Role-playing time! Let's say you're having sex, with a partner, in whatever manner that you both enjoy. And let's say that toward the end of your time together, your partner asks, "Hey, would you mind if I brought several million of our closest friends in here, just to observe this?" And you're like, "Oh, please, no. I would not prefer that." And then your sex partner invites millions of people into the room anyway, instructing each of them that you would really prefer they not come in. This excites them! They are willing to pay $10 a pop to observe what you do not want them to see.

So: What does this experience say about you, as a person? Let's take a representative sample of public responses to people who once privately videotaped themselves during sex many years ago, and then later saw that videotape disseminated to millions of people without their consent:

* You don't deserve reproduce, or ever succeed at any job: "[to] all the little girls and boys out there who one day hope to be famous/have a family/have an awesome career. Don't make a sex tape."

* You're either a calculating liar, or too dumb to fuck: "Spare us the outrage at how you feel sooooo betrayed, how you have no idea how this could have fallen into the wrong hands. . . . if you are actually dumb enough to make a sex tape and think it won’t get leaked, you are too dumb to ever have sex again."

* If you express discomfort at having your sex tape disseminated without your consent, you're a whiner: "Forgive us if we don't feel too sorry for Paris, given that the sex tape helped transform her from a two-bit reality TV star and wannabe to an internationally famous tabloid darling and blonde icon."

* And on the off-chance that you are not embarrassed by the tape's release? Well, you're a whore: "Like any mentally unstable famewhore, she's speaking out about the entire debacle."

Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and I disagree with these sentiments! Join us in this edition of Sexist Beatdown as we chat consent with girls on film, until the conversation devolves into a demonstration of OUR FEMINIST HULK RAGE:

SADY: Well, good morning! Who wants to discuss... THE EROTICIZATION OF NON-CONSENT????

AMANDA: Oh me! Me! Wait ... I believe I am meant to feign disinterest in this discussion, in order to make it hotter. THE CHAT THEY DIDN'T WANT YOU TO READ.

SADY: Perhaps you should hire a lawyer to stop me from chatting with you, so that I might go ahead and continue chatting anyway!

AMANDA: For that is the consequence of having a Gmail account.

SADY: EXACTLY. And we all know that, however many verbal and/or legal refusals a woman may utter, she SECRETLY WANTS YOU to do whatever the hell you want and/or will profit from, anyway. If she didn't WANT you to release her sex tape, why did she make a sex tape? If she didn't WANT you to penetrate her vagina, why did she have a vagina? And so on! And so forth!

AMANDA: Right? So, the whole wink-wink "taboo" behind the "leaked"-but-not-actually-leaked sex tape doesn't bother me so much – I know that some people get off on the idea of watching people have sex on tape who don't normally have sex on tape. . . as long as all parties are actually just playing the "leak" card for its erotic potential. The problem is that the people who are selling, downloading, and writing about these things don't appear interested in differentiating between "leaked" sex tapes and. . . leaked sex tapes.

SADY: Right. That's the thing. And the assumption, among people I've talked to, is that these things ARE leaked purposefully. Thus making their subjects total sluts! But when one brings up the idea that maybe, JUST MAYBE, someone like Kendra Wilkinson may be repeatedly saying that she doesn't want people to sell or view her sex tape because SHE DOESN'T WANT PEOPLE TO SELL OR VIEW HER SEX TAPE, then the reply that comes back is, all too often, "well, then she's just stupid." Stupid for making the sex tape, stupid for not thinking strangers would jerk off to it without her consent. Which MAKES the non-consent involved in your jerk-off time... okay? Because you think she's not smart? How does that work? As far as I can tell, we value consent no matter who it comes from. It's not like you have to pass the SAT in order to decide whether or not you want a certain sexual experience. You just want it or you don't, and if you clearly don't, it's not okay for anyone else to proceed with that against your will.

AMANDA: Right. I am also confused as to why some people assume that people who fight the release of their sex tape in court are simply doing it for publicity purposes? Because I have been involved in a civil court proceeding like one time on a relatively minor matter and it was hugely inconvenient and horrible! And I imagine that when a video of you having sex is involved in evidence collection it is even more unpleasant!

SADY: Right. And the fact is, even when we all assume the release of the tape was fully consensual — instigated by both or all of the people in it — the idea of it not being consensual IS kind of eroticized, by the people selling it. That, I am actually NOT okay with — the way there were, according to Tracy Clark-Flory, mocking speech bubbles over Kim Kardashian's face on the packaging of her own sex tape, reading like, "OMG!" or "PWNED" or whatever. The idea that you're dominating this specific woman — er, excuse me, stupid fauxlebrity bitch, I believe, is the term we for some reason think is appropriate when discussing her — and doing something sexual to her against her will IS CAPITALIZED UPON. As is the idea that legal court proceedings are just cute little gestures of resistance so you won't think she's a slut. That, to me, is exactly what rape culture looks like.

