[Turing 2013] Atheist Entry #2

August 13, 2013 By Leah Libresco

This is the second entry in the Atheist round of the 2013 Ideological Turing Test. This year, atheists and Christians responded to questions about sex, death, and literature.

Polyamory

I admit, when I heard that polyamory was going to be one of the topics of this year’s ideological Turing test, this wasn’t how I was hoping the question would be framed. The “sacramental” side is awkward to answer as an atheist, and I’m not quite sure what to say about the policy question. But then, I shouldn’t complain about a challenge, so here it goes (though the standard internet disclaimer I Am Not A Lawyer applies).

On a practical level, I don’t think polyamory is for everyone, but I think people who think polyamorous relationships (or nonmonogamous relationships more generally) never work don’t know enough poly people. (Or don’t know that they know them. Plenty of people in non-monogamous relationships aren’t out about that fact.) And on a moral level, I can’t even fathom why anyone would think nonmonogamy is automatically wrong regardless of whether it works for the people involved.

Legally speaking, I certainly don’t think there should be laws against adultery, and I think even fundamentalist Mormon polygamists should be left alone if they aren’t breaking any other laws (like age of consent laws). Whether civil marriage marriage should be open to groups of more than two people is (at least potentially) a more complicated issue, though.

I say “at least potentially,” because I’ve run across one polyamory advocate on the internet who insisted it wasn’ta complicated issue and that it would be a simple matter of repealing laws against bigamy. Color me skeptical, however. In the US, at least, marriage carries with it a wide range of legal privileges, some of which seem designed with only two people in mind. For example, it would probably not be possible to require employers and insurance companies that offer family health care plans to cover an indefinite number of spouses (at least, not without costing more, in the case of insurance companies).

Now, the issue of health insurance is going to be much less of an issue in rich countries other than the US, which generally have well-established systems of universal health care. And in fact, I’ve been told that many countries are, in general, moving to make legal marriage less important. If this is true, it lends plausibility to the point of view that the state should get out of the marriage business entirely.

I’m not suggesting that’s something we should try to do in the very near future, again at least not in the US. As I’ve already said, marriage is, legally speaking, a big deal in the US, and not having access to some of the associated legal privileges can be a huge problem for some couples, as we all should have learned by now from following the gay marriage debate. So whatever we do, it can’t be as simple as abolishing legal marriage tomorrow.

But maybe we should be looking at emulating those other countries where marriage has less legal significance. The Affordable Care Act, which tries to make health insurance affordable for everyone regardless of whether they or their spouse has a job that provides health insurance could, in a sense, be viewed as a step in that direction, and it’s a step I, for one, am very glad for.

Euthanasia

I wrote this part of my entry well in advance of the deadline, and then decided to completely rewrite it in the middle of the Christian round after Scott Alexander, a psychiatry resident who blogs at SlateStarCodex.com, wrote a blog post which I recommend everyone read, titled, “Who By Very Slow Decay.” While you’re at it, go also read his, “In Defense of Psych Treatment for Attempted Suicide.”

The take away from these two posts, in reversed order, is that on the one hand lots of people who attempt suicide do so because they’re mentally ill, not just because of depression but also because of many other mental illnesses. These people, when they don’t succeed in killing themselves, tend not to try again and are often in fact very glad they didn’t succeed. We need mechanisms in place to prevent these people from successfully killing themselves and to get them the treatment they need.

On the other hand, dying is unspeakably horrible, not just because you’re dead afterwords but because the process tends to be unspeakably horrible, and also slow. Having a dad who’s a health care provider, I could add to the examples Scott gives. Knowing all that convinces me it’s really important for people who want to be able to die as quickly and painlessly as possible when their only other option is to die slowly and horribly should be able to do the first one.

As for exactly what rules should govern assisted suicide and euthanasia, while I’m more sympathetic to consequentialism than most people, I have trouble swallowing the consequentialist view that there is never any moral difference between killing and letting die, and on a practical level (slippery slope arguments and so on) I think we have someone more reason to be worried about providing a lethal dose of a drug the proverbial unplugging of the machines. And within the first category, I’m less worried about providing patients with a lethal prescription to take themselves (which provides reassurance that it’s what they really want) than I am about doctors administering the medication.

That said, the worst case scenarios people imagine for countries like the Netherlands (people being pressured into euthanasia against their will) have, to the best of my knowledge, failed to materialize. Because of that, I’d be tentatively supportive of similar legislation being introduced in this country (not that that will happen anytime soon). I definitely think existing laws in Washington state and Oregon are better than completely prohibiting physician assisted suicide.

