A man was found guilty of raping an unconscious woman. He received an unbelievably light sentence and then only served half of it. And we were all appalled. This is as it should be! This sentence (that seemed to be much more about the “damage” prison would do to this man than it was about the damage done to the victim) underscores how little women and their sexual dignity seem to matter in our current cultural environment. And I’ve had enough.
We are told the answer to situations like this one starts at home. We need to have conversations with our sons about informed consent. We are to be talking with them about how “no means no” and how an unconscious person isn’t capable of giving consent at all.
The consent conversation with my 9 year-old happened in the context of a talk about prostitution and rape. I just go where the questions take me and he had some questions that night. When I explained what rape was, he told me he had seen something like that before. I tried not to panic and asked him where he saw it. He told me it was in “Back to the Future” which is how we came up with the phrase “Don’t be a Biff” when it comes to how you treat women. So we talked about consent, but I’m struggling with the emphasis we’re putting on teaching the concept of consent to boys. It seems to me if you’re having to explain to young men that it isn’t okay to have sex with women who don’t want to have sex with you, something has gone wrong much earlier in your sexual education discussions.
I’m afraid we have become much too casual not just about sex, but about the value of women– their safety, preferences, needs and desires. And I think the porn-saturated culture we live in has a lot to do with that.
When we let porn control the dialogue for our kids about what sex is like and what women are like, we end up in a world where we have to literally tell young men that if a woman is unconscious, she doesn’t want to have sex with you. That is insane. What kind of man would want to have sex with an unconscious woman? A person is literally not even aware of what is happening– not participating, not enjoying, may even be in medical danger, just being used for her body. Like a blowup doll. That sounds like a porn problem to me.
Regular porn viewing that starts before kids have even entered puberty is going to have an effect on what these future adults think sex is like. How could it not? Especially when parents don’t want to talk about this stuff honestly with their kids and choose to be ignorant about the kind of free access their children have to porn. Who is going to counter the messages they receive from porn if we don’t? Do we really think that one conversation with our child about consent is going to counteract the pervasiveness of a porn-saturated culture that objectifies women and presents them as commodities to be enjoyed by men?
Porn tells kids that women want sex all the time, even when they say they don’t, even when they’re in pain, even when they’re being humiliated and degraded in an unsafe environment. Or porn tells kids it doesn’t even matter if women WANT sex, men should be able to do what they want because sex is the most important and rewarding thing in life. Porn tells girls that their highest value is as a sexual object. It tells them that to “win” at life is to be sexually desired and once you’ve become sexually desired, what kind of woman doesn’t then consent to sex? My hope is that ANY WOMAN WHO DOESN’T WANT SEX isn’t consenting to it, but we’ve created this environment where she must act in a way that implies she wants sex in order to get male attention and then does she even still feel like she has a choice? She absolutely DOES have a choice, but the pressure that puts on her is immense.
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