Well, this place has been kind of quiet lately, hasn’t it? (Well, aside from snippets of dialog from that silly-looking new Ricky Gervais film, The Invention of Lying. Has anyone else had that banner ad suddenly decide to start spouting dialog from the film all by itself at odd times over the last couple of days? It scared the hell out of me the first time it did that. The following twenty or so times were merely annoying.) Times are tough all over, I guess. And a number of the old regulars aren’t around much anymore for whatever reason. So, in the interest of fostering some activity (and grinding some reliable axes), here are a few rambling but not wholly unconnected thoughts.
We’ve had several discussion related to the notion of consent in the context of various types of sexual activity. That issue came up in a recent Slate article: Smeary Lines: The lesson we're not learning from the Hofstra date rape that wasn't. The article was mildly interesting – the cautionary tale of a late-night after-party encounter between five young men and one young lady in a men’s bathroom. The encounter was first alleged to be rape and then fairly conclusively proven not to be rape (as defined in the statutes) when a video of the events surfaced. It was a video recorded by one of the young men with his cell phone – without the knowledge of the young lady involved, obviously. The article talks about what lessons ought to be learned (conspicuously absent lesson: always assume these days that a video or pictures might exist when an event involves witnesses).
More interesting I thought was the discussion in the associated Jurisprudence Fray. Folks had a lot to say, but one frequently recurring theme (expressed mostly by men) focused on how truly awful a false or even a non-provable accusation of rape is, what harm it does to the accused. Right along with that went the notion that a woman has to accept some responsibility, maybe a lot of responsibility for the situations she puts herself in. A lot of these folks also opined that we shouldn’t be too quick to judge the intentions or the actions of a man (or a woman) involved in these sorts of things, we can’t always know who consents to what and when and why with great certainty, let’s give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and so on. Quite interesting...
More evidence, I’d say, that if people can see themselves in a given situation then they’re much more likely to be sympathetic to those involved. As if more evidence was needed.
Anyway, both the article and the discussion piqued my interest in university conduct codes related to sexual activity. As a result, I did a little research into the standards that most universities impose – standards that by design exceed what the law typically requires. And in so doing I came across a hitherto unfamiliar term: Effective Consent. Here’s a typical definition: Effective Consent is informed, freely and actively given, and consists of mutually understandable words or actions [emphasis added] indicating a willingness to engage in mutually agreed-upon sexual activity. Of course there are paragraphs following that strive to define “freely” and “actively” and that attempt to provide guidelines to help determine when an individual is inherently incapable of offering effective consent. That’s to be expected.
But one take-home lesson is that even the wary guardians of our avowedly safe, diverse, respectful, and responsible communities of higher education have recognized the commonsensical reality that consent may be signified by mutually-understandable actions rather than words.
Yet more evidence, I’d say...
Okay, separate (but related) topic... There was another recent article on Slate about love, mostly in old Athens, entitled Ancient Greek Lessons About Gay Marriage: The dizzying spectrum of same-sex relationships. The article is a book review (The Greeks and Greek Love: A Bold New Exploration of the Ancient World by James Davidson) actually. The review tends to ramble a bit and the title doesn’t much reflect the main thrust of either the review or the book as far as I can tell. That’s unfortunate. But the book looks interesting; its main thesis seems to be that there were actually quite a range of socially-acceptable same-sex relationships sanctioned to one degree or another in ancient Greece and it’s easy to misconstrue them by seeing them through the prism of our own time and culture. It’s also been too often assumed that what was accepted during a particular era in Athens, for example, was somehow archetypal. The reality, the author says, was more complex and harder to pigeonhole.
It’s a valuable and not-too-shocking point. Too bad it was mostly lost in the related discussion on the Books Fray. Nothing much of note there, for the most part... It’s mostly a weird amalgam of posts by same-sex marriage opponents and proponents who are both offended by the notion that we might have anything to learn from ancient Greek boy lovers intermingled with the occasional post offering a vague or tendentious reading of history and/or the evolution of sexual mores. Plainly a lot of these posters either didn’t read the article at all or else they didn’t read it very carefully.
But never mind all of that. I was particularly intrigued by the following passage from the review:
“Davidson brilliantly shows that this interpretation [The Athenians were obsessed with anal sex, which they saw as an act of domination and humiliation] is largely a projection on the part of modern historians, who have been reluctant to imagine a world where gay relationships could be expressions of love, affection, and appreciation, rather than deeply skewed power arrangements.”
That rang a bell. One does often hear general complaints about “deeply skewed power arrangements” in quite a lot of discussions about various unconventional sexual relationships. I’d never thought too much about that objection being somewhat reflexive and easily triggered by a wide range of topics, but maybe it is. I hadn’t much considered that it might serve as a broad foundation for other objections, but maybe it does. Maybe among other things it’s a reliable rationalization for folks who’re confronted by someone whose affections are just too alien to be understandable. Now I’m certainly not suggesting that the objection is never valid, but oftentimes it is awfully convenient. “Those freakazoids can’t possibly feel what I feel, so those relationships must be based on something different than mine. Power, predation, unbridled hedonism, something...”
Yet more evidence, I’d say...
Cheers.