You can vote on whether you think these answers were written by a Christian or an Atheist here. Comments are open to discuss the substance of the post and for speculation about the true beliefs of the author, so please vote before looking at the comments.

[Turing 2013] Atheist Entry #1

August 12, 2013 By Leah Libresco

This is the first entry in the Atheist round of the 2013 Ideological Turing Test. This year, atheists and Christians responded to questions about sex, death, and literature.

Polyamory

It seems to me that the purpose of civil marriage is not to tell people who they should be in a relationship with, but rather to grant legal recognition and rights to the people who are in fact in relationships. As such, the question is not “should more than two people be allowed to form a marriage?” but rather “do more than two people want to form a marriage?”

The answer, in most cases, is no.

Some days, it’s as much as my wife and I can do to stay married to each other. I can’t imagine trying to negotiate a relationship between more than two people with career and personal needs and aspirations to balance. I find it hard to imagine that anyone wants group marriages other than a few hippies and some fundamentalist Mormons and Muslims.

However, in a free society, we don’t ban something simply because the majority of people don’t want it. Indeed, whether we can call ourselves a free society is best measured by how we treat our minorities. If anything, the fact that so few people would want to engage in polyamorous relationships is all the more reason to recognize them where they do exist. It’s certainly not going to make my marriage stronger to keep some committed group of three or four consenting adults in a long term relationship from having legal recognition and the ability to visit each other in the hospital and have community property together. I don’t want that kind of relationship, and so whether the people who do want it are recognized really doesn’t affect me at all. One of the lingering effects of puritanism in our society is that so many people think that their existences will somehow suffer if people who are not like them are allowed to live in peace.

Now, I do see certain concerns from a women’s rights perspective, in that realistically many of the people taking advantage of the recognition of polygamous relationships might be members of fundamentalist religious sects who tend to treat women and children badly. That’s a serious concern, and I think it’s probably the best argument that people bring against recognizing these relationships. However, it’s important to remember that we already have laws against child abuse and spousal abuse. Far more women and children are abused by men in “traditional” marriages than by members of plural marriages. Moreover, it’s arguable that it’s being forced to live in the shadows outside the law that makes it so easy for these families to treat their members badly. If they are recognized in terms of their family relationship and come out of hiding, it’s that much easier for women and children in these families to come to the authorities if they are experiencing abuse. Finally, making it easier for religious fundamentalists who believe in polygamy to integrate with mainstream society is probably the most powerful weapon we have against the sexism and child abuse so common in those circles. If they stop living on the margins and start sending their kids to public school, surfing the internet, going to mainstream doctors, etc. just like any other family, they are that much more likely to come in contact with the opportunities and technologies of modern society which, I firmly believe, tend strongly towards instilling in people a desire for freedom both from patriarchy and superstition.

Euthanasia

If it’s never permissible to end a life, then why exactly do we all die? If there’s one thing we can say for certain, it’s that life is a 100% fatal condition.

Look, I don’t mean to be flip. But if there’s one thing that is utterly and completely our own, it’s our lives. That’s why it is always wrong for someone to take another person’s life against their will. But it’s also why it’s frankly kind of offensive to claim that I don’t have the right to end my life if I choose to.

A person doesn’t give their consent to be born. They don’t sign a contract committing to remain alive until some outside force chooses the time of their death. So why would we not have the right to choose when to end our own lives? To force someone to remain alive against their will would be a form of slavery.

Now, let’s be clear: There are certainly a lot of situations in which someone who expresses a desire to die is not actually doing so freely, but rather under the influence of depression or emotional coercion. For the same reason that I think it’s essential that our right to end our lives how we choose and when we choose be respected, I think it’s also important that if there’s a reason to think that someone is seeking to end their life due to depression or outside pressure, we provide them with counseling.

However, there are times when it’s completely rational to choose a dignified end to life rather than seeking to get every last minute of suffering. I’ve seen many articles in which it’s stated that doctors would prefer not to end life in an ICU surrounded by a bunch of other doctors and nurses trying to revive them. And that’s hardly surprising. What kind of quality of life is that? What kind of sick worldview would hold that we’re required to suffer as much as possible rather than slipping quietly away in a morphine fog when it’s clear that there’s nothing left but pain and increasingly desperate medical procedures?

And if we have the right to end our lives when we choose, it’s simply a matter of justice that those who through disability aren’t able to do so themselves have a physician’s help.

