Towards the “pleasure-affirming vision”: a review of the magisterial “Yes Means Yes”

In mid-December, I ordered a copy of “Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape, edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti. YMY is an anthology filled with essays by writers well-known in the feminist blogosphere, and others who aren’t; by cis- and trans-gendered men and women; by people across the sexual (and chronological) identity spectrum. But each piece in the collection offers a new and different insight into the questions of rape, consent, power and pleasure. Taken as a whole, these 27 essays constitute a visionary and immensely important contribution to the work of creating a new sexual dynamic between men and women, between men, between women, and within ourselves.

The foreword to the anthology comes from feminist comedian Margaret Cho, who in her familiar funny and painfully insightful style, sets the tone for the collection. She writes about the complexity of that simple word, “yes”, and the insidious variety of ways in which our sexist cultural rules work to extract that monosyllable from women. Though the title of the collection is “Yes Means Yes!”, Cho and the editors understand that an authentic “yes!” can only come in a dynamic where “no!” can be said safely. Just as it is infuriating and exasperating to have one’s genuine “yes!” overanalyzed, shamed, or denied, there are also huge psychic consequences to saying “yes” just to placate, to soothe, to avoid a fight. Cho writes:

I am surprised by how much sex I have had in my life that I didn’t want to have. Not exactly what’s considered “real” rape, or “date” rape, like my first time, although it is a kind of rape of the spirit — a dishonest portrayal or distortion of my own desire in order to appease another person — so it wasn’t rape at gunpoint, but rape as the alternative to having to explain my reasons for not wanting to have sex…

I said yes to partners I never wanted in the first place, because to say no at any point after saying yes would make the whole relationship a lie, so I had to keep saying yes in order to keep the “no” I felt a secret. This is such a messed-up way to live, such an awful way to love.

It’s dangerous for any feminist man to claim knowledge of “how women think”, but in countless journals and in group or private discussions, I’ve heard women say almost exactly what Cho says here. And I’ve heard it from one or two of my exes from years ago, women who were honest enough (and often, angry enough) to call me on my own privilege, my own presumption, and the thousand ways in which I (who ought to have known better) helped to create a dynamic where I needed soothing. One of the most humbling experiences I’ve been through is listening to a lover recount to me, in excruciatingly candid detail, the way in which I worked (with her complicity) to silence her “No”, to “get” her “yes”. This is not to suggest that my male pro-feminism is rooted in a desire to make amends, or even worse, to reclaim some lost pride. But a great many men are oblivious to the ways in which their sense of entitlement — and women’s culturally ingrained people-pleasing behavior — work to make sex legally consensual but emotionally unwanted. For men who care about their partners, the realization that a woman has had sex to soothe, to placate, or “just get it over with”, is and ought to be devastating. And it ought to be an impetus to action, to candor, to hard work, and to conversation. Cho’s foreword sets a tone for all of that, while serving to remind us in scathingly honest fashion of the consequences of remaining silent.

If Cho writes an excellent foreword, Jill Filipovic of Feministe provides the keynote address with “Offensive Feminism: The Conservative Gender Norms that Perpetuate Rape Culture, and How Feminists Can Fight Back.” Cho’s piece is nakedly personal; Filipovic’s connects the personal and the private to the nakedly political. She sets out one of the key goals for the YMY project: reaching young men and young women with a feminist-centered sexual ethic, an ethic that privileges pleasure and power. For men, that means teaching how “not to rape”, something that sounds “ridiculous and simplistic” — but of course, when so many rapists don’t perceive themselves as such, the task is harder than it sounds:

Teaching men not to rape involves addressing the disconnect between men who commit sexual assault and men who self-identify as rapists. It is both a social and institutional process that requires accurately representing the reality of sexual assault… If we are to bridge the divide between how women experience rape and how some men define it — and how they define it as something apart from sexual activities that may be ordinary parts of manhood — we need to eliminate the idea that rape must involve extreme violence.

Filipovic continues, with a stirring rebuke to the right-wingers who advocate female restraint and “modesty” as the only reliable protection against bad male behavior:

We must work with women, too, but not in the traditional way of warning women away from moving through public space and engaging in normal social behaviors like drinking or going to bars and parties. Rather, we must emphasize a pleasure-affirming vision of female sexuality, wherein saying yes and no are equally valid moral decisions in many sexual contexts — and wherein women not only are answering the question, but also feel equally entitled to ask for and initiate sex when they want it and their partner agrees.

With an impressive diversity of perspective, the remaining essays in YMY offer a more detailed understanding of that “pleasure-affirming vision”.