AMANDA: It is. And it's also this really weird phenomenon where even people who are OK with other people having consensual sex the way they want to get all confused once that sex is transferred onto videotape and commence with the slut-shaming again. Like, one of the biggest arguments I've heard against people who make sex tapes and then don't want them released for strangers to jack off to them, is that they don't understand the "consequences" of sex. REALLY? Because while I understand the practical concerns involved here, and think everyone should be educated about the risks of sexual intercourse, people who trump up "personal responsibility" while doing no fucking work to help make bad "consequences" of sex any better just essentially think people who have sex OUGHT TO BE punished for it. These are the same arguments against abortion, the same arguments against working to stop HIV, the same arguments against working to stop rape.

SADY: Right. It's the "well, she's stupid, so she deserves it" argument. And people can make sexual tapes or photos or whatever for a lot of reasons, aside from being stupid. They can be young, they can be drunk, they can be getting off on it, they can be trying to get their partner off better, they can have trusted their partner's multiple protestations that he'll never in a million years show it to anyone and in fact he'll erase it once he gets home HE SWEARS and... whoops, your partner lied. As far as I can tell, "you trusted your partner and then he lied to you and hurt you" isn't a "consequence" of sex. It's a "consequence" of your partner being abusive. And we're placing the onus of guilt on the victim.

AMANDA: Exactly. And I just want to give a shout out to Amanda Marcotte and Lena Chen here, who have written about this stuff a lot, and I really wouldn't understand any of the dynamics at play here if not for their work.

SADY: Yeah, Lena Chen really clarified a lot of this in her own writing, as far as my reading goes. Because she's experienced this form of assault first-hand. And the shaming that goes along with it.

AMANDA: One of the things Lena spoke to me about in an interview I did with her is that at Harvard, where she blogged about sex, she would get so much slut-shaming from other college students who were also having sex, and also probably had taken some photos during sex at some point, but who a) didn't write about it publicly, and b) didn't have some douchey ex leak those photos on a blog. The assumption being made by all of the people shaming people who make sex tapes is that it would never happen to them because they're not idiots. When really, it probably won't happen to them because they're not targets. Lena was a target because she talked about sex; Kim Kardashian was a target because she has a name that could sell copies. If random Internet Commenter makes a sex tape, they will likely never see the "consequences" of having sex on tape, because no one is particularly interested in watching random Internet Commenter do it, and yet they glean some sort of moral superiority out of that.

SADY: Right. Another thing that crops up, in these discussions, is the idea that if the woman ALREADY has expressed some of her sexuality in public, ALL of her sexuality belongs to the public. Like, Megan Fox is shooting a nude scene in a movie — where she probably has a carefully worked-out deal about how much is going to show up on screen and how it will look, or whatever — and that's assumed consent for some random douche to take a photo of her for the Internet. Lena Chen blogs about sex, so that's assumed consent for people to leak and/or look at sexual photos of her. Kendra Wilkinson has made porn, so therefore anything she does on film can be distributed as porn. Whereas the reality is, if someone as comfortable with being naked on-screen as KENDRA FREAKING WILKINSON is saying "no, I don't like this, this is hard for me, don't sell or watch my tape," I think that REALLY, REALLY SUPER-DUPER MEANS that she doesn't want you to do those things.

AMANDA: Exactly. Christ. It's that really awful anti-sex impulse rearing its head again. Like, you're allowed to make a sex tape – as long as you stay married to the other person in the sex tape forever and ever and never betray each other until you go to Heaven. Or you can make a sex tape – as long as you keep your head down and never make a name for yourself, because people who reach some level of success deserve to be shamed for having sex.

SADY: Exactly. They're successful, and they're often already "impermissibly" sexual, so the whole "humiliation" — we can see your cleavage! We think you're skanky! You belong to US now, whether you give consent or not — is really just about scaring women out of being sexual. Again.

AMANDA: And people who give the "skank" treatment to celebrity women? They're actually talking about all women, everywhere, but they use the fame as a convenient excuse. We all hear these messages.

SADY: Exactly. No matter how comfortable you are with your own sexuality, no matter how well you think you can set your own boundaries, you don't belong to you: You belong to the people looking at you. They decide what to do with your sexuality, not you. So don't flirt at the bar. Don't wear that short skirt. Don't go to the bar. Don't go out. And when you're in the house, don't make a sex tape. Because we'll find it if we want to. I mean, so many people don't even watch this stuff to get off: They watch it to mock. To feel superior. They watch it, pretty bluntly, to shame.

AMANDA: It's just really sad to me that when it comes to "sex tapes," we can't even reach the level of common courtesy of your standard Girls Gone Wild shoot, where at least the women being videotaped expect what it's being used for, and are generally forced to sign a contract stating as much. Like, that's a really really low bar.

SADY: Yeah. I mean, there's basically no responsibility at a GGW shoot. Girls are young and girls are WASTED. GGW goes over the line of consent pretty continually. BUT AT LEAST THERE IS THE ILLUSION OF CONSENT, you know what I'm saying? When we, the American public, hold ourselves to a lower standard than Joe "Alleged Rapist" Francis, things have gone pretty far in the direction of Hell.