Bonus

I think the genre which would best express my worldview is the coming of age novel.

The novel is the quintessential modern literary form. The narrative structure allows a focus on psychology which allows deeper insight into the human experience. It allows for complex plot and for multiple viewpoints.

The coming of age novel in particular deals with what I think is the key human experience: that point when we realize that there is nothing magical about adults. In some says, I’d say that religious experience is rooted in a refusal to ever quite accept that there are no “adults” out there operating on a higher plane and looking after us.

There’s a scene in Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood which crystalized for me the pretense behind religion. The main character is sitting in her church service and it suddenly becomes very plain to her that there’s simply nothing going on there. The same realization came to me much more gradually, but when I read Dillard’s book in high school I thought it summed up the liberation of realizing that there’s no god tip-toeing through the room when people close their eyes and pray.

Perhaps the book I’ve read most times in my life is Ender’s Game, another coming of age novel, and while Card himself seems intent on bringing in religious topics (he’s Mormon) I always drew a lot from the way in which Ender realizes that the adults are not guardians of goodness. And it’s especially key that it’s empathy that allows him to understand the “Buggers” in a way in which the adults in his life are incapable.

One set of books that I found myself unable to love, even though I read a lot of fantasy, was the Narnia books, and I think one of the reasons is that Lewis never really lets his characters grow up. They have to remain children in relation to his god-stand-in, Aslan. The only character who does clearly grow up is Susan, whom Lewis condemns.

[Turing 2013] Christian Entry #10

July 24, 2013 By Leah Libresco

This is the tenth entry in the Christian round of the 2013 Ideological Turing Test. This year, atheists and Christians responded to questions about sex, death, and literature.

Polyamory

Well, first of all, I’m a Protestant, and Protestants generally only consider baptism and communion to be sacraments. That said, I have a lot to say about the ethics of polyamory from a Christian perspective, way more than I could ever fit in here, but I’ll try to give a summary.

One reason I find this issue interesting is that it shows the limitations of the approach to Biblical interpretation that focuses on looking for prooftexts to show that one particular view is True. I suspect a lot of conservative Christians assume there must be a pro-monogamy prooftext somewhere in the Bible, when such prooftexts are actually very hard to find. Some of the Bible’s most famous stories, like the story of Isaac and Ishmael, or the story of Rachel and Leah, assume a cultural background where polygamy is considered totally acceptable. (Or more accurately, there’s a cultural backdrop of polygyny, where a man can have multiple wives but not the other way around.)

To be clear, I do NOT think that the specific practices recorded in the Old Testament would be appropriate for us today. That’s because I see the Bible as a record of people’s experiences with the Divine, filtered through their own understanding of the world and cultural assumptions, rather than a word-for-word dictation by God.

A more helpful approach here would be to look at the issues in light of the core message of the Bible. According to Jesus, the whole of the law could be summed up in two commandments: love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. When talking about romantic relationships it’s tempting to assume love means eros, but in most of the the New Testament the word being translated as “love” is agape. Love, in this sense, requires among other things that we not put ourselves above other people (equality), or coerce other people into do what we want regardless of whether it’s what they want (consent).

Now whenever I talk about polyamory with people who don’t live in San Francisco, they tend to hear “polygamy” and think of Mormon fundamentalists. Mormon polygamy (or polygyny), though, is rather obviously not based on male-female equality. On that model, an already-married man is allowed to take additional wives (sometimes without even consulting existing wives), but it would be totally unthinkable for a woman to have multiple husbands. Often, marriages are arranged by a woman’s (or young girl’s) male relatives, with her getting little say in the process. That model isn’t something I support or condone.

Polyamory as I understand it is based on equality, openness, honesty, consent, and mutual respect. That doesn’t mean people just doing whatever they feel like. People need to communicate with their partners to build relationships that work for everyone involved, and respect the boundaries they lay down. It also doesn’t necessarily mean having exactly the same rules for everybody involved in a relationship. “Do to others as you would have them do to you” doesn’t mean you ignore the way other people’s preferences differ from your preferences, instead it should mean recognizing that you wouldn’t like it if someone else went around acting like everyone should share their preferences, and then adjusting your own behavior in a way that recognizes that fact. The key thing is that people communicate their preferences, and that the relationship is built on a foundation of equality and mutual respect.

(And now I really want to talk about some of the things Leah has written on marriage, but I guess I should move on to the next question.)

