cynisch bedoeld is?]
But two wonderfully simple moral assumptions underlie the facilitation of sexual access for persons with disabilities that ought to carry across the spectrum of ability: first, sex is or can be a source of joy in people’s lives, and second, sex is socially coordinated and mediated. Danish sexual advisors would not do what they do if sex and intimacy did not make their clients’ lives better. And they would be unemployed if masturbation and sex were just one- and two-person acts that require no learning, training, or experience. But given how insufficient and inaccurate so much sexual education is in the United States, and given how stubbornly sexist, heteronormative, and uninformed our dominant sexual culture is, temporarily abled folks will likewise benefit from resources and assistance so that their erotic lives and relationships are not only free from coercion and violence but are also joyful. " [mijn nadruk] (164-165)
"Following Sarrel and Sarrel, and Appleton and Stiritz, a politics of democratic hedonism, at the most general level, might entail providing girls and women, queers, and everyone else with information about sexual health and pleasure; readily available, publicly funded access to birth control, other reproductive services, and pre-exposure prophylaxis (Burda 2015; Caron 2017); workshops on improved sexual communication, better sex, safer sex, better masturbation, and so forth; good lube; and a variety of contraceptive options. Many universities currently offer these sorts of programs and resources. Nevertheless, such programs are too easily perceived as gratuitous in comparison to the “real issue” of sexual violence. Rather, these programs should be understood as essential to transforming immiserating sexual culture that leads to so much unpleasant and unwanted sex." [mijn nadruk] (165-166)
[Dat is dus het inzicht dat je er niet komt met alleen maar 'affirmative consent' wetgeving, maar dat je een cultuur moet scheppen waarin mensen kunnen genieten van seks en andere mensen willen laten genieten van seks, een cultuur waarin geweld en dergelijke afgewezen worden. Nou, wat Fischer opsomt is prachtig en ik ben helemaal voor. Maar zoiets lijkt me in de VS totaal onmogelijk om ook echt te realiseren.]
"Promoting democratically hedonic access necessitates interrogation of institutions and cultural dictates that continue to make pleasurable sex and egalitarian sexual culture inaccessible. Namely, consider the more rigid and unforgiving aesthetic, comportment, and behavioral norms of femininity and masculinity that stifle most people’s sexuality, especially the sexuality of people with disabilities."(166)
"A commitment to sexual autonomy — as a capability that needs to be cultivated — also requires access to a minimal level of publicly funded comprehensive sexuality education (CSE).
Comprehensive sexuality education programs were all but rubbed out in the United States between 1981 and 2009. Until recently, “abstinence only until marriage” (AOUM) programs dominated public schools, especially those in poorer communities." [mijn nadruk] (167)
[Precies. Dat zegt dus alles over de VS en daarom geloof ik niet zo gemakkelijk dat dat nog in een andere richting omgebogen kan worden. ]
"From the perspective of facilitating sexual autonomy and democratizing sexual access, federal initiatives under the Obama administration at least signaled a turn for the better, away from ideological, irresponsible, and endangering abstinence “education” and toward evidence-based programming targeted at teen pregnancy, sexual violence, and sexually transmitted infections (R. Stein 2010; B. Wilson 2010). As of this writing, the Trump administration is rolling back even these limited gains."(168)
[Dat illustreert wat ik bedoel.]
"Virtually non-existent — either now or in the past four decades — are publicly funded sexuality education programs in which sexual desire is celebrated as a “force for good” (Vernacchio 2014, 10; see also Gill 2015, 81). Rarely are sex acts — what they include, why they (should) feel good, how to refuse or initiate them, how to perform them well and safely — discussed plainly and positively. Infrequently too are “plumbing” lessons of sexuality education taught alongside critical interrogations of gender normativity, heteronormativity, and cultural valorizations of able-bodiedness and able-mindedness. Nor does comprehensive sexuality education typically entail less lofty but no less important lessons regarding how to start and end relationships, how to respectfully argue with intimate partners, and how to determine and revise one’s sexual and relational values (Fine and McClelland 2006, 325–28; Haberland 2015; Lamb 2011; Lamb and Peterson 2012; McRuer 2011; Owens-Reid and Russo 2014; Vernacchio 2014)." [mijn nadruk] (168-169)
[Klopt helemaal. Zelfs in ons land is dat nog grotendeels afwezig, al zijn er wel scholen die daar meer aan doen.]