AMANDA: Yeah I'm pretty depressed about this whole human enterprise right now. Thank Christ for Lena Chen.

SADY: Dear Lord. Woman is sharp and woman is strong. She has dignity like I will never in a million years have. Although, right now, I am also developing a real affection for Kendra W.

AMANDA: For real.

SADY: In conclusion: YAY for the survivors. Especially the ones who keep telling us that this is fucked up even though occasionally real live grown adults keep finding reasons not to listen.

AMANDA: I know. I am seriously proud of them for being brave enough to speak out about this. Even though they know people will turn around their honest commentary about how fucked-up this situation is in order to accuse them of trying to make money off not consenting. UGH. I'M LOSING IT AGAIN.

SADY: "SURELY YOU ARE NO ORDINARY SLUT! SURELY YOU ARE A MONEY-HUNGRY SLUT AS WELL!" "You only want your rapist to go to jail because you support the prison-industrial complex!"

AMANDA: URRGGGG

SADY: "Something something! No legal recourse for slatterns! Something something word barf!"

AMANDA: Someone get FEMINIST HULK on this.

SADY: FEMINIST HULK NOT KNOW MUCH ABOUT HOW TO APPROXIMATE NOT-HULK TALK. FEMINIST HULK STILL PROBABLY UNDERSTAND WORD "NO."

Photo via ed.ward, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Katsnelson indicated he hoped his victims could take something “positive” away from the experience of being sexually assaulted. “When asked what that might be, he suggested that maybe she will now know to keep her doors locked,” the pre-sentence report stated.

Anti-rape blogger Cara Kulwicki wasn't surprised by Katsnelson's comments; she encounters disgusting sentiments like that one every single day. But she was surprised to learn that mainstream media outlets reacted with disgust to the "lock your doors" lesson. After all, when victim-blaming tips are handed down by anyone other than a convicted rapist, nobody seems to bat an eye. Kulwicki writes:

And far more than I’m surprised by his comments, I’m surprised by the fact that the media seems to be almost as appalled as I am. The statement isn’t just printed in the article, it’s featured in quite a few headlines. His words are referred to as “startling” and the “revulsion” of listeners is carefully noted. And while relieved that for once publications aren’t just parroting back the victim-blaming excuses and framing of a rapist and his attorney, I also simply cannot help but ask myself: where the hell are they the rest of the time?

Where is the shock and outrage when it’s argued that a victim shouldn’t have gotten into a car or entered a building with her assailant? Where is the outrage when it’s argued that if women didn’t get themselves so drunk, rapists wouldn’t rape them? Where is the outrage when it’s essentially stated that sex workers can’t be raped? Why is it not a cause of shock and source of headlines when a sexual assault is explained away as verifying the genitals of a person the assailant suspected was trans? Where are the expressions of horror when those who failed to stop the reported and ongoing rape of a woman with a mental illness declare themselves to have not been negligent? Where are the editors shaking their fists when a defense attorney goes out of his way to note that an alleged victim was a drug user? Where is the anti-rape media perspective when the assault of a child by an adult is being referred to as “sex”? Where are they? Because nine times out of ten, they’re turning the other way.

As far as victim-blaming sentiments are concerned, Katsnelson's comments were far from extreme. Last fall, a series of sexual assaults were reported inside a freshman dorm at the George Washington University. In October of last year, a University of Maryland student entered the residence early in the morning, prowled for open doors, and then sexually assaulted several women, placing his hands down their pants and forcibly kissing them. In response to the attacks, G.W. student newspaper the Hatchet—the leading media source on campus—performed an act of victim-blaming nearly identical to Katsnelson's. The assaults, the paper's editors wrote, served as a “valuable reminder of the necessity for students to lock their doors at all times and to take responsibility for guests you bring into residence halls.”

When a rapist blames his victims, we're appalled. When we do it, we're just being "realistic," "concerned," "protective," "responsible." Why are we outraged when rapists blame their victims, but not when we blame them? Because while it's unseemly to blatantly support the sorry excuses of a convicted rapist, we're still invested in supporting a culture of victim-blaming that shifts the responsibility of eliminating rape away from society as a whole, and onto individual victims. When Katsnelson tells his victims to "lock their doors," he's shifting the responsibility for the rape off of the rapist. When the G.W. community tells victims to do the same thing, it similarly excuses the campus of taking any meaningful action against sexual assault.

But when rapists start using the same victim-blaming arguments we do, it makes it a lot harder for us to keep up the narrative of blame without being identified as rape apologists. One solution to this problem is to tell those rapists to shut up, because it's making us look bad. So we call out a rapist for revealing himself to be—gee, who would have thought!—a rape apologist, and we draw a line in the sand that helps to protect our own right to victim-blame. We use the same tactic to excuse our own casual homophobia and racism. Our homophobic slurs and racist jokes are just "ironic" and "anti-PC" and "social commentary," but when a gay basher or a white supremacist uses the same words, well, that's just socially unacceptable. The reason we are allowed to use these words, we tell ourselves, is because we are not truly homophobes, or racists, or rape apologists.