Euthanasia

Leah worded this question really broadly, and it’s tempting to go off in all sorts of directions with it. There’s the issue of forgiveness and how Christians should respond to violence, and how that interacts with Christianity’s unfortunate history of militarism, from Constantine down to certain “Christians” in the US today. And, um, this may be a weird reaction, but when I hear “is there a difference between killing and not administering medical treatment?” my first thought is to feel guilty about the things I spend money on for myself when so many people in the world don’t have access to basic health care (not to mention food and clean water). But since the question is supposed to be about euthanasia, I’ll try to focus on that.

So some people assume that everything is God’s will, even things like teenagers dying in a car crash or something equally tragic. But the God I believe in is not a God who would will anyone to die when they have a full life ahead of them. On the other hand, nor are they a God who would will anyone to die a slow, agonizing death. So it would be wrong to withhold life-saving medical care for fear of interfering with God’s will, but by the same token, it would be simplistic to try to settle the issue of euthanasia by saying that euthanasia is, necessarily, interfering with God’s will.

The key issue for me is how we can best follow the principle of love. I don’t think I can definitely say that there are cases where providing active euthanasia would be the most loving thing to do, especially if the pain of a terminal illness can be managed through pain killers. But I don’t think I can definitely say there aren’t such cases, either. In fact, it would be pretty arrogant of me to do so. As for whether we might ever have an ethical obligation to provide active euthanasia, that’s an even more difficult question. That would be a very hard thing for most people to do, but as Christians, we should always strive to do the most loving, compassionate thing we can, even when it’s difficult.

[Turing 2013] Christian Entry #2

July 16, 2013 By Leah Libresco

This is the second entry in the Christian round of the 2013 Ideological Turing Test. This year, atheists and Christians responded to questions about sex, death, and literature.

Polyamory

Church marriage (a term I prefer because marriage is not generally held to be a Sacrament in the Anglican Communion) is a marriage between a man and a woman. The identity of the spouses is still disputed within our society, and I am personally torn over whether faithful same-sex couples should be able to marry within the church; however the number of spouses being two is not in dispute. I have seen no arguments for the Church recognising polygamy, and personally would see it as inconsistent with the purpose of a Christian marriage: that a couple, loving one another and loving God, enter into a union together, in order to better serve God, better love one another, and better do God’s work in the world – including, when they have children, the bringing up of their children in the faith. There is a direct reciprocality to marriage which would be broken by bringing in additional spouses, making the union unbalanced and imperfect.

What is more, if the marriage of two men is not appropriate within the church, why should adding a woman to the group suddenly change things? If the Church will not marry Bob and Tom, how is marrying Bob to Tom and Anna okay?

From a civil perspective, I would oppose polygamy on the practical grounds that even as people continue to find marriage to one other person difficult (view the divorce rate), relationships with multiple partners are less stable than monogamous ones – logically, the more moving parts in a relationship the more likely things are to break. And look how rancorous divorces through the civil courts can be with only two spouses – how much worse with many? Adultery is not a crime, at least in this country, and if a married couple wish to have carnal relations with other consenting adults that is their right, albeit I consider it very likely to damage their relationship.

Finally on this point, many have (and do) questioned and opposed the re-definition of civil marriage to include same-sex couples. While I sympathise with their perspective, at least same sex marriage retains the fundamental characteristic of being a bond between two people. Just as the dynamic of a group of friends changes as more friends arrive, so the dynamic of a romantic relationship changes if more people are involved. The dynamic of a man, a woman and maybe children is time-honoured and proven. The dynamic of one man and children or one woman and children is unfortunately common, but nobody claims it as an ideal. The dynamic of two men or two women and maybe children is one that is under test at the moment. Multiple adults plus maybe-children of different combinations of the two adults is an unknown, and at the bare minimum we should not enshrine it into civil law before we know how it is supposed to work.

As I hope has become clear, my argument here is based on both Christian and secular grounds, and should thus be at least partially persuasive to all.

Euthanasia

It is permissible to end a life to save others, including oneself. This exception does not generally apply in the case of euthanasia.

It is obligatory to end a life to save others, but not to save oneself – you may choose to sacrifice yourself for a higher goal, but you can’t choose for other people.

Neither of these conditions apply very frequently in cases of euthanasia – not very many terminal patients are likely serial-killers, after all, nor would many of them stop a runaway tram if pushed in front of it.
Looking at the question from the other end, I consider it a requirement that anyone consent to medical treatment before they undergo it, except if they are not conscious to be asked and treatment is urgently required. As such it must be acceptable to allow people to refuse treatment that might, or will, prolong life; there is no consistent line to draw between the two, and the first is a vital part of medical ethics.

