6

BUILDING A CULTURE OF CONSENT

People around the world are gaining awareness of the enormous prevalence of sexual assault and smaller sexual aggressions. But bringing into consciousness something that we have avoided thinking about usually requires some thrashing around. When we claim our sexual freedom and start building communities wherein we can express ourselves in a sex-positive way, we immediately bump up against the truth that we are living in a society that holds some insane values about sex and consent. When it is not safe, accepted, or welcomed to say, “No thank you” to sex, building a sex-positive culture can become impossible.

Dossie, giving a lecture on consent to about two hundred people, asked those who had never been sexually assaulted to stand up. Only about a quarter stood up, mostly men, some women. There were many men as well as women among those still sitting. That large number of people who remained sitting—let’s admire their courage and determination to free themselves and their sexuality, even though someone hurt them.

All our wonderful sexual freedom is dependent on two very important conditions: freedom from sexism and freedom from rape. These changes must take place at both the individual and community levels. Prosecuting rape and child molestation is quite difficult, so our communities need to work for our own safety. We can seldom send offenders to jail, but we can uninvite them from our parties, and remove them from the other environments that we control, both online and in the physical world.

Major violations include drugging someone and then raping them, violent rape, child molestation, and any intentional violation of another person’s stated limits. These are all very serious crimes, even if they are often hard to prosecute. Other violations require some discussion, sometimes because the accused doesn’t feel that they’ve done anything wrong. Verbal offenses—pushy come-ons, arguing with someone who has said “No, thank you,” or objectifying or belittling people—may cause less harm than physical offenses but can still create an atmosphere of danger in our communities. Edging over people’s limits, or trying things that have not been explicitly agreed upon, can tear apart relationships and have a ripple effect that occasionally destroys the communities in which those relationships are grounded.

Much of this conflict is the consequence of our absurd cultural insistence that in sex, men should be the initiators and women the withholders. Thus, some people learn that they are supposed to be pushy and others that saying anything but no is, well, slutty. This pattern leads to “no” being heard as an invitation to push harder, with predictably disastrous results. Freeing your sexuality requires that you look at these cultural beliefs about what it means to be a person of your gender, and perhaps make some changes—unless you want to spend the rest of your life living down to your gender stereotype. How would we propose that people of all genders learn better behavior? We wish we could say that there’s a handy twelve-step group around the corner for this sort of thing, or a class we could take, but at this writing, these resources are pretty rare. Some community members are stepping up to the plate to do this sort of work. We’d love to see more.

“Freeing your sexuality requires that you look at cultural beliefs about what it means to be a person of your gender.”

For Trauma Survivors

Way too many people of all genders, ages, and cultures have experienced sexual trauma. Sexual assault, outright rape, child sexual abuse, sometimes even medical trauma, can leave us with major challenges to enjoying our sex lives—including flashbacks, disassociation, post-traumatic stress disorder, and just plain fearfulness.

People who have survived trauma, especially as children, have particular vulnerabilities and may feel unsafe or violated more easily than most. A trigger response may have been learned, and an individual may be responding to a relatively modest offense as if it were the terrible thing that may have happened in the past, or as if they were still the child that they were when they were abused. The fear may appear unrealistic or disproportionate to outsiders, but that’s not the point—the fear itself is real, usually doesn’t feel sexy at all, and may leave the person so panicky that discussion, or even hearing an apology, may be impossible at that time.

Don’t give up! Your therapist author Dossie specializes in healing old wounds for trauma survivors and is happy to announce that many people find ways to deal with their history of violation, take care of themselves when painful memories show up, succeed in reclaiming ownership of their bodies, and enjoy a free and happy sexuality.

Sometimes all it takes is a little collaboration about safety, establishing clear agreements about boundaries, creating safe space, and being supportive and understanding. Survivors and partners alike need to be willing to deal with the interruption if a person needs to stop and recover from a bad memory, even if that happens in the middle of sex. We hope you will be patient with yourself if this is your situation, because being kind to yourself and your partners can become the practice that heals you.

The information about taking care of yourself around triggers that you’ll read in chapter 15, “Roadmaps through Jealousy,” is also applicable when you decide to deal with other emotional landmines. If you have a partner who is struggling with reclaiming their sexuality from an ugly history of violence, we hope that you will choose to become an ally in that struggle and find the patience to support the work that needs to be done to claim a joyous sexuality. Check Further Reading for some good resources about healing sexual trauma.

For Those Who Have Been Accused

If you’ve done something that has left a partner feeling traumatized, you have a different problem. Our natural tendency when we are accused of doing something wrong is to get very defensive and really want to tell our side of the story. But if the people who used to like you well enough to have sex with you are now angry with you and clamoring for your hide, you might want to look around and see if there’s anything you’d like to change in your behavior.

You may have been taught that “getting laid” is about getting away with something. From that point of view, having an active sexual life may look like consumerism: how much can you acquire, with how little effort? Does that mean that your lover, or potential lover, is a commodity? Having learned this doesn’t necessarily make you a problem, but acting on it certainly will.

How would you go about making changes in yourself? And later, how will you let people know that you have done some work on yourself and it’s now safe to welcome you back?

If you are in this situation, please remember to retain your sense of yourself as a whole person. Behavior that may have frightened or hurt another is a part of you, and you have many parts. Take a little time to reflect on your own strengths and sense of ethics. How do you want to use your strength? What can you do that is in line with your ethics?