In other words, the only people who are allowed to blame rape victims are people who don't really, truly believe in their heart of hearts that the victim is at fault. This clever little set-up helps keep victim-blaming alive while preventing any victim-blamer from actually being identified as a bad person. It's also inspired the use of the very popular construction, "I'm not blaming the victim, but [enter victim-blaming sentiment here]."

In the end, the only people who are allowed to use the language of rapists are the millions of people in this country who haven't actually been convicted of the crime. How is this not a rape culture again?

When Lena Chen was a sophomore at Harvard, she started "Sex and the Ivy," a blog devoted to something that most college students do, but few are willing to talk about. On her sex blog, Chen unapologetically aired every taboo of a college student's sex life, from recovering from an eating disorder to recovering a condom from her vagina. And for that, several thousand people decided that Chen must be punished.

In 2007, when she was 19 years old, private sexual photos of Chen were planted in the comments section of Ivy League gossip blog IvyGate. From there, Chen's ex-boyfriend, her classmates at Harvard, and the greater Internet gossip world took delight in forwarding, downloading, and re-posting the images—a full-scale campaign waged to shame Chen for talking about sex. "I was never ashamed of my body or of people seeing it," Chen later wrote about the experience. "I felt victimized because I had been exposed without consent and doubly victimized by those who wrote salaciously about the incident."

Chen's legion of downloaders are on the cutting edge of public sexual harassment. The technology has changed, but the idea is the same: Find a woman who dares to have a sex life. Feel the need to exert sexual power over her. Police her by sexualizing against her will, and under your terms. On the Sexist, we've called out the inherent misogyny of publicizing something as seemingly innocent as an inadvertent "nipple slip"; at Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte has suggested that the dissemination of private sexual images (like the Carrie Prejean masturbation video) ought to be considered a form of sexual assault; around the country, similar incidents of harassment have moved girls to suicide.

Chen, now 22 and writing at the Ch!cktionary, didn't  "deserve" this because she happens to be a sex writer. But her pro-sex philosophy does help to articulate why disseminating sexualized images of women without their consent is wrong.

—

SEXIST: Could you talk a little bit about how the dissemination of photos like these can be so damaging?

LENA CHEN: People don’t really understand when there’s a line being crossed. People will say to me, “But how can you object to this when you post very provocative photos of yourself?” When I was 18, I posed nude for a friend of mine, for an art class. The photos went up in a student art gallery. Classmates saw the photos. They were taken completely with my permission, and I knew exactly the context in which they were going to be used. The leaked photos were taken in private by someone I was dating at the time. I didn’t expect them to be publicly disseminated. They were never meant for public consumption. It felt like a major violation. . . . But the part that I think is really exploitative is that these photos were obviously being spread in a manner in which the goal was to shame me. I’m not ashamed of my body or of people seeing my body. But the people distributing these photos didn't do it as an empowering, ‘rah, rah’ thing. These people took private photos of me and knowingly distributed them in order to try to make me feel ashamed of myself. I want to clarify the difference.

LC: In some ways, I was better prepared for this situation because I was already writing about sex. I know that slut-shaming is wrong and I'm not ashamed of being sexual. If this were to happen to someone else—a completely private individual—it would be extremely, extremely damaging to that person’s self worth. As for me, I went from being somewhat unhappy with my campus reputation to actually having panic attacks for the first time my life. I was placed under a considerable amount of scrutiny. These are real-world consequences. When slut-shaming works—and even when it doesn’t work—you end up losing a considerable amount of trust in people. And not just the person who posted them in the first place—you can’t even count all the people who helped to spread them. . . . Maybe you can predict the crazies, but you just can’t imagine the masses of people who will step up to help them. That’s what’s disheartening. And at Harvard, it wasn’t even that bad.  I think the difference is at Harvard—it’s not so possible to be a social conservative at Harvard. So everyone would be very politically correct about it to my face.

LC: I don’t think people forget that they also have sex. I think there’s a sense of false modesty about it. You’re not supposed to talk about it; that's the real crime. Even if you do it, you’re still less of a slut than a person who talks about it. People like to maintain the façade of sexual propriety. Think about the most embarrassing things that could happen to someone, and a lot of them will involve sexual performance. There is a great deal of anxiety about sex in our culture, and no one wants to talk about it openly and honestly. Because we’re neurotic about sex. We’re curious in a morbid way. That makes for some very ripe material for controversies like mine coming up. It’s a lurid, sensational story. Who isn’t going to be drawn into that? People project their own anxieties onto me. They want to shame me for letting someone take naked photos of me, but these people are going and downloading those images from a torrent. What does that say?