I would consider it morally acceptable to provide reasonable doses of painkillers to someone who has refused other treatment, but not to give any treatment which will kill them. Palliative care is the ideal – supporting someone, making the end of their life as pleasant as possible, without cutting it short. I also consider it right that this, as “Assisted Suicide”, this carries a legal penalty. It is the responsibility of a civil society to look after its weakest members, and it is our duty as Christians to look after the least of these, before and around and alongside the efforts of society as a whole. The terminally ill and those afflicted by degenerative conditions are among “the least of these”, and they deserve our care, not being brushed aside like an ailing pet.

In all seriousness, I am uncomfortable with the ease with which we put down sick pets, and would like to see more shelters looking after pets in that position, rather than discarding them as inconvenient; we take on a commitment of giving an animal a home, and care, and affection, and food, and it ill behoves us to renege on this just because they are unwell in a way we can’t cure. The very idea of treating people like pets in this regard is horrifying, when we should be treating our pets more like people.

And the idea that in this fallen world we can instate safeguards such that no-one will be “euthanised” who wants to live but “doesn’t want to be a burden”, is ridiculous. We stopped executing criminals because we were killing innocents, we shouldn’t start killing the sick and elderly because we’re only fairly sure all of those being killed really want to die.

Bonus Question

Using Orson Scott Card’s four story factors, I think that the most appropriate milieu is a fairly ordinary modern day setting – it is very tempting in writing a “religious” epic to set it in a fantastical milieu with appearances from angels and so on, but that undervalues the quieter virtues of faith which I see as more important to most of us in our daily lives.

As for the idea, the core idea is that the discipline and practice of their faith helps people with their struggles by bringing them closer to the mind of God. It is easy to grow too didactic in this regard, as some people find Narnia to be – though this is of course fantastical also and thus not my ideal.
Character should be fairly realistic and close-in – first-person is good, to actually see the struggles of our protagonist, but a close third-person perspective might be even better; and the aim should be to show how people are imperfect, but can still rise to the challenges in their path and love their neighbours. The particular flaw matters less than that they are flawed, though sins of which we are almost all guilty are preferable.

Events – a variety of event-series can work. Coming of age stories, crime stories, romances – when written appropriately – can all play their part, and I think this is why I prefer Scott Card’s structure to Christian H’s – I see the milieu, the idea and the characters as fairly key, but the events as less important.
I see Left Behind as the exact inverse of my ideal – it is a sort of reflection of Protestantism’s deepest id, dogmatic, destructive and repulsive, rather than showing a better way by example and thus drawing people towards you.

7 Quick Takes (5/17/13)

May 17, 2013 By Leah Libresco

— 1 —

Yesterday, I was blogging about abstinence education, shame, and horrible Homeric epithets. That may leave you wondering what kind of sex-ed my high school had. It turns out that my school had an abstinence-only policy, but, instead of damaging content, they went with no content. My semester of sex-ed consisted entirely of the teacher putting on episodes of Freaks and Geeks til the bell rang.

— 2 —

I reached to Much Ado about Nothing and A Song of Ice and Fire for my examples yesterday, and I should really tell you that Calah Alexander, who wrote the excellent post on abstinence metaphors that kicked all this off, has also written two great pieces on Much Ado: “So You Think You Understand Shakespeare” and “Live Unbruised and Love.” Here’s an excerpt from that last:

[T]his second Beatrice was something else. She was beauty and wit and charm all deeply streaked with pain. She was glittering, brilliant, fierce, and then when that scene came, she was terrible.

When she took a breath and said, “Kill Claudio”, the audience took a collective breath. In that appalled, appalling silence I saw grown adults grasping their heads in their hands, covering their faces, and shielding their eyes, as if they were subconsciously trying to block out what was happening.

And she said it with such a dreadful, icy self-possession that it was impossible to play off as heated emotion. Even if the later scene where she refuses to greet Benedick until he tells her that he has challenged Claudio didn’t convince the audience, the raw power of her delivering those two words was enough. She knew exactly what she was doing. She was using selfless love, freely offered, as a weapon against her enemy.

— 3 —

I’m really hopeful that Joss Whedon’s adaptation will keep the audience slightly uncomfortable and aware of some of the ugliness and cruelty lurking under the merry war of words in this play. In this interview, Joss talks about his choice to have Beatrice and Benedick be former lovers and only slightly disguised anger and hurt below their banter. He also shares Calah’s thoughts about Borachio and Margaret.

