My earlier post (Are We Doing Young Persons a Disservice by Teaching them No Means No?) garnered over 380 comments. When I had a chance to delve into the comments, I found myself wanting a graphic recorder to organize the rich array of facts, concepts, perspectives and personal experiences in the discussion. It was an incredibly rich discussion, but I suspect for many commenters very frustrating. At times it seemed as if there several conversations going on near each other and at each other but not with each other.
Some commenters took strong exception to my diary. These commenters pointed out that we, collectively and forever, have been teaching women to not do certain things in order to avoid being raped and obviously it hasn't worked. They also pointed out we haven't taught men the things we need to teach them. We don't say to men, "Don't rape." These commenters also pointed out that 2/3 of rapes, are committed by serial rapists who are not going to be dissuaded by conversation. These points are correct and I agreed with them before any one made them. But obviously, they needed to be made in response to my diary.
So where did my diary go awry?
I accepted the boundaries of the Our Whole Lives session as the boundaries of the discussion without realizing it. In the Our Whole Lives session on date rape, the central problem is a failure to communicate. (There is a revision of the curriculum in the works and I suspect the date rape session is one of the sessions being rewritten.) The scenario in Our Whole Lives presents date rape as "a good date gone bad." The story in the session is written to create an obvious set of decision points - if something different happened at this time, the outcome would have changed. (As for example, there's a point in the story where he tells her to sleep in his bed and he'll sleep on the floor; if he'd turned the lights out and gone to sleep, that would have been good.) The curriculum scenario, inadvertently I believe, frames the discussion in terms of choices leading to a bad end.
As I read the comments and reread my original post, I was struck by the cultural tone-deafness in my post. I'm normally pretty acute, so I wondered what was going on - then it hit me "Privilege." It was easy for me to accept the framing in the curriculum because of various privileges I have. This is where I have to start unpacking my privilege as a male in our society. And, where a lack of heterosexual privilege tripped me up.
Public discussion about rape (almost) always puts the onus on women. It was not my intent to blame the victim but, I ignored the reality that talking about mitigating risk plays into existing cultural myths that blame women for their own rapes - it's as if there's a predetermined form and discussion simply falls into that form whether we intend it or not. I don't believe our cultural context should prevent us from having a complete conversation; I also need to recognize that we can't have our conversation divorced from our culture context. How we navigate between Scylla and Charybdis is up to us. We need to have a comprehensive, nuanced discussion but we also need to make changes in our cultural attitudes. It's a short term and a long term project.
I believe, and everything in my experience has taught me, that open and honest conversation about sexuality reaps tremendous rewards. In my own dating life, I am alarmingly frank with potential partners about what I will and won't do and how I expect them to communicate with me. As a man, I can engage in open discussion without being stigmatized for even having the discussion. As several commenters pointed out, a woman who brings up the topic of sex (no matter what she says) is immediately treated like a slut. If her position is "let's wait" it is often treated as a challenge to be overcome not a position to be honored. As a man, if I say, "No sex on the first date," that's respected. Men are permitted to know our own minds about sex - women are assumed to not know their own minds. Men are trained to respect other men in ways they are not trained to respect women. If I say, "No sex on the first date," everything in his socialization has trained my date to respect that (it may piss him off, but he won't try to beg and haggle and wheedle until he talks me into having sex).
Because I date other men, I don't deal with mindfuck that our society does to women about their sexuality. Every teenage girl who has ever been in my sexuality education classes has talked about her experience of the crazy-making societal standards about female sexuality - she's supposed to have sexual desire, but not too much or she's a slut and not too little or she's hung up and only when he wants it and she's not supposed to ask for it, and she's supposed to be enthusiastic, but not too enthusiastic, she's supposed to be knowledgeable but not too much or she's a slut and she's supposed to handle all the birth control but not talk about it because only sluts talk about birth control (I'm sure we could collectively come up with more ways the dynamic plays out. Women are damned if they do, damned if they don't where sexuality is concerned. Many young women (such as those I work with) lack the life experience to realize the problem isn't them, it's society. It's easy to forget those toxic messages when it's not part of my day to day life.
The cliche that men always want sex is wrong and harmful, but it's far less toxic than our attitudes toward female sexuality. When there's two men, and nobody is a slut, I believe the basic conversation is easier. Our society makes it more okay for men to talk about sex than for women to talk about sex.
There's also, at least for me, a component of privilege that I'm not certain how to name - class privilege, yes but it's multi-layered. I have been incredibly fortunate in my life to move from high school, to college, to grad school to adult life largely within a progressive community. As a teen and college student, my peers and I lived in a remarkably safe world - the adults around us created a world in which liberal values about gender role, sexuality, equality and justice were part of the air we breathed. As a grad student, I was surrounded by people who exemplified Cahn and Carbone's "blue family" values. As an adult, I spend a huge amount of time in a progressive community which lives the values of equality, respect, mutuality and sexual health. It may be a conceit, it may be a function of privilege and good luck, but in the world in which I have lived a huge chunk of my life, conversation is almost always the answer. I suspect the folks who wrote the curriculum were writing from within a similar experience, hence the boundaries I mentioned above.
Without realizing it, I wrote from deep within privilege. From within that privilege, it's easy to forget the multiple, reinforcing forces and functions which create an environment which blinds you to the operation of privilege.
Why walk through these observations?
Even someone like me who has done a lot of work around privilege can get tripped up by it and I apologize for the blindness that sometimes comes over me. It may not comfort but it was accidental, not deliberate.
I continue to believe that education is the answer. The discussion under my earlier post emphasized again and again the need for education. In that discussion, I believe there was general agreement on principles and goals. We want to end rape. We support positive sexuality. We believe education has the power to transform things. We want to end sexism.
If we work from our shared goals and principles, I think we can get further. As a community, we need to find a way, at least when talking with each other, to avoid prebuttal mode. It seemed there was a lot of discussion at each other about things no one said but that float around in the general miasma of discussions about rape - that people who are talking about reducing risk are saying "Never leave the house or take a drop of the demon rum" while people who are talking about transforming the rape culture are addicted to moral absolutism and sloganeering in the face of a complex problem. No means no can feel like an updating of Nancy Reagan's Just Say No and we all know how well that worked out. How we talk about what we talk about matters.
We're all trying to achieve the same goal, we're all sharing the same moral highground. If we pay attention to what is actually being said and respect one another, we can open up a myriad of avenues for implementing immediate solutions as well as creating the circumstance for long term, systemic change.
I began my prior post by remarking on a huge change in the way young women reacted to the date rape lesson in Our Whole Lives. At the end of the day, our job as adults is to mentor young people into maturity, to stand beside them while they navigate the world and it's realities. I remain worried that we're not doing the right things to prepare them. I'd rather check in and say, "Is this working? Does this feel right?" than not check in and just hope. So I guess my original question stands in some ways - are we teaching the right lesson the right way to help young people thrive?