LC: Harvard has 6,400 undergrads. I don't think close friends of mine Googled the photos. Casual acquaintances, maybe we were close enough to be Facebook friends—they probably did. The people who are a few social networks removed from me. It’s bizarre to me, because obviously I’m a real person, even if I don’t talk to them. They see me in the dining hall, see me around school. It’s not like I was MIA. I really didn’t remove myself from Harvard campus life until after the fact [Chen took a leave of absence from school following the incident], but at the time, I was more or less a fully engaged student there. That’s why I found it really, really disheartening—the people behind it were my peers at Harvard. And maybe they didn’t think of it as some sort of huge betrayal of my trust, but it felt like a witch-hunt and felt like mass bullying.

LC: The person with the photos—my ex, presumably—left a bunch of comments on IvyGate with links to the photographs. Someone contacted me from IvyGate and said, "Do you want to comment on this? We’re going to write a story on it." I was so completely shocked that I didn’t even question what I was being told. You have to understand how quickly this all happened. Now I think I would like to go back and say," Do you really need to have a story on this? I’m 19 years old. I don’t think I fall into the category of a public figure. Exes go crazy. Where is the news?" People who are deemed “web celebrities” are just considered fair game for attack. Why would Gawker [porn blog Fleshbot] be posting anything about me? . . . The whole system is under the impression that if something happens to you, you "asked for it." And it’s applied more often to women bloggers. For example: I hate Michelle Malkin. But if she were a dude, would anyone want to find out where she lived? Conservatives and liberals alike—if you’re a woman you’re going to have to put up with a lot more vitriol. Certainly when it comes to matters of sexual shame. The best thing for everyone to do would have been to just ignore it. . . . I heard it was one of the highest-trafficked stories IvyGate ever published.

—

Previously in Sexist interviews:

* Jaclyn Friedman on Fucking While Feminist

* Thomas MacAullay Millar on men in the feminist movement

Jaclyn Friedman is, in short, a feminist rock star. She is the executive director of  WAM!: Women, Action & the Media. She edited the incredible Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, and continues the work of dismantling rape culture in her weekly pro-sex column. She writes as compellingly about taking off her shirt for fun as she does her college sexual assault. And she has been fucking under these conditions for nearly 20 years.

Fucking while feminist presents a peculiar set of challenges for the pro-sex single. How do you talk rape culture on a first date while still managing to get laid once in a while? How do you find the feminist guy who won't self-flagellate to the point of unfuckability? How do you avoid dying alone, basically? Friedman agreed to talk to me about establishing a feminist fucking litmus test, the art of locating non-douchey sex partners online, and the secret perks of fucking a feminist.

Sexist: So I was eating dinner with my boyfriend the other day and I started talking about my opinions on rape kits and shit, and I realized that I could probably never talk about this stuff on a first date with someone I had never met.

JF: And if you were me, you would go the a first date, and he would ask, "So, what do you do?" My online dating profile says that I’ve written a book and I’m writing another one. So they ask about it. And then literally ten minutes into a first date I’m talking about rape culture.

How does that usually work out?

JF: The way I hope it will work is that they ask these initial questions before we meet in person. So then they can go offline and collect their thoughts and then respond to me. My profile says I’m a feminist. So a lot of people who would be really scared off by me, we don’t get very far. When the whole Polanski thing was going down, I had this big argument with a guy about Polanski. First date. And last one.

JF: I would like for there to be a set of feminist litmus tests that I could reference and use to find the right guy. Right now, I feel like I'm in an endless cycle of asking myself, "Am I willing to let this slide?" I'm mostly dating guys right now, which is fairly new for me. From my early 20s to my mid-30s I dated exclusively women and trans men. I'm not romanticizing that, like "it's so much easier with women"—let me tell you, it's not. But it's a different set of questions you have to ask. I don't feel like I can go in to these dates expecting dudes to know as much about feminism or sexuality studies or rape culture, the stuff that I live my life talking about and thinking about. I feel like I’m going to die alone if I do that.

. . . Here is what’s depressing about dating while feminist. Feminism is what I do with my life, it's how I spend my days, it's my job, it's not just an opinion I have among many other opinions. If I had a hardcore litmus test, the pool of men I could date would be so tiny. And then when you weeded out men who are gay, the men I don't find attractive, the men already in monogamous, committed relationships—really, I would never get laid again. So I do feel that I have to try to be flexible out of necessity. But if I were to end up with someone—and I do want a long-term, stable relationship with someone at some point—they would have to be feminist on some basic level. They would have to be.

JF: That would be lovely, wouldn’t it? If I could turn a man feminist with the power of my vagina? It hasn’t happened yet. . . . When I was younger, I dated mostly women and trans men. Those relationships didn’t work out, obviously, they had their own issues. But the feminist thing wasn’t as much of an issue. And the only cisgender man I’ve been in a longterm relationship was a feminist when I met him. We would have feminism arguments where I was educated by him, and vice versa. And I thought, well, how lucky I am to have found a feminist guy! And he ended up being an ass . . . in somewhat unrelated ways.