— 4 —

And while we’re talking about sexual ethics or romances that make us a little queasy, there’s been a spontaneous symposium going on at AmCon in response to Emily Witt’s essay “What Do You Desire?” for N+1. Nota bene: the essay has some extremely graphic sex and sexualized violence, and thus, so does the commentary. PEG has links to most of the AmCon responses here and adds some thoughts of his own.

I like it when people come together to argue in response to a specific prompt; it helps keep the discussion grounded. One thread of it has been talking about whether consent is sufficient or only necessary but not sufficient for an ethical sexual encounter. Rod Dreher added yesterday:

Well, sure, it’s much worse for Sally to chop off Harry’s arm mid-coitus without his consent than for her to do so with his consent. But it’s still pretty horrible and perverse for him to consent to such an act. Why is this so hard to say? And if you cannot say that it’s grossly immoral, even if consent is given, where do you draw the line? In Germany, prosecutors did not know how to deal with the case a decade ago of Arwin Meiwes, a cannibal who advertised for a victim willing to be slaughtered in a sexualized ritual. He found one, and slowly killed the guy, and ate him. Meiwes’ defense? His victim soberly consented to the whole thing, and he (Meiwes) could prove it by videotape. Eventually prosecutors won a conviction, but however they managed this legally, that doesn’t answer the moral question as to whether or not consent validates the gruesome act.

— 5 —

Since this discussion is getting a little dark, let me make it up to you in these last few takes. It turns out that a college friend of mine, in addition to being a delightful director when I worked under her as Miracle Max in an adaptation of The Princess Bride for elementary schoolers, is a kickass video editor. Julia Myers put together the below:

You can ooh and awe about more of her work at her website.

— 6 —

And if you still need an even simpler, purer love to recover from all this, can I interest you in a Dictionary of Numbers? As described by Randall Monroe:

A friend of mine, Glen Chiacchieri, has created a Chrome extension to help solve this problem: Dictionary of Numbers. It searches the text in your browser for quantities it understands and inserts contextual statements in brackets. It might turn the phrase “315 million people” into “315 million people [≈ the population of the United States]“.

As Glen explains, he once read an article about US wildfires which mentioned that the largest fire of the year had burned “300,000 acres.” This didn’t mean much to Glen:

I have no idea how much 300,000 acres is […] But we need to understand this number to answer the obvious question: how much of the United States was on fire? This is why I made Dictionary of Numbers.

Dictionary of Numbers helpfully informs me that 300,000 acres is about the area of LA or Hong Kong.

— 7 —

And, of all good things, I am perhaps most infatuated with The Bushwick Book Club. After reading the assigned book, people don’t just show up for wine and kibbitzing. The members write songs about the book of the month, and then perform them. A friend of mine wrote this brilliant number for their Sherlock Holmes night: “Sherlock is Home”

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

Two Terrible Ways to Have Sex

January 2, 2013 By Leah Libresco

Eaton of Growing up Goddy has written a much needed jeremiad against a poisonous strain in our rhetoric about sex and consent. From his essay:

In the world I was raised in, most junior high, high school, and perhaps even college students were unlikely to give explicit consent — even though they were willingly having sex. I don’t just mean girls, either — both men and women in that environment had the lessons of immorality, temptation, and so on drilled into them. Sex was treated as a dangerous thing that all people desired, but good people resisted. Falling into temptation was perhaps understandable, but planning for it or encouraging it? That was embracing sin and deliberately rebelling against God… A close friend of mine once explained without irony that using condoms was a more serious sin than unprotected premarital sex, because it implied premeditation.

…In that kind of environment, the idea of deliberately, actively, openly choosing sex — owning up to it and telling your partner that you’re ready — is practically unthinkable. Pushing boundaries, both your own and your partner’s, becomes the only way anyone gets laid, and over time it becomes normed. Protest, conflicted sex, and a veneer of regret functions as a sort of polite fiction, and many of the kids get what they want out of it. They have sex with their partner, and they don’t feel quite as much guilt because they can convince themselves that “It Just Happened.”

But inevitably, you get the dark side: some asshole learns “that’s how it works,” and date rapes a girl (or several) in his youth group, or goes on to college and does the same because — hey, that’s how it works! That kid assumes that a woman’s ambivalence — or even protest, depending on how deluded he is — is just part of the polite fiction “everyone” uses to avoid guilt and regret about their own sexual choices. In other cases, young women in the youth group culture are coerced into having sex, and understand that something terribly wrong has happened, but have no clear way of articulating how it’s different than what everyone else is doing. In some cases, they lack the language to explain how date rape is different from what they have voluntarily engaged in… The hardcore abstinence message of the conservative suburban youth groups I knew, and the poisonous atmosphere of normalized denial and rationalization, are basically training a generation of men and women who literally don’t understand what sexual consent looks like.

