Shikha Dalmia wrote some things about affirmative consent laws. I agree with some of it, some of it I am troubled by. Jezebel and Erin Gloria Ryan responded, in contrast, by sex-shaming her for the crime of having a different opinion about a controversial law. I don’t have any right to dictate what it means to be a feminist. But it’s shameful to attack another woman’s sex life thanks to a political disagreement. Ryan knows nothing about Shiksa Dalmia, knows nothing about her sex life and how satisfying it is, and clearly barely read her piece before writing her response to it. I don’t care what the situation is. I don’t care who you write for. I don’t care how you identify yourself politically. It’s not alright to shame someone else about their sex life. Ever.
Can you imagine if I read a piece by Ryan and wrote an essay in which my sole “argument” was “This chick needs to get laid”? Can you imagine the response? If I said “boy, Erin Gloria Ryan writes like someone who has shitty sex!” I would rightfully be pilloried, because that behavior is not acceptable. And the thing about it is that Ryan will never, ever even think it over. She won’t for a second say to herself, “hey, maybe shaming another woman and making broad assumptions about her sex life isn’t the most feminist thing I’ve ever done in my life!” Because Jezebel’s whole deal is never, ever engaging in self-criticism.
There’s lots and lots I could say about the piece. Ryan simply makes up things that Dalmia believes out of whole cloth, inventing arguments that seem to exist only in Ryan’s imagination. She seems to think “the fuck?” is an argument. And Ryan demonstrates the incoherence of her own position. She’s advocating for a massive change to the legal definition of consent, but then mocks Dalmia for thinking that it’ll actually be enforced. She writes:
the piece’s most ridiculous aspect is the assumption that following every sex act, thanks to this law, authorities will sweep in and subject both parties (but mostly the man) to an exhaustive cross examination on consent as the pair of lovebirds towel their bodily fluids off of each other in a panic.
Hey, seriously. You guys. Admitting that a law won’t be enforced is not an argument for making it a law. In fact, it’s the opposite.
But none of that really matters. Mocking a woman’s sex life because you don’t like her politics is wrong. Shaming another woman because you don’t like her politics is not alright. It’s reactionary by its nature.Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig wrote about how women who explore political ideas outside of the mainstream feminist space are disciplined:
unorthodox views can, especially for women in left academic feminism, result in precisely that form of discipline: withdrawal of community, overwhelming assassination of character, a very sudden onslaught of negative feedback and demands for apology. It strikes me that this method of disciplining members is another symptom of the problem Amber gets at in her article: the community is not so concerned with what is true or false as with who is good and who is bad.
Congratulations, Jezebel. You’re the latest to discipline a woman for having an opinion, and you’ve used sex-shaming as a tool to do it. I bet you’re very proud.
Update: It occurs to me that Ryan repeatedly saying “the fuck?” and thinking that constitutes a rebuttal is a perfect example of We Are All Already Decided. Thinking that expressing incredulity at someone else’s opinion is enough to dismiss it can only happen when you’re so steeped in an echo chamber that you forget there’s a world of people out there who don’t agree with you.
I’m still kinda stuck on the fact that a “libertarian” publication is arguing for a more organic view of human sexuality, where the “left” one wants it to be purely contract-based.
But yeah, Jezebel being pretty gross there. I’ve not looked into the recent online feminist culture sphere (too much “personal == political” for my taste), but I assume people are trying to fragment into smaller heretical communities to explore heterodox feminism? This is the goal of intersectionality, and all that? If people know them, could they link them? Always looking for new stuff to read.
The heretical communities are mostly 70s-style second-wavers who can’t get on board with heterosexuality or trans issues. They’re reviled by everyone inside and out of online feminism.
Intersectionality is mainly used to silence, not expand, the debate. The major intersectional blow-ups have been complaints about white women taking up too much space in the online movement – certainly very important during the digital ink shortage we’ve been experiencing of late.
Feminists come down on heterodoxy harder than Republicans on “RINOs.”
Shiksa Dalmia? If only this was an Israel/Zionism post because that would’ve been an awesome type.
Ok, serious comment. Yah, for a site that’s all about respect for others, no body shaming, no body snarking and all that stuff. . . just straight up making nasty personal remarks (this woman knows nothing about sex and must have awful sex) . . . idk, makes Jezebel seem like a bunch of hypocrites.
Like, SD’s arguments aren’t so outside the mainstream discourse such that it warrants a no-response (as in, not on the merits) response. Like, Bill Maher’s bigotry against Muslims deserves to be called out and he should wear the crown of an ignorant bigot if such crown fits. But I don’t see SD’s arguments being so offensive that we should just nod and tsk-tsk and foist a crown of idiotic prude (but apparently not that prude?) without engaging with the substance of her argument.
Like, is there evidence No means No doesn’t work? I’d think the problem is people, not the standard, whatever and wherever it may be.
If anything, this sort of reminds of the voting law restrictions, insofar as the remedy will capture more innocents (more people unable to vote because of onerous restrictions, more people violating the strict terms of the law even though no one objected to such relations — which weakens the law since there’d be mass violations), then the underlying problem the law is intended to rectify (illegal voters, sexual assault).