I’d be writing until the Super Bowl if I responded to each piece in the collection, though I am convinced that they are nearly uniformly marvelous. A few are particularly noteworthy. Hanne Blank writes an essay called “The Process-Oriented Virgin”, a dazzling reflection on how we think about sexual experience and how we can help young people construct more empowering narratives about their sexual experiences. I’ve read my Augustine, but Blank offers a surprising new insight into the bishop of Hippo’s understanding of virginity. Blank tells us that Augustine was the first to see virginity as essentially metaphysical: if a woman had been penetrated against her will, then her soul remained pure. No rapist, in other words, could take by force what was not freely given. Carnal desire, Augustine wrote, was essential to the loss of innocence. Assuming that a woman who had been raped had no desire to be raped, Augustine articulated a profound truth about the sexual body as distinct from the self. What happened to you sexually was not necessarily what you were as a person. This has major implications, 1600 years later, for how we talk about sex and consent with young people — and how we might offer women the chance to describe their sexual experience through the lens of desire rather than through the lens of physical activity.

Kate Harding gives us the devastating “How do you Fuck a Fat Woman?” Harding, who has written many wonderful and important pieces about fat-phobia, talks candidly about her experience as a heavy woman negotiating a sexual culture in which thinness in women is seen as the sine qua non of desirability. Harding notes that on a regular basis, she hears the suggestion that “rape is a compliment”, and that one of the saddest things about being a fat woman is to be perceived as not only unwanted, but even “un-rapeable.” Harding writes:

…some of us assumed our manifest unfuckability meant that virtually any male attention was a thing to be treasured. While I don’t know any women who have bought into the “rape is a compliment” theory, I certainly know some who believed abusive boyfriends when they said “You can’t leave, because no one but me would want your fat ass.” I know several who have had multiple semi-anonymous one-night stands, not because that’s what floats their boats but because they were so happy to find men — any men, just about — who expressed sexual interest in their bodies.

For all women, thin or heavy, “attractive” according to the cultural ideal or not, the problem is a clear one. We raise our daughters to pay more attention to male desire than to their own; we teach that “fuckability” is a yardstick for worth. We teach women to shame, silence, or ignore their own wants and to see male longing as valued currency. Those whose desirability is lower according to our absurdly cruel aesthetic and sexual value scale are thus encouraged, as Harding writes, to be “grateful” for any attention they receive from men. Whether they are attracted to the men involved is almost irrelevant; how dare a fat woman actually want?

Julia Serano, a transsexual woman activist, gives us “Why Nice Guys Finish Last.” It’s a great essay, though it was the one in the collection with which I had the strongest disagreement. Serano, who lived as a man before transitioning to life as a woman, is keenly aware of the ways in which our dominant culture encourages a “predator/prey” mindset. She notes that this dyad suggests that men can only be predators, and women only prey.

…the predator/prey mindset essentially ensure that men cannot be viewed as legitimate sexual objects, nor can women be viewed as legitimate sexual aggressors. This has the effect of rendering invisible instances of man-on-man and woman-on-woman sexual harassment and abuse, and it makes the the idea of woman-on-man rape utterly inconceivable. It is also why women cannot simply “turn the tables” and begin sexualizing men….

The predator/prey mindset means, according to Serano, that a sexually aggressive women will be labelled “slutty” rather than aggressive. The very term “asking for it”, after all, suggests that a woman can send signals that she wants to be “done” by, but not that she wants to “do” a man. Female agency is dismantled, and the absence of male self-control is presumed. Serano makes clear how damaging this cultural trope has become, and how important it is for us to dismantle it.

I agree with her analysis, but am a bit put off by other aspects of her analysis. In particular, Serano downplays the role of other men in encouraging sexually aggressive behavior in males:

…many men become sexual aggressors primarily, if not solely, to attract the attention of women. In fact, if heterosexual women suddenly decided en masse that ‘nice guys’ are far sexier than ‘assholes’, it would create a huge shift in the predator/prey dynamic.

All of the work done by pro-feminist men in the field of violence prevention (Jackson Katz, Michael Kimmel, Michael Flood) suggests otherwise. Serano ignores the huge role that the desire for homosocial approval plays in young men’s sexual behavior; being validated as a “real man” in the eyes of peers is at least as important to adolescent and post-adolescent males as “getting laid.” Male aggression, the predator model, is not just a strategy for gaining access to women’s bodies — more vitally, it is a tactic for gaining precious validation from other men. From both perspectives, a dynamic is set up in which men are taught the rewards of behaving badly. But it’s not women who make up the rules, and it is not women alone who can shift the dyad. Until homosocial approval is disconnected from predatory behavior, change isn’t coming.

But my quibble with one aspect of Serano’s otherwise excellent analysis is really the sole problem I have with any of the essays in this extraordinary collection. Though I was disappointed to not have my own submission included, that disappointment evaporated after finishing the anthology. There is relatively little that I could have added to what has the potential to be a paradigm-shifting text. Accessible to a general audience (appropriate for bright high schoolers), it is also sufficiently intellectually challenging to be of use in advanced university courses in gender studies. Each piece stands alone on its own merits; collectively, they have an undeniable power. And the goal of what Jill Filipovic calls a “pleasure-affirming vision of female sexuality” is advanced in compelling terms by Yes Means Yes.

Buy it, read it, pass it on. But above all else, please, please, talk about it.

And check out the book’s blog here.