Some might say that it is. They might say that you have people who care about you and depend on your work to support them and you cannot act like you are 19 anymore. I don’t know if I would go that far, but I can certainly agree that exposing yourself to various STDs and cavorting with prostitutes is immoral.
Again, not illegal or infringing on your legal right to do it, but still immoral nonetheless
Well, I was going to take a more circuitous route to this point, but OK: given your use of the phrase, you probably think “cavorting with prostitutes” is immoral irrespective of risk, let’s be honest.
If you think the transaction is immoral by virtue of its nature, then it doesn’t matter to what extent it presents a risk, and raising the question of harm is more of a lever for further judgment than any kind of threshold concern.
Would “they” also say that it’s immoral to take any risks, e.g. making a risky investment or traveling to Istanbul? Life involves risk; it’s only a matter of degree. Where do you draw the line, at what point does it become immoral?
If you’re looking for anti-BDSM discourse there’s plenty out there. One critique is against choice feminism itself, which is a common justification in this thread. Choices aren’t made in a vacuum. Here, it’s a blatant recapitulation of patriarchal gender roles. This sort of “empowerment” is a bad joke played on women as they search for sexual autonomy in a culture that teaches them to be passive receptacles for men’s pleasure. This doesn’t render meaningful choice impossible, but it does mean these choices should be examined instead of uncritically celebrated.
As for fiction, most interesting stories aren’t about well adjusted people leading happy lives. At least, not for long. Most people probably don’t want to read feminist polemics or morality plays in their porn either. If the story’s aim is prurience you may as well make her even more dysfunctional and the acts more abusive and coercive. Guys eat that stuff up.
This is essentially “I know better than Person A what’s good for Person A” sexual morality/politics.
Yeah, that’s the paternalistic bullshit I was alluding to in my OP.
The idea that our desires are a ‘‘bad joke played on women’’ suggests women don’t have the agency or judgment necessary to determine what is good for them.
Horseshit.
(no offense to you, marshmallow, I think you are just summarizing an argument rather than taking a position.)
I don’t think he was summarizing. I also think there’s more to what he’s saying than makes for purity of ideological position on the issue.
It’s facile to dismiss the idea out of hand, as Velocity does, by saying it’s “I know better than you” morality. Lots of morality is “I know better” morality. The question is whether there’s reason to believe we actually do.
And the trouble here is that if you take the alternative point of view, once you’ve determined that there’s an absolute rule that agency trumps all, and all choices are beyond an examination of what led to them, you’ve laid the foundation for rape culture. You’ve established a rule for consent that tracks very closely with “real rape victim” ideology. After all, every sexual encounter that isn’t at knife-point or under similar levels of immediate duress involves each person exercising some form of agency. And agency is a prerequisite for blame. Stronger protections against date rape, campus sexual assault, marital rape, “gray” rape, statutory sexual assault, and so on are all premised on the idea that a victim may make a choice – may exercise agency, in a literal sense – in a way that is still a product of the immediate environment, and so is subject to