CW:
rape, sexual violence, rape apology, ableism (especially dismissing
autistic women)
So,
earlier today I got an email asking me if I wanted to present at this
year’s Work in Progress (WiP) Day at the Philosophy Department. I
replied, thanking the person for thinking of me and explaining that I
had, in fact, quit my PhD in April this year, so there wasn’t any
progress to present.
That got me thinking, though. It got me thinking a few things. It got me thinking back to last year’s WiP Day (where I presented what I posted recently as the Let’s Talk About Sex Part 1 post and won two audience-voted awards)… it also got me thinking of the discussion that resulted from that presentation, both there and then during the Q&A, and what continued afterwards via email with a Person who had asked a Question and then with my supervisors, which did in fact result in significant progress.1
You
see, one of the questions that was asked in response to my talk (in
response, in particular, to my insistence on the need for explicit
verbally negotiated
consent)
was about what if men could learn to read body language – would
that change things.
This
prompted some discussion, particularly afterwards, and led to me
writing quite a bit more. But the question that was asked, and what
the man who posed in wrote in response to me answering him… scared
me. I see it as nothing short of rape apology.
So,
I’d like to share another part of what I wrote for my thesis, which
came out of the discussions from last year’s WiP Day.
A Defence of the Need for Explicit, Verbal2 Consent Negotiation
A
frequent objection to this suggestion that we need to explicitly,
verbally negotiate our sexual encounters is that it’s not sexy.
Apparently, it takes away the natural give and take of reading and
responding to body language and the sexiness and sensuality of
flirtation and replaces it with a clunky script. This objection
(often made by men), sometimes stutters briefly at least to a halt
when they hear about the numerous studies which show that men
consistently misinterpret women’s nonverbal behaviour.3
However,
the question has come up as to what might happen if men could learn
to read body language and whether that might change things with
regards to this need for explicit verbal negotiation. Some people,
the argument goes, are
much better at “lying” with their words than with their body
language so if someone is saying “yes” with their words but “no”
with their body language, then one would want to take the body
language into account.4
The simple answer to this is that this isn’t a possibility I can seriously consider because this isn’t a thing that is possible. Even if I were to grant that whatever we’d like to call “typical” nonverbal behaviour could be learned (and I have no idea if it can be or not because it’s not really relevant – bear with me here!) there is far too much diversity. And even if we were to grant that the vast differences in cultural expressions of body language and facial expressions and other kinds of nonverbal behaviour (across all the different cultures in the world) could be learned (by any one individual man), which would be a mean feat, and seems highly unlikely, this is still not possible. Because all of this doesn’t account for neurodiversities that impact these non-verbal forms of communication, and for social awkwardness that might lead to atypical (or a lack of) non-verbal communication.
Story
time: I’m autistic, but I didn’t know that and wasn’t
“diagnosed”6
until earlier this year, when I was 30. So, I have spent almost my
whole life so far not knowing that I’m autistic. Part of being
autistic for me means that my body language, and in particular my
facial expression is definitely not “typical” (and in fact often
blank), as has been confirmed for me by many friends and others close
to me. If someone were to base their interactions with me more on
their interpretation of my body language and facial expressions than
on my verbal communication that would be a surefire recipe for
disaster. Fortunately, now, I am able to communicate (verbally) to
those around me that I am autistic and explain the situation about
the non-verbal communication. For most of my life I haven’t been
able to do so.
