Amanda has a great post up about this "Willful Ignorance" article in American Prospect. (Shakes also has a great post up from a different, and important, perspective.)
Talking about gender-stereotyped abstinence-only education (I know, as if abstinence-only wasn't bad enough, it's gender-stereotyped abstinence-only ferfuxake), Amanda says:
teaching that men want sex and women want love but don’t want sex means that young men figure there’s no such thing as an enthusiastic “yes” to sex. If men think all women are reluctant to have sex at all points in time, then that means that they think sex is basically always rape. If you think all sex is rape because women never reallly want sex—as this abstinence-only curricula subtly teaches—then you think that rape is socially acceptable.
That's vitally important, and it's an essential element of date-rape and of disbelieving rape victims. "No" only means "no" if "yes" means "yes."
See, let's walk away from what it teaches men for a moment and look at what it teaches women. My first reaction is that if they teach young women that only men really want sex, then women will feel defeminized when they get horny. Holy shit, I want sex, I must be a man. Or mannish. Butch. Undesireable because of these unnatural feelings. All that.
But there's a subtler outcome, which is that a woman will not admit to sexual desire. She wouldn't want a man to find out that she isn't really "feminine," that she has these "masculine" desires. So she'll say no even when she means yes, because no is the only "female" response.
Creating the feedback loop whence comes the rapist's mantra: "She said 'no' with her lips but 'yes yes yes' with her eyes." You know, "She really wanted it." Women simply cannot be empowered to say "no" and mean it and have it honored unless they can also be empowered to say "yes" and mean it and get happily healthily fucked. And these crazy abstinence conservatives fear women who enjoy fucking SO MUCH that they're willing to rob women of our "no." Small price, they think, for robbing us of our "yes." Well, my "no" can save my life and my "yes" is too much joy to give up, thankyouverymuch.
(And when I say this is a cross-post, I mean it!)
[That's all, folks]
|