Consent

I know everyone who reads this blog is a very intelligent person and therefore has already seen this (probably via Atrios), but I have to share anyway.

James Bowman (in the conservative National Review Online) takes the recent Michael Jackson case as an opportunity to complain about how women can use the law to their advantage. Michael Jackson says it’s alright that he sleeps with boys because he doesn’t actually have sex with them.

For the article of faith on which Jackson bases his appeal is the feminist one that only what actually happens should be relevant to questions of sexual crime and punishment. Thus a woman can lead a man up to the point of penetration, only then say “no” and subsequently prosecute him for rape if he is a moment late in heeding her instruction. Most importantly, because no one but the two people involved know if he was late, or just how enthusiastic or prolonged were her yeses before her noes commenced, such a prosecution will always come down, as it has in the case of Kobe Bryant, to asking a jury to take the word of one or another of them on faith. [ Hypocrisy Against the Devil]

What a slippery man Bowman is! First of all, I think we can probably all agree that it’s not right for a woman to lead a man on and then change her mind when all that lies between having sex and not having sex is the simple physics of inertia. And if you think I’m wrong about that, consider the evil of last-minute driving directions: “Go right through this … no! Turn right here!” When you’re halfway through the intersection already, who could blame you for missing the turn?

But it’s not the question of inertia that bothers Bowman. Consider: he’s not really complaining about the idea of changing one’s mind microseconds before ignition. He starts by complaining about the “feminist [notion that] only what actually happens should be relevant to questions of sexual crime and punishment.”

That’s not a feminist notion, that seems like basic law. Is Bowman suggesting we consider what could have happened? What may have happened but didn’t? What else can you consider but what actually happened?

That’s not the feminist notion at the root anyway. The feminist notion is that women are supposed to decide what happens to their bodies, and that at no point is a man justified in assuming sex has been promised and must be delivered by the undersigned, no escape clause allowed. Which seems to me to be pretty reasonable.

That women can say “yes” in public but say “no” in private can put men in a tight spot. That women can say “yes” in public and in private but can claim later in court that they said “no” is also something of a problem, which is what leads to the he-said/she-said fiasco.

How Bowman wants to solve this is to say that women are contracturally obligated to have sex by how they behave in public:

Pre-feminist common sense suggested that a woman who comes alone to a man’s hotel room late at night has already consented to sex with him, but on the all-or-nothing principle so dear to ideologues everywhere, feminist orthodoxy insists that the adoption of this rough-and-ready but extremely useful guide would be tantamount to saying that a woman who has slept with other men not her husband, or even who dresses provocatively has already consented to sex.

See! Bowman is ticked that, at no point, is the deal to have sex legally binding. I can practically hear him screaming: Dammit, you signed a contract when you ordered that shrimp cocktail!

Between crossing the threshold of a hotel room or bedroom and “the point of penetration” there are a lot of spots where both parties can change their minds, where physics is not an issue. But Bowman doesn’t acknowledge this. He just acts as though he’s restating the argument. Which he’s not. He’s making a new one.

That’s the really sneaky thing about the way this argument is constructed. Bowman first gets you to agree that one act—changing one’s mind the instant before, when there is only inertia—is an injustice, then he adds another one in. One that deals with percieved contractural agreements, not physics.

In such a fashion can the unwary be led, heads nodding, accepting one seemingly logical statement after another, until by the end they are left agreeing that Michael Jackson’s strange brand of alleged pedophilia is the fault of feminists insisting that provocative behavior does not give one the legal right to commit sexual assault.

Well done, NRO!