JF: I'm e-mailing a guy right now I really want to meet who used the word "heteronormativity" in his profile . . . aside from that, which almost never happens, more what I look for is. . . you know the Bechdel Test for films? It states that any good film has to have two female characters who talk to each other about something other than a guy. Well, this is my test: When I look at personal ads, I look at their lists of favorite books, movies, and music, and they have to list women in all of those categories. They don't have to have a majority of women, but they have to know that women exist in the culture and be fans of some of them. It's a pretty low bar—or it should be. I used to look for guys who don’t list Fight Club in their favorites, but I've had to relax that rule, because all dudes evidently love Fight Club. I do draw the line at Ayn Rand. It's more about avoiding red flags than anything else. . . . I also don’t respond to any guy who says they’re looking for a woman who "doesn’t have drama," not because I have a lot of drama, but because I feel like that is code for women who have opinions.

JF: If you Google me, it’s pretty obvious where I stand on the sex stuff. Whenever I end up talking about my work on rape, I also am immediately communicating that I’m a pro-sex feminist. . . . I have been with some men who are surprised that I am, shall we say, less than vanilla in bed . . . A couple of guys were shocked that I like to play various games in bed, because I'm a feminist. That's always really interesting to me. I'm always like, 'Are you kidding me? The feminists I know are the craziest women in bed you can find!" Those are the moments where I feel like a one-woman feminist PR machine. I'm instructing the world one man at a time that feminists are really fun to sleep with.

JF: Oh God. There is a type of feminist guy who is so eager to fall over himself to be deferential to women and to prove his feminist bona fides and flagellate himself in front of you, to the point that it really turns me off. And it makes me sad, because politically, these are the guys that I should be sleeping with! You know what I'm talking about?

YES.

JF: Everyone knows what I'm talking about. And some of them are even really cute! I want to say to them, "If you could be a person, like a whole, complicated person, who I feel like I could crack jokes around, then I would really like you." But they're so serious about their feminism at every moment that I don’t feel like a person to them. I feel like I'm on a pedestal, almost. I know that they're not going to disagree with anything I say under any circumstances. And I don't feel like I can make a raunchy joke about sex, because they'll be horrified. . . . I hate to be critical of our allies in any way, because we need them, but there's something about that certain kind of hyperfeminist guy that makes them unappealing to date, to me. I suspect it has something to do with our internal conceptions of masculinity, which is terrible on my part.

JF: Yes. They haven't internalized their feminism, so it’s always being externalized. And it places a lot of pressure on the women they're with. There's this very self-conscious performance of feminism. And it does sometimes feel like they want a cookie. . . .  OK, I know this is such a delicate conversation to have, but I want those guys to wake up because those are the guys I want to want to sleep with!

JF: . . . What happens to me that drives me up a tree is this: The guys who respond to me and are like, 'You’re awesome. You’re kind of a hellcat." They think it's cool and kind of bad-ass that I'm outspoken and passionate about things. They think that’s really hot. They’re into it. But then when that outspokenness gets applied back to them, it’s suddenly game-over. You know the idea of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl? She's light, and quirky, and she has no inner life of her own, and just there to serve our hero’s development and erotic interests. I sort of feel that I get cast in these dudes' narratives as the Hellcat Dream Girl, there to prove how bad-ass they are because they’re dating such a bad-ass woman. They think it’s cute or sexy. But when I use that smart, outspoken bad-assery to challenge their own perspectives, it’s suddenly not sexy at all. It happens when they say something that I disagree with, and I act like a person and not someone that is playing out their particular fantasies.

It’s happened to me a million times . . . they want it as a trophy. "Hey, look at my bad-ass girl." They don’t want to deal with me as a person. It follows this pattern where it usually comes from a person who seeks me out. They try to seduce me. They think I would be an accomplishment to conquer or something. They seek me out and try to get me interested in them, and then I am, and then they flee. . . . I feel like the same thing happened with the guy I dated for two years. He liked the idea of being a guy who would be with someone like me, but ultimately it turned out that he wanted someone who wouldn’t challenge him as much, a person who was easier and quicker to sweep away. I got evidence of that when, within three months of breaking up with me, he was dating a 23 year old who lists her political views on Facebook as "moderate."

JF: Oftentimes I wonder what the people who know me professionally would think about the compromises I make when I’m dating. I wish this were a live conversation where other feminists were weighing in. I’d like to know what other women are doing. Am I making the right compromises here? Should dating require these sorts of compromises? Is there any tactic that produces better results? . . .  I feel very unsure about what the best way is to live my politics and have a sex life. I really feel in the weeds about it. But it's something I think about all the time, and I don’t feel like I have the answers.

Photo by Anh Dao Kolbe

Date Rape Anthem: Up next in our date-rape anthem series: Ke$ha's "Blah Blah Blah," a track about how Ke$ha just wants to fuck you—not fucking listen to you! (Thanks to Heartless Doll for bringing this track to my attention).

