Last month, I posted a note instructing a bunch of people to kill themselves (not in minecraft) and for some reason a lot of people were upset about it. It read:
I still fully stand by this statement.
The dissenters fell into one of two categories, either for a lack of social or literacy comprehension, those who took it to mean that any instance of a woman “being sad” after a sexual experience with a man automatically would necessitate that he did something wrong, and those incredulous to the fact that many men like this even exist in the first place.
In light of last week’s allegations against vocal, self-proclaimed feminist, beloved fantasy author Neil Gaiman, the mind behind cult favorites like Coraline and The Sandman, I find myself once again, being a timely Cassandra of a phenomenon most women know all too well.
At the time of writing this article, eight women, including a former nanny and several fans, came forward accusing Gaiman of unwanted and often incredibly violent sexual behavior, including walking in on them in private spaces like the bath and initiating sexual contact, forcing a woman into sex while she had a painful UTI, and making women have sex in front of his young son.
Amidst the media frenzy, my online feeds are yet again filled with progressive influencers pontificating the same tired lectures on the importance of consent, power dynamics, the patriarchy, and rape culture, turning hollywood’s game of rapist whack-a-mole into groundhog day.
And while acknowledging these things is all well and good, there seems to be a greater point that has been completely missing since the dawn of Me Too— whatever happened to good old fashioned basic emotional and social intelligence?
Consent is always necessary, but it is by no means the alpha and omega of what constitutes an entirely ethical encounter, and though enforcing consent does a lot to protect potential victims, it arguably can do just as much to protect perpetrators by reframing the conversation from being about the spirit of the law to an overly legalistic letter of the law interpretation. A standard that draws a hard black and white line between sex that is “good” and sex that is “evil” depending on which boxes have or have not been checked off not only provides a rubric for predators to more easily gamify the system, but also erases the need for people to engage with the subject on a more analytical and holistic level. Predators are now asking themselves what is the most amount I can get away with without technically doing anything wrong, and easily-squeezed verbal consent acts as a safeguard even when every other aspect of the situation was coercive, manipulative, and forceful. By the same token, it has become taboo to question or bring any semblance of nuance to accusations brought forth by women, as long as they proclaim consent was breached.
The overreliance on consent in evaluating a sexual encounter has become a kind of thought-stopping technique completely inhibiting the ability of otherwise intelligent people to apply any ounce of emotional reasoning, empathy, social skills or critical thinking while determining whether they should behave in a certain way or not.
When it comes to sex, everyone these days seems to have stage four, terminal autism—Things like trying to understand how another person would feel about a sexual advance in a particular moment in a particular context, understanding how the opposite sex generally feels about certain sexual behavior, the capacity to analyze body language and social cues, making inferences about another person’s emotional state, and conventional wisdoms like, it’s generally, at the very least, rude to walk in on someone taking a bath, all seem like harder feats for some people than solving cold fusion.
At worst, people become predators with no discernment of what constitutes harassment, and at best, become those who awkwardly ask for explicit! and enthusiastic! verbal consent at every juncture of an interaction at the expense of a mood conducive to romance and functioning like a normal person.
There also seems to be a linguistic limitation in modern-day discussions of sexual ethics, as the word rape is too strong to describe most non-consensual occurrences, and sexual assault, much too vague, with both terms being gradually watered down as their usage becomes increasingly thrown around for a lack of better language. Semantics surrounding the subject are based around legal definitions and inevitably steer conversations towards debate over litigation, which is rarely helpful and removes all humanity or meaningful discussion of ethics and social understanding.
For Instance, some of you may know me from Dear John, my first-ever post on Substack— a transcript of a letter I sent to my then 48 year old, married college professor who strategically harassed and coerced me into a sexual relationship with him when I was 20 years old.
The letter deconstructs the ideology and psychology behind his behavior, explains specifically the manipulation tactics used, provides a detailed account of my thought processes and emotions during and after that time, and touches on the subjects spoken about in this article more thoroughly, for those interested in a more personal and philosophically rigorous read.
What I was not expecting though, was the amount of men in my comments and my DM’s, who often-angrily responded to the post not because they simply disagreed with me philosophically, but because they identified with my professor to the point of viewing the post almost as if it were about them, despite the letter being addressed to literally one specific man.
These critics, almost all conservative men, spoke of “agency”, which in this context, is basically just alt-right speak for the progressive’s word “consent”, complete with all the trappings of ending any and all discussion of feelings, ethics, and increasing social intelligence before it even begins.
I think that non-consensual sexual relationships are not even the main issue at hand, but rather, a symptom of some much more fundamental sexual pathologies plaguing our culture that have gone largely unaddressed:
Having sex is viewed as more important than having good sex. On the right, this manifests with either Red Pill types encouraging men to optimize quantity of sexual partners over everything else, or religious puritans turning sex into a sterile act relegated to the confines of marriage, and on the left, people advocating for all manner of fuckery (so long as it’s consensual!) but god forbid anyone mention that hookup culture leads to lots of hurt feelings and bad sex.
Many people (mostly men) don’t seem to require any amount of symmetry of enjoyment or desire between both parties before going through with sex. A guy who had me on his podcast a couple months back even went so far as to say that a woman enjoying sex too much is an active turn off!
Ironically and counterintuitively, sexual encounters seem to be the only recreational social activity where liking and caring about the other people involved are not viewed as prerequisites for the interaction occurring. In fact, sex between men and women is often framed as a zero sum game, where one party’s gaining of what they want necessarily comes at the expense of the other party losing something.
I am going to be discussing these points plus more in my upcoming articles, one of them being The Politically Incorrect Girl’s Guide to Sex, which will be out in the next few days, which will provide a framework for approaching sex and relationships to maximize both fulfillment and well-being for all parties, without appealing to either left or right-wing talking points (including how to say “No.” like a grown woman without sacrificing hotness).
And for the literal or proverbial Neil Gaimans reading this, I know you’re into a bit of choking, so have you considered the sexual tension between you and the rope hanging off your ceiling fan?
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