Whatever your opinion on affirmative consent, clearly, there are deep, basic issues of simple coherence and enforceability here. And yet Erin Gloria Ryan finds it so self-evident that affirmative consent has to be the only correct opinion to hold that she’s willing to shame a complete stranger to her, sexually, for having an alternative opinion.
Hey MarkS: this comment by NattyB is about this post, so it stays. You write a comment about this post, it stays. You write a comment about a post I turned comments off on because of a profusion of dumb, bigoted, off-topic comments, your comment gets deleted. Not complicated.
Why again must we have affirmative consent laws?
And yeah, Sex-shaming was totally unwarranted.
That’s pretty alarming. Apparently they are now openly advocating for a summary end to the presumption of innocence. No big deal, it’s only one of the cornerstones of our civilization.
To what extent should we blame Jezebel for this rather than Ryan in particular?
I tried to search for another example of this with the search term “jezebel sex shaming”
and after lots of jezebel articles that weren’t relevant to this I got this article
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2012/04/18/jezebel-pro-life-women-who-dress-sexy-must-be-slut-shamed
about some pro-life woman who worked at hooters. But the Jezebel article in question was also written by Ryan.
You’re fast on that delete-comment button!
The sad part is that I think you & I would agree on >90% of law/policy proposals, and I don’t disagree at all with what you wrote about US policy on Iran. But you’re silencing my voice here because I don’t agree that Bill Maher is an “ignorant bigot”, and said so.
Enjoy intellectual life in your teeny-tiny WAAAD bubble.
I’m not silencing anything. It’s a big internet, duder. What I am saying us that comments on this blog will be on-topic or they will be deleted.
You didn’t delete NattyB’s initial off-topic remark about Maher, but only my response to it. Consistency is all us duders ask!
NattyB’s response is not off-topic; it reflects on this post and brings in Maher. Your comment had nothing to do with this post and specifically said “this is a response to an earlier post.”
Mark – I too had thoughts on the Modern Muslim piece but missed my chance to comment. It happens. Can we move on?
“Mocking a
woman’sperson’s sex life because you don’t likehertheir politics is wrong. Shaming anotherwomanperson because you don’t likehertheir politics is not alright.”FTFY.
Otherwise nice post.
Perhaps “the fuck?” is a bit of subtle wordplay, given Ryan’s thesis that Dalmia is having awful sex.
Many of the comments on the Jezebel post seem to be focused on Dalmia’s observation that “The truth is that, except in the first flush of infatuation, both partners are rarely equally excited. At any given moment, one person wants sex more passionately than the other.”
I think there is some truth to that statement, and that it likely could have been better worded. That’s my lived experience anyway. Obviously others may have really truly never experienced that sort of relationship or they haven’t empathetically engaged enough to consider that position. But the group ridicule of that specific passage is a good example of your update: We Are All Already Decided.
I am just surprised that passage is getting that much attention, it seemed obvious enough to me on first read; sex drives between partners ebb and flow depending on a whole host of variables. Yet that passage is somehow builds the case that this female writer is worthy of scorn.
Freddie, I really appreciate your earnestness when it comes to Gawker stuff, and I agree with you that it *could* be a site (or network of sites) that does much more good for the world than it actually does. But its become blatantly obvious to me that this is unlikely to happen; the clear business model of Gawker Media is the conversion of progressive superiority complexes to dollars.
They don’t shame Reason writers’ sexualities because they think its some stroke for social justice; they do it because their audience is hungering for the next takedown of people with bad opinions, the next hit of superiority-fueled dopamine. Nick Denton has figured out the formula to turn this hunger into money, and ‘solutions’ to the problems his writers monetize are incidental and probably even counterproductive for that purpose.
Enjoyed your posts on language policing but disagree with you here. While I wouldn’t use that title because there’s no point in personalizing this because that’s almost always a mistake, I think it’s fine to say that people who actually make sure they have consent are having better sex than people who are not making sure they have consent or assume silence and a cold stiff partner equals consent.
People who are afraid that a standard in which their partner has to show some expression of enjoying themselves (non verbal consent) OR give explicit consent, will make sex horrible, it’s such a strange attitude to me. It’s investment in the status quo cultural position where consent is assumed unless there’s vigorous protest.
I can see why people who aren’t women or victims of sexual assault could question the idea but the current system in no way works for victims of sexual assault and that needs to be addressed.
Why I don’t think personalizing it was a good move (it wasn’t because it almost never is the right way to go), the criticism of the libertarian Reason writer’s argument was on point.
“The reality is that much of sex is not consensual — but it is also not non-consensual. It resides in a gray area in between, where sexual experimentation and discovery happen.”<– That is dangerous rhetoric. Sex should always have consent. She probe meant to refer to sex that people aren't initiating, or that sex they aren't enthusiastic about but consent is there. Consent is just what separate sex from rape. It's not necessarily "I love what's going on!" or "This was my idea". Rapists have a field day behind the idea that consent is difficult to discern. It's not. It's easy to discern.
Your comment is more or less indecipherable.
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I am not a student of rhetoric; your comment is more earnest and literal than anything I’ve ever written in my life; your take is simultaneously self-aggrandizing and nonsensical; you fail to reflect anything resembling understanding of Dalmia’s argument; you have no rational claim to why sex-shaming in this instance is fair, feminist, or excusable. For all of these crimes, I hereby disemvowel your comment.