Why
is this story relevant? There is a huge number of undiagnosed
autistic people, researchers estimating around
half
of autisitcs don’t know they’re autistic,
and the thing is, the
vast majority of these undiagnosed autistics are women. The fact that
the majority of autistic women go undiagnosed, are diagnosed late, or
get misdiagnosed has a number of reasons. In part it’s due to
misinformation in the medical field. There are countless stories of
women who have had to fight to get diagnosed after having first been
told that autism is something that only affects boys and men, so they
can’t be autistic, or some variation of that. Part of the problem
is also in the original diagnostic criteria (both for autism and for
Asperger’s, the latter of which is now no longer considered a
separate diagnosis7)
having been based on studies which involved a lot
more boys than girls. Another very major issue is that things which
are pathologised
in boys (being quiet, preferring to play by oneself, having intense
obsessions) are often seen as quite normal and expected in girls,
especially since quite often these intense obsessions are often
related to things girls are typically “supposed to” take an
interest in (such as fashion, horses, celebrities, or in my case
fantasy books and religion when I was younger), rather than often
with boys the stereotypical things like trains. Girls go undiagnosed
because our autism is seen as another expression of typical
femininity, but when everything is too much, and we get overloaded
and we meltdown we are “difficult” children. Lastly, autistic
women tend to be much better at masking/camouflaging our autism,
which is essentially a survival mechanism for fitting into allistic
society by pretending to be
allistc
ourselves since we’ve spent our lives learning the “right”
mannerisms, social cues, scripts, etc. However, masking is extremely
exhausting and is very detrimental to our well-being and especially
our mental health and for a lot of autistics it can lead to autistic
burnout. Masking is only very recently starting to be researched and
discussed by the medical community, yet it is clearly another big
reason why so many of us get so far through life without a diagnosis.
It is worth highlighting also, that on top of all of these reasons for women being un-/mis-/late/under-diagnosed, this is also an intersectional issue (at least in some parts of the world, I can’t speak to all parts of the world). Here in Aotearoa, for example, adults can’t be diagnosed through the public health system8 so in order to receive a formal diagnosis, adults need to see a psychologist or psychiatrist privately which can be very expensive (hundreds, if not thousands of dollars). For people living in poverty this is prohibitively expensive, and since we know that statistically poverty affects certain population groups more, groups who are already more marginalised (in Aotearoa these are, for example, Māori, Pasifika people, single parents – single mothers especially, and disabled people). When women belonging to one or more of these groups (or even just women living in poverty, since living in poverty is itself another form of oppression) are unable to seek a formal diagnosis, this becomes an intersectional issue (it’s always been a feminist issue). It is also one of the reasons why self-diagnosis is rather common in the autistic community and is fairly commonly accepted.9
The
upshot is that it is a bad
idea for anyone to make
assumptions based on someone’s body language or facial expression!
While Leo Kanner, who first published on autism in the 1940s may have
thought that the prevalence was merely four in 10,000 people10,
researchers now estimate that one in 40 people is autistic11
(and this number has increased from just four years ago when
researchers were estimating the prevalence to be one in 5912).
And considering that that number comes from a paper on autistic
children, I can’t imagine it takes into account the numbers of us
who go undiagnosed or who aren’t diagnosed until much later in
life.
I
have had people assume that I’m bored when I haven’t been bored
at all, I’ve had people ask me why I’m so upset or sad, when I’ve
felt absolutely fine and not at all upset or sad, I’ve been told I
look like a scared squirrel when interacting with customer service
people when I’ve felt quite confident (just a little dreamy,
perhaps).13
And I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been asked
“what’s that look on your face?” and wanted to respond with a
snarky “I don’t know, I don’t have mirror in front of me!” If
someone were to make assumptions about me, or about any other
autistic person, based on our nonverbal behaviour, that wouldn’t
get them very far. If someone seemed to be making those kinds of
assumptions now, I might
be able to pick up on that and tell them not to do that (though I’m
not good at picking up on the nonverbal behaviour of others, which is
also part of being autistic). Before I knew about all this, I would
have been just as clueless and may have been trying to ignorantly
guess my way through someone else’s nonverbal behaviour as much as
they tried to make sense of my nonsensical face! The moral of this
story is: no one bothered to tell me that my face was blank, and I
didn’t know I was autistic until I was 30. You don’t know who you
might be interacting with, nor how good at masking they might be.
Expressing yourself clearly, explicitly, and verbally is the only way
to go.