For Everyone

Here are some strategies that we know don’t work:

Pathologizing . This refers to turning a response or reaction into a disease, as if labeling it were a sort of antibiotic. Is this person a predator, a sociopath, a victim of Stockholm syndrome, a victim of the patriarchy? (Pretty much all of us act like all of these on occasion.) Are we rape apologists if we don’t immediately ostracize the offender? When we define a problem as a disease, we often act as if a diagnosis were a solution: paste on a label and then end the discussion as if we’ve accomplished something. But then nothing ever changes.

Splitting . This is a psychological defense in which a person tries to feel safe by presuming that the good guys are all good—so if any part of some person is not good, then that person must be all bad and needs to be permanently exiled, with no accommodation for change or growth. Splitting can divide whole communities, with everyone choosing up sides rather than asking what they might do to make things better.

Truth seeking . In many of these problems, there is one person saying “So-and-so did me wrong, hurt me, caused me pain or damage,” and the other is insisting that the person who is upset with them is making it up, getting revenge, or really wanted it. So who do we believe? It is going to take courage to try and find solutions when we can’t determine the absolute truth of the problem. We must understand that we are a community, not a criminal justice system, and our actions need to be about whatever we can do at this time, with the resources we have today, to make this situation a little better.

Blaming . Whose fault is this? Who did what to who first? Very few of us actually blame ourselves: we all have ways of rationalizing and reasons why our behavior is justifiable. But when we try to feel safe by minimizing our own involvement and blaming someone else, then we disempower ourselves. We give the “other” all the power by saying that only they can make things better. Many people, acutely uncomfortable at hearing about how a person has been violated, distance themselves by finding some reason to blame the victim: looking too sexy, drinking too much, what did you expect if you want a kind of sex that’s more extreme than most? And just to make things more confusing, what feels like violation to one person might be easy for another, and a third may see it as play and delight in it.

But there are a number of conflict resolution strategies that we find helpful to draw on. A marvelous body of wisdom is emerging from efforts to teach emotional intelligence and restorative justice in some American high schools and middle schools. Students in these programs are being trained to be peer counselors and peacekeepers, to intervene in conflicts that might become violent or otherwise destructive. Many studies have measured very positive results, even in “difficult” schools, as a result of these trainings, both in reduction of fights and suspensions and in increases in the percentage of students who graduate.

Some schools now have a quiet room where kids who were causing trouble can sit at a desk to write down their answers to questions like these: “What happened?” “What was my part in it?” “What can I do to make it better?” “What can I do to make it less likely to happen again?” Perhaps when there is an issue about sexual boundaries, we can ask ourselves these same questions—“victim” and “villain” alike—and see whether that leads to a more productive dialogue.

Back in the protest era of the 1960s, we used to say, “When you don’t want to be part of the problem, you need to become part of the solution.” Resources to support change happen all over the world, and we need to adapt them to our sex-positive communities: nonviolent communication workshops, anger management classes, conflict resolution classes, self-defense classes where you can practice clarifying your “no,” support groups for offenders and survivors, and more.

We approve of communities that offer new members information on ethics and boundaries in their community, and we also know that rules alone will never be enough. We need to be willing to enter into an ongoing process that addresses these issues and supports change and healing and growth, each of us contributing what we can and expecting to continue indefinitely in the process of navigating consent and boundaries. We do have a right to insist that people prone to bullying, limit pushing, and other problematic behaviors go learn what they need to learn—take a workshop or a class, join a group working on changing compulsive or antisocial behaviors, get a therapist, get sober—before they can earn their way back into our communities.

We can’t prevent every problem, but we can create a sex-positive culture that deals proactively and constructively with the problems we face rather than sweeping them under the rug out of shame.

Clean Love

Can you imagine love without jealousy, without possessiveness—love washed clean of all its clinginess and desperation? Let’s try.

We can take some thoughts from Buddhism: What would it be like to love without attachment, to open our hearts to someone with no expectations, loving just for the joy of it, regardless of what we might get back?

Imagine seeing the beauty and virtues of a beloved and letting go of how their strengths might meet our needs or how their beauty might make us look better.

Imagine seeing someone in a clean light of love—without enumerating the ways in which that person does and does not match up to the fantasy we carry around of our perfect mate or dream lover.

Imagine meeting another person in the freedom and innocence of childhood and playing together without plotting how to make this person give us the kind of love we wish we could have gotten in our actual childhood.

But…but…but. What if you open your heart to someone, and you don’t like what happens next? Suppose that person gets drunk or treats your open affection with scorn? What if this person doesn’t fulfill your dreams? What if this one turns out just like the last one? Suppose all those things do happen. What have you lost? A little time, a brief fantasy. Let it go, learn from it, and walk away a little wiser.

Love doesn’t much take to being stuffed into forms, which is what everybody’s fantasies and imaginings are: custom-built plans for a constructed individual they’ve created to solve all their problems. Your authors have dream lovers, too—but people are not made of clay or stone, and it won’t work well to approach them with a chisel.

How many times have you rejected the possibility of love because it didn’t look the way you expected it to? Perhaps some characteristic was missing you were sure you must have, some other trait was present that you never dreamed of accepting. What happens when you throw away your expectations and open your eyes to the fabulous love that is shining right in front of you, holding out its hand?

Clean love is love without expectations.

Washing your love clean doesn’t require advanced spirituality or weekly psychoanalysis. You’ll probably never let go of every single attachment—at least we’ve never managed it. But maybe you can let go just for an instant: your history, worries, frets, and yearnings will still be there to come back to when you need them. Just for now, take a look at the wonderful person who is standing right in front of you.