I blogged about this “sex as irresistible force” awfulness about a year or so ago, when I was creeped out by a Christian who would give his daughters an HPV shot but wouldn’t tell them what it vaccinated against. In his mind, compromising any reason to not have sex was unthinkable; his daughters needed every defense they could get. It’s fine to talk about when not to have sex, but, unless you’re the Shakers, you need to put at least as much effort, if not more, into explaining how to have appropriate sex.

Eaton (and Kevin Roose, back at “Call Him Voldemort!”) does a good job explaining how the extreme purity model of some Christians prevents reasonable discussions about consent. So, while I’m linking you to him, I thought it would be a good time to call out one similarly destructive secular and sex-positive model.

If you watch a romcom, read a novel with romance, or listen to people talk, it’s easy to think that the best proxy for intimacy is one partner’s capacity for intuition. We think that the measure of a partner is how well he or she anticipates our needs and desires, without having to ask. This doesn’t just apply in the bedroom; we have scorn for a partner who doesn’t know what to get as a birthday gift and has to ask. This is bizarre. If you’re screening partners for how good they are at modeling future behavior, date statisticians. If you’re looking for someone who cares more about serving you than about showing off their precision of their model of you, date someone who isn’t ashamed to ask about your preferences.

By promoting the spontaneous, intuitive model of sexual encounters, we’re not leaving room for frank discussions about consent and comfort. When one partner says “slow down” or “I don’t want to do that” or even “Can you try x?” we think that points to a communication problem. Why didn’t the other person know?

You’ll see this in movies or tv shows. When one character tries to move from kissing to something else, s/he almost never pauses to ask the partner if they’d like to turn things up a notch. And when one person in the scene rebuffs the new sex act, the couple almost never continue at the previous level of intensity, they sit up in their artfully draped sheets and try to figure out what went wrong.

This is a terrible norm. The default is to keep pushing someone until they say no. And it’s not always clear what counts as a clear no, since romances in popular culture tend to include a lot of girls that “need” someone to push them to loosen up and stalking that gets rewarded. I guess the only thing that’s totally clear is saying, “No!” and belting your partner across the face. (Oh wait). So we end up with another group of people who, in Eaton’s words ” literally don’t understand what sexual consent looks like.”

It shouldn’t be this hard to tell desired sex from undesired sex. We want a better diagnostic criteria for dividing real consent from coerced, impaired, or absent consent. That’s what enthusiastic consent (coined by Antioch) is meant to do. Instead of setting a high standard for what kind of no is a “real no,” people who practise enthusiastic consent assume the default is “No” unless they get an unambiguous and specific “Yes.”

A common objection to “enthusiastic consent” (which is sometimes glossed as “consent is the presence of a ‘yes’ not the absence of a ‘no’) is that having to talk about sex with prevent people from ever having sex. To which I say, tough beans. The intuitive model doesn’t mean that two partners are in sync, it just means it’s harder to notice when they’re going wrong. Besides, Dan Savage and the BDSM community have shown it’s possible to have community norms of talking to your partner and then having sex. And if you think it’s worse to have an awkward conversation than possibly coercing your partner, then no one should have sex with you anyway.

Bonus: Cliff from the Pervocracy has another excellent essay about how we use jokes and cliches to blur our norms about consent and respect in a way that makes it harder to know how to treat other people well.

Superpowered Feminism

December 12, 2012 By Leah Libresco

This was going to be a short post, but there were a lot of good women to link to, so just think of this post as an epic crossover.

Perhaps it’s not intuitive to go to tumblrs commenting on the questionable anatomy of girls in comic books for smart, incisive commentary on feminism and (sometimes inadvertent) misogyny, but man oh man are you missing out.

I follow Escher Girls, a tumblr that collects professional drawings of superheroines that have something terribly wrong with them (the tags include: organless torsos, gratuitous butts, rubber spines, and boobs don’t work that way). In addition to calling out these bizarre depictions of women, the Escher Girls tumblr fixes some of them with redraws. Sometimes, they show how a more realistic drawing actually looks stronger and more dynamic, and sometimes they show how contorted a picture is by just reproducing the pose from a different angle (click for larger view).