In
an interesting, and somewhat related aside, Bessel van der Kolk
writes about his work as a psychiatrist working with patients who
have suffered trauma that a “characteristic they shared was that
even their most relaxed conversations seemed stilted, lacking the
natural flow of gestures and facial expressions that are typical
among friends.”14
It would appear from this that atypical facial expressions and
gestures (so, nonverbal behaviour) is not just something common to
autistic people, but perhaps also to those with PTSD, or other
survivors of trauma. In fact, it is well known in the medical
community that in women, at least, autism presents quite similarly to
PTSD, so that often a differential diagnosis needs to be made (though
that is not to say that we cannot both be autistic and suffer trauma;
in fact, being autistic makes us more susceptible to trauma since we
are more easily taken advantage of, as the research also shows15).
This
point here, regarding trauma, is actually very
important. One might be inclined to dismiss all of the talk about
autism and think that well, if it did turn out to be possible to
learn the nonverbal behaviour of NT people, then that would cover the
great majority of people at least (one in 40
is only 2.5%
of the population, after all), so we’d be pretty safe grounding our
assumptions on that… Except firstly, that’s a very dismissive and
callous attitude to take. Secondly, look again at the note about
survivors of trauma. A lot of people might associate PTSD with war
veterans. But the great majority of people with PTSD are people
(particularly women) who have survived rape and sexual assault. And
the statistics on sexual violence are awful, even here in Aotearoa.
One in three girls is sexually abused before she turns 16, one in
seven boys before he reaches adulthood. One in five women experiences
a serious sexual assault at least once during her lifetime.16
If there’s a chance that the effects of trauma can change the way
our nonverbal body language presents (and I’m sure this will be
different for each individual survivor of trauma) then considering
how widespread such trauma is, we cannot assume for any given woman
(or any given person, since men who are survivors of sexual violence
report even less often than women do) that their nonverbal body
language will be “typical”.
Taking
all of this back to the negotiation of a sexual encounter… if
someone, let’s say a man (who was unfortunately unable to learn the
nonverbal behaviour of ALL
people) gets the impression that their partner is saying “no”
with their body-language/facial expression, then by all means, they
should exit the sexual encounter, however (and this is very
important) not because
they think the other person doesn’t want to continue with the
encounter. They should
put a stop to the encounter because they
themselves do not feel comfortable with it,
and if they feel they are getting mixed signals they shouldn’t feel
comfortable with it. This distinction matters, because if they were
to stop the sexual encounter because
they think the other person doesn’t want to continue with the
encounter and actually
said so to their partner then that would be telling their partner
that they (the male partner) believe that their ability to interpret
their (the female partner’s) non-verbal
communication/body-language/facial expression is better or superior
to the woman’s ability to communicate what she actually wants and
how she is feeling. They would essentially be mansplaining her own
feelings to her (saying “I can tell what your body is saying better
than you can… or you are lying to me”). If, on the other hand
they put a stop to the sexual encounter because they
themselves do not feel comfortable with it,
then they are taking responsibility for their own feelings and for
their own confusion, which is a very mature thing to do. It is
respectful of their partner to take them at their word and it is
responsible and caring to themselves to take a step back and ensure
that they are in a situation they are completely comfortable with
themselves. The other option they have, of course, is to openly talk
through their discomfort, if they feel they have the sensitivity to
do so.
Before we continue, think back for a moment to the example of Sam and Alex from the previous post on sex, negotiating their sexual encounter within their established long-term relationship. It may seem odd that a couple who are in an established long-term relationship would communicate so explicitly about sex with each other. One might think they, at least, would already be able to “read” each other, that surely an argument could be made that even if men can’t learn to read non-verbal communication generally, surely we can say that we can get rid of this need for explicit verbal communication in long-term relationships because couples can learn to read each other, given some time!
I
want to say yes, I really, really do. And yet, I remain cautious.
On
the one hand, we might say that so long as general boundaries are
negotiated to begin with and a safeword is always in place and an
openness to renegotiation is always there, what’s the harm in
saying go ahead and fall back on safewords if need be…? My caution
lies in the fact that the majority of rape occurs between “intimate
partners” (with most of the rest between “acquaintances” –
stranger danger is really rather a myth).17
And this isn’t something that occurs only rarely to someone you
might read about in the news. You can be almost certain that you know
someone yourself who has experienced this in their own life.