Relevant Lyrics:

Coming out your mouth with your "blah blah blah"
Just zip your lips like a padlock
And meet me at the back with the Jack and the jukebox
I don't really care where you live at
Just turn around boy and let me hit that
Don't be a little bitch with your chit chat
Just show me where your dick's at.

.. . .Come meet me in the back with the Jack and the jukebox
So cut to the chase kid
Cuz I know you don't care what my middle name is
I wanna be naked but you're wasted.

Why It's So Rapey: First, Ke$ha is concerned that her sex partner is not unresponsive enough to fuck. Next, Ke$ha is concerned that her sex partner is too drunk to fuck. Mixed signals, Ke$ha! Here's one great thing about sex partners who are allowed to communicate with you: You never have to guess as to whether your sex partner is (a) incapable of consenting to revealing the location of his dick, or (b) simply being coy at your request. Blah, blah, blah: It really helps eliminate the guesswork in that whole date rape thing.

But today, my brain officially exploded, courtesy of a piece entitled "The Campus Rape Myth." It's not just a clever title!

Yesterday, notveryraven, of Twitter, alerted me to this year-old investigative piece by Heather Mac Donald into why there is no rape problem on college campuses. You may remember Mac Donald from books like The Immigration Solution (points for ominousness!) and Are Cops Racist? How the War Against the Police Harms Black Americans (Alternate title: Cops Aren't Racist! Problem Solved).

Mac Donald's argument about why rape actually never happens to college students goes a little something like this:

(a) Once upon a time, in the 1980s, feminists were losing their edge. So they tried to convince everyone in the world that 25 percent of college women are raped by commissioning all these "studies":

During the 1980s, feminist researchers committed to the rape-culture theory had discovered that asking women directly if they had been raped yielded disappointing results—very few women said that they had been. So Ms. commissioned University of Arizona public health professor Mary Koss to develop a different way of measuring the prevalence of rape. Rather than asking female students about rape per se, Koss asked them if they had experienced actions that she then classified as rape. Koss’s method produced the 25 percent rate, which Ms. then published.Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further—though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her—42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.

(b) Because most women don't feel comfortable calling their experiences "rape," or reporting them as "rape," or labeling men who have sex with them without their consent as "rapists," or preventing those "rapists" from "raping" them repeatedly, feminists are obligated to just shut up and ignore "rape" as well. IT IS IN THEIR FEMINIST CODE: "In short, believing in the campus rape epidemic depends on ignoring women’s own interpretations of their experiences—supposedly the most grievous sin in the feminist political code."

(c) CAMPUS RAPE PROBLEM SOLVED! We found the person at fault for all campus "rapes": It is the victim, always, for pretending to be a "victim" of a "crime" that all the other girls are more comfortable just calling "sex." MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE.

(d) But wait! Feminists are ruining everything, still! Did you know that the feminists actually created the "rapes" they claim to fight against, what with their insistence that grown women should be allowed to have "consensual sex" when they feel like it? It's true: "The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora’s box of boorish, sluttish behavior that gets cruder each year. Do the boys, riding the testosterone wave, act thuggishly toward the girls? You bet! Do the girls try to match their insensitivity? Indisputably." Silly feminists: Slutty girls can't say no to sex, ever. And have you ever tried to close a Pandora's box of sluttishness? It is just impossible to fit all the oversize stripper heels back in that little box, I am telling you.

(e) But these feminists do help one group of people: Women who haven't been "raped." According to Mac Donald, those few college women who are actually willing to call their rapists "rapist" are . . . liars, probably! Here's a handy tip to help deny that college rape happens: whenever a college woman says she was raped, just assume that she was "filmed giving oral sex to seven men [and] cried rape when her boyfriend found out," and wash your hands of the matter.

(f) THEREFORE, it is proven that abstinence is the only way to protect college girls from all the rapes that don't actually happen on college campuses:

Some student rebels are going one step further: organizing in favor of sexual restraint. Such newly created campus groups as the Love and Fidelity Network and the True Love Revolution advocate an alternative to the rampant regret sex of the hookup scene: wait until marriage. Their message would do more to return a modicum of manners to campus male—and female—behavior than endless harangues about the rape culture ever could.

(g) KABLOOOOOOEY! My brain, it is exploded. But . . . could this have been Heather Mac Donald's plan all along? To craft an argument against rape that is so mind-numbingly stupid that it would EXPLODE THE BRAINS of every feminist who read it? Well played, Mac Donald. Well played.

Recently, the problem of consent arose in two porn-inspired real-life incidents. In one, a teenage girl claims she was coerced into having drunken videotaped group sex with four men in her dorm. In another, a teenage girl apparently consented to drunken videotaped group sex with four men in her dorm, then instantly regretted it. Scenarios where four men have sex with one woman carry obvious challenges for establishing consent. Each sex partner must establish consent with every other partner. Each sex partner must be able to listen to every other partner to establish that each new sex act is OK. And each sex partner must realize that a group power dynamic can be a seriously coercive sexual environment for everyone involved, and discuss the act accordingly.