And, in the last week or so, Escher Girls and Girl in Four Colors have been untangling some problematic discussions of women’s bodies as well as their usual topic of illustrations. You see, recently someone started a tumblr called The Hawkeye Initiative, which redraws terrible poses for women with gruff, butch Hawkeye as the jumbled up object of desire.

And here’s one observation the Hawkeye Initiative sparked:

I’ve liked some of the redraws where there’s a male/female pose, and people draw Natasha in the “male” role, because it doesn’t look like “wow, she looks masculine,” it looks like, “oh, hey, she looks normal, but what is Hawkeye’s spine doing?” I think it emphasizes how women in comics aren’t problematic because they’re feminine, they’re problematic because a lot of times, they aren’t drawn like human beings.

But Girl in Four Colors was a bit perturbed by the viral attention the Hawkeye Initiative got, compared to the long-running Escher Girls:

People care more about issues of sexual exploitation if that exploitation directly effects men. We see this time and time again in our day-to-day lives… So when that culture sees an instance of a man being objectified, even if that objectification is meant to draw attention to similar treatment of women, it reacts in ways it does not when the subject is female. As I said before, Escher Girls has been highlighting this issue for over a year now, but the focus has remained solely on how this issue effects women. Ami provides smart commentary, her readers have contributed redraws showing ways in which the art can not only be less objectifying but objectively better, and the focus remains on women. The Hawkeye Initiative, meanwhile, shifts the focus to a male character, and in so doing, draws the attention of our male-dominated culture.

And that’s assuming the best intentions of the management and their contributors. Go through the archives and count how many times a variation of “This is hilarious, I had to contribute” is used. Be careful here, friends. There’s some intense ugliness hidden behind why you find this so hilarious, and it’s steeped in misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia.

Girl in Four Colors expands that last point, with examples, in a second post. Some of the Hawkeye Initiative pictures aren’t satirizing the strange topology of comic book drawings. They’re just going “Hawkeye in a skirt! How funny!” Which reminds me of the opening lines of Madonna’s “What it Feels Like for a Girl”

Girls can wear jeans
And cut their hair short
Wear shirts and boots
‘Cause it’s OK to be a boy
But for a boy to look like a girl is degrading
‘Cause you think that being a girl is degrading

The Hawkeye Initiative folks are engaging with the criticism and trying to figure out how to pull off more narrowly targeted satire. Meanwhile, Escher Girls has highlighted another pernicious effect of the way comics objectify women.

In many ways, comics present us with these “damsel in distress” or “I don’t notice that my skirt is too short” or even “Oh, I just see you now, I’m so embarassed that you’re looking up my skirt, stop it!” style fanservice.

The artist makes us, the viewer, into a creep. And if anyone has ever been a victim of creeping, this completely breaks the story for us. It’s one thing to read a story about a character that creeps on another character. (some would argue Edward watching Bella sleep fits this) It’s another thing to describe something, through art or writing that turns us into the creeper in second-person perspective.

What these illustrations are eroticizing is the absence of a woman’s consent to be interacted with sexually. They’re promoting her own interest and pleasure as irrelevant to the man’s enjoyment, instead of amplifying it as lover and beloved both will the other’s good. And that’s not the only toxic way we do it. Over at Femspire, Rachel Kay Albers has an excellent essay up titled “Why I Never Play Hard to Get.”

The unfortunate side effect of this poison is the implication that consent can exist between two people even when one says otherwise. This idea is the fount of victim-blaming and the seed from which Todd Akin grows his thought crop. When we structure romantic relationships so that one party is considered a prize of conquest, won only by someone strong enough to fight past objections and overcome enough Nos to reach the Holy Grail of Yes, how can we expect that this blurred view of consent won’t bleed into our sexual relationships, as well? If No means Maybe, I don’t know, I mean… at a bar, in a text, or on a date, when does it starting meaning No again?

When I asked a male friend of mine what he thought about Hard To Get, he told me: “Well, you know, there is a right and a wrong way to play Hard To Get.”

“Enlighten me!”

“It’s fine if she’s all Oh, I don’t know…I’ve been hurt before…let’s take it slow. But I hate when she lays it on too thick. Not just ‘hard’ to get—impossible to get!”

“You mean, when she’s really saying No?”

“Yeah! It really pisses me off. I’m a nice guy, so why does she have to be such a bitch?”

I’m glad that people like Albers, Girl in Four Colors, and Escher Girls are speaking up and making it easier for guys who intend to be nice guys to notice when the culture is leading them astray.