Statistics from the US tell us that “[n]early 1 out of 10 women in
the United States (9.4% or approximately 11.1 million) has been raped
by an intimate partner in her lifetime” and in addition to that,
“[a]pproximately 1 in 6 women (16.9% or nearly 19 million) has
experienced sexual violence other than rape by an intimate partner in
her lifetime; this includes sexual coercion (9.8%), unwanted sexual
contact (6.4%) and non-contact unwanted sexual experiences (7.8%).”18
Given Aotearoa’s notoriety for domestic violence, I’d wager the
statistics here are no better.
Now
take these statistics and consider whether we want to say, across the
board that it’s fine to assume that we can read our partners well
enough to do away with explicitly negotiating consent. Clearly, far
too many people can’t and don’t. Given that, I would suggest that
continuing a certain level of explicit consent negotiation even in
long-term relationships displays trustworthiness, respect,
responsibility, caring, and of course honesty. While the ideal might
be for us to be worthy of our partner’s trust, to be respectful of
our partner, to be responsible, caring, and honest, the minimum
requirement, even in a long-term relationship should be that we act
in ways which are trustworthy, that we treat
our partners with respect, that we behave
responsibly and with care and that we act
honestly. The minimum standard is continence, though as we continue
to practice these actions we will continue to build up our character
traits and work our way towards virtue. The other reason to continue
to clearly and explicitly negotiate and communicate in long-term
relationships is that people don’t read minds and continuing to
negotiate throughout a sexual encounter what feels good and what
doesn’t is not only best practice ethically, but since it’s a way
of giving feedback it can make for better sex, and positive feedback
would surely be nice to hear.
In
another twist on all of this, a response I have come across to all of
this (or specifically to the insistence that yes, we really, really
need to have explicit verbal consent negotiations) is the claim that
goes, more or less “but wait, I’ve never done the explicit verbal
thing in all of my sexual encounters thus far and I’ve never raped
anyone!” This style of response was clearly framed by Matteo
Ravasio when he said:
I am quite sure that all of my first-time encounters with a woman have been of this sort: whether it was initiated by her or by me, there was no linguistic agreement that we were going to have sex.
I think that insistence that this sort of explicit verbal consent is a necessary condition for a consensual encounter would result in a view that considers the vast majority of intercourse as cases of sexual abuse.19 [Emphasis in original]
I
have two responses to this. The first is rather a blunt question: how
can you be sure? If you didn’t explicitly negotiate consent, how
can you know for sure what the other person(s) involved wanted and
felt? Unless they told you, you can’t. Pointing back to the
previous post,
men are notoriously bad at reading women’s nonverbal behaviour and
communication and if that’s all you have to go on… I’m frankly
amazed at how anyone could be so certain. You might also want to
consider the fact that a lot of survivors of rape and sexual assault
wouldn’t confront their rapists with the fact of what they did
afterwards. (I
know I didn’t!!)
My
second response is on something of a lighter note. We need to stop
looking at sex as a dichotomy of good sex and rape. I mentioned the
statistics earlier and yes, they are awful, and things desperately
need to change. However, if you look at this within the virtue ethics
framework then we can say that you may have been terribly
irresponsible in not practicing explicit verbal negotiation of
consent, you may have lacked respect and care for your partner(s),
you may have been callous and insensitive to their needs (perhaps
also to your own), you may have not communicated honestly about your
own needs and desires. You may not have been generous with your time,
perhaps your sexual expertise, your vulnerability and openness
towards your partner(s). Maybe you lacked the courage to open up and
speak openly and vulnerably about your desires and needs and
fantasies with your partner(s). We can consider all of these things
and say that the sex someone has is ethically problematic in one, a
few, many, or all of these ways, and still not call it rape or sexual
assault. But on our current vocabulary about sex, as soon as we
identify sex as bad (in an ethical sense) it must
be rape. This was the problem with the Aziz Ansari case;20
so many commentators read the story, couldn’t find rape and
concluded there was nothing ethically wrong, so it must just be a
case of “bad sex” (i.e. a lousy/unpleasant sexual encounter).