I don't blame porn for these incidents, but I do think that if enthusiastic, informed, and sober consent were featured in pornography to the extent that gang-bangs are, it might help teenagers clear up consent issues before sex begins—not in the press, through the student judicial process, or in the courtroom.

But how do we make consent porn-ready? Let's start at the beginning: Punny consent porn titles! Here are mine:

ID Check XVIII: Girls Your Own Age

The Mile High Club: Consent From Above

Consenting Adults II: Double Checking

Doggy Style: Consensual Seduction

Safe Word III: When "No" Doesn't Have to Mean "No"

Totally and Completely Legal

Night of Refusal: No Anal Sex This Time, But Maybe Next Week

Sex, Extended Consultation Over Each Party's Feelings, and Videotape

Backseat Bangin': The Honda Accord

Suggestions?

According to one employee from an ad network solicited by Tucker Max, everyone's favorite rape culture scholar has been shopping around some ads for "I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell" based on his fratty "fact" catchphrases. Sample Tucker Max "facts": "Sexism isn’t the same as misogyny, you stupid bitch," and "The best thing about fat girls is heart disease."

Apparently, some ad networks don't like "facts"! According to the employee, the firm rejected the above mock-up, deeming it too "offensive" and "ignorant" for general distribution. The employee says that each of Max's "facts" proved contrary to the network's terms of service, as the advertising firm dos not tolerate "garbage."

UPDATE: Max confirms that his "I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell" ads have been rejected by firms, and has this to say:

"Fuck them. I definitely had some agency pull some holier-than-thou trip a few weeks ago and I went elsewhere. I'm not paying them money so they can tell me what my ads are supposed to be like. Fuck them, and anyone who thinks they can tell me what to say or not say."

Last month, Tucker Max's cross-country movie premiere tour hit Raleigh, where students from the North Carolina State Women's Center were on hand to protest the screening. Max's people, predictably, had some anti-feminist fun with it, and posted the video online. In the video, Max sends out his minion to interview the protesters while masquerading as a gay Duke student writing a thesis on "the linguistics of rape culture." Of course, anyone actually interested in the linguistics of rape culture need only watch "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell" to figure out what it sounds like. Basically, there are a lot of references to "cum dumpsters."

In the Raleigh Q & A, Max himself expounded upon the rape culture issue. "Fucking rape sucks, dude," Max said. "It's, like, not a joke, and I feel like [the protesters'] hearts are probably in the right place, to be honest. But I fell like they're fucking it up, man, because what they're doing is really kind of devaluing the seriousness of an actual crime. . . . Dude, I mean, the discussion about where consent lies and doesn't lie is an important one, and should be had, but this is not the fucking forum. And, uh, and that's never been an issue for me, so, I don't know man, I feel like if that's an issue to you, that's great, and you should pursue it, but pursue it with the people who it needs to be pursued with. And not with me."

Of course, "where consent lies and doesn't lie" is a consistent issue in Max's work. Max's stories succeed on orchestrating sexual conquests that are increasingly outrageous, drunk, dubiously legal, painful, objectifying, and embarrassing to his sex partners. In order to continue to one-up himself, Max intentionally pushes the line of consent—getting drunker, getting her drunker, leaving his sex partners to fend for themselves—naked—on the street, hiding his friend with an undisclosed video camera in his closet while they're doing it. It's not hard to think of the ultimate scenario these increasingly absurd sexcapades are inching toward—it's, like, rape, dude. And now—thanks to Max's movie tour—undergrads everywhere can compete to have the consensual sex that's most like rape without actually being a prosecutable offense. Sure, some dudes might fail and actually rape chicks. Oh well!

In the middle of Max's protest video, an actress from the film criticizes the protesters for failing to "read and watch any of the material!" She's right: Max's words are the best ammunition his protesters have, and it helps to get specific. So let's take a look at the rape-culturiest quotations from "I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell." Shannon Johnson, the director of the NC State Women's center which staged the Raleigh protest, has collected some highlights of the film for future protesters to use in their arguments:

On women:
- “She may be a vacuous slut with no taste, but at least she’s not a stripper.”
- “I’d rather mainline Drano than listen to another minute of your whore prattle.”
- “Your gender is hardwired for whoredom.”
- “I don’t like her because she’s a negative fucking bitch, not because she has tits.”

- “Fat girls aren’t real people.”

- "Cum dumpsters."

On fun:

- “Ready to get shit-faced and grab some titty!?”

- “We can’t all go after the girl with low self-esteem.”

On what women are good for, beyond fucking:

- “I will gut you and grind you into pig fodder.”

- "Get away from me or I’m going to carve a fuck hole in your torso.”

- “I want to shoot every one of these bitches.”
- “The only way I can cut you deep is with a battle axe and a running start.”
- “Rape’s not funny, but murder can be.”

]]> http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2009/09/11/the-rapiest-quotes-from-i-hope-they-serve-beer-in-hell/feed/ 127