"I argue first that nonconsent is neither the core nor the common wrong of #MeToo’s wrongful sex, despite some advocates contending otherwise. Furthermore, positing #MeToo’s wrongful sex as ubiquitously nonconsensual leads to bad, as in antifeminist, political outcomes: the sentimentalizing of (white) children and the pathologizing of men; a myopia regarding sexual culture and gender hierarchy; and conservative backlash. And while discrimination and harassment hold better explanatory purchase over #MeToo’s wrongful sex than nonconsent, these terms too do not quite capture some of the central and centrally unethical aspects of these sexual or sexually assaultive encounters. "(173)
"I propose instead that what might hold all this bad and really bad and assaultive sex together is undemocratic hedonism, a problem of asymmetric sexual access. Reframing #MeToo as exposing both violations of sexual autonomy and impediments to sexual access helps accentuate the movement’s aspirations while buttressing it against familiar conservative criticisms. "(173-174)
"A first problem with lumping all #MeToo sex as nonconsensual sex is that it potentially mystifies men’s usurpations, their sense of sexual entitlement, behind the twinned specters of ruined innocent children and pathological predators (Kincaid 1998; for my gloss on intergeneration- ality, consent, and sex offense, see Fischel 2016).
Take as a primary example the hashtag campaign #MeAt14, which arose in response to allegations leveled against then–US Senate candidate Roy Moore from Alabama that he pursued, kissed, and molested teenage girls when he was in his thirties. The youngest of the girls was fourteen. In the weeks leading up to Moore’s election day defeat hundreds of women, Alabamans and non-Alabamans, celebrities and ordinary folk, posted pictures of their fourteen-year-old selves online, with the hashtag #MeAt14 with comments like “Can’t Consent at 14. Not in Alabama. Not anywhere” and “When I was 14, I got braces . . .” (Contrera 2017). The images feature dorky kids doing dorky stuff like homework; they are not dressed up for the school dance. The images and captions bespeak the supposed naïveté and incompetence of any and every teenage girl. National Public Radio summarized the campaign succinctly: “#MeAt14 Reminds Internet 14-Year-Olds Are Innocent, Immature, Unable to Consent” (Benderev 2017).
Feminists should be skeptical if not outright dismissive of such a campaign. #MeAt14 converts the phenomenon of an older man leveraging age and power to sexually assault or advance upon girls (for example, by driving a victim to a remote spot in his car to grope her) into a phenomenon of a pedophilic man who spoils purity, the frivolous joys of childhood. What about all of Moore’s alleged victims who were older teenagers (Cleves and Syrett 2017; see also MacKinnon 2007b, 245–56)? Are they undeserving of sympathy or support because they are not minors and so are above the age of consent? If Moore sequestered girls and young women from their communities to force himself upon them, what difference does age difference make? On the other hand, what about fourteen-year-olds who willfully and joyfully engage in sexual activity? Refiguring ruined preadolescent and adolescent innocence as the social problem, rather than male sexual entitlement buttressed by privilege and power, substitutes pervasive sex inequality for Sick Men and Cute Kids. #MeToo, unlike #MeAt14, recalls that sexual manipulation, coercion, assault, and misconduct are practiced by superordinated men against subordinated girls and women (and boys and men) of all ages. Young age aggravates women’s vulnerability but young age is not ipso facto vulnerability.
The sentimentalization of childhood and the pathologizing of sexual misconduct also orbited the Kevin Spacey scandal." [mijn nadruk] (174-175)
[Mooie analyse.]
"A second problem with lumping all #MeToo sex as nonconsensual is that some of the sex was or might have been consensual, nonetheless deeply unwanted, but still rightfully a target of feminist movement. "(176)