Somehow so many people failed to notice the attempted rape, the
manipulation, the callousness, the lack of respect, the lack of care
about his date’s needs and desires.
1It
also got me thinking about how I had to quit my PhD largely because
I wasn’t coping because of my PTSD (which I have because the bad
ex raped me) and the content of my thesis being very much to do with
sexual consent (and therefore non-consent), so I wasn’t very well
equipped to deal with things like the rape apologist whose question
during the Q&A sparked the further progress which I’m sharing
here… also, the University’s disability support (I found out in
my last year before I quit that I’m autistic and ADHD, though the
ADHD wasn’t formally diagnosed until after I quit, I think…) was
absolutely useless!!
I know
that my research is important and valuable, but because of the lack
of support I’m never going to complete the thesis I wanted to/set
out to. I also know that I’m not the only survivor of rape/sexual
violence who has had to give up graduate study at least in part as a
result of that.
2I
had made
the point elsewhere in what
I’d written (in what was meant to be a chapter)
that for people who are non-verbal other methods of communication,
such as written, electronic text-based, or sign language
communication would also fit the bill. For the sake of brevity, I am
subsuming those into the “explicit and verbal” label, even
though those forms of communication are not, of course, verbal.
3
Michelle J. Anderson, “Negotiating Sex,” Southern
California Law Review
78, no. 6 (2005), 1406.
4
Thank you to Matteo Ravasio for this “interesting” question –
I am sceptical of how
actually interesting it is, of course, especially considering all of
his follow-up comments, which as mentioned above, I see as nothing
short of rape apology.
6 I now, of course, find the medicalisation of the idea of “diagnosing” us… distasteful, to put it mildly. Unfortunately a “diagnosis” is still necessary in order to access a lot of accommodations/supports (such as in education/employment), but this is a topic for another post.
7 In the DSM-V; in the ICD-X it still is, and the ICD-XI, in which it won’t be, hasn’t been released yet.
8
I have been told that it may be possible if someone is admitted for
inpatient mental health care, possibly even only if that is
involuntary, so under the Mental Health Act, but I don’t know how
accurate that is. I do know that generally speaking it’s simply
not funded through public health except for children.
9
Of course, as in any community, there is disagreement. Some hold
firmly to the view that formal diagnosis is the only form that
“counts”, however I have found these to be outliers, and often
to be found in people who also hold very racist and misogynist
views.
10
Simon Baron-Cohen, “Book: Leo Kanner, Hans Asperger, and the
discovery of autism,” The
Lancet 386, no. 10001
(2015), 1330.
11
Kogan et al., “The Prevalence of Parent-Reported Autism Spectrum
Disorder Among US Children,” 1.
12
Baio et al., “Prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder Among
Children Aged 8 Years – Autism and Developmental Disabilities
Monitoring Network, 11 Sites, United States, 2014,” 2.
13
Most recently, I’ve had my older sister show me a photo of one of
her cats who is terrified of her new puppy (and clearly looks very
scared) and tell me that the expression on her cat’s face looks
just like an expression that is often on my face. I do not see the
resemblance. I don’t think I look like a cat (but apparently
that’s not the point).
14
van der Kolk, The Body
Keeps the Score, 26.
15 https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/girls-autism-high-risk-sexual-abuse-large-study-says/
16 HELP Auckland, “Sexual Abuse Statistics,” https://www.helpauckland.org.nz/sexual-abuse-statistics.html
17
Black et al., The
National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey: 2010 Summary
Report,
1. It says, “[m]ore than half (51.1%) of female victims of rape
reported being raped by an intimate partner and 40.8% by an
acquaintance”. These are US statistics.
None
of this is to say that rape and sexual assault by stranger doesn’t
happen at all, simply that it is incredibly rare and that women are
much more likely to be subjected to violence by a current or former
partner or an acquaintance.
18
Ibid., 42.
19
Matteo Ravasio, email message to author, November 1, 2018.
20 Way, “I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It turned into the worst night of my life,” https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355
Social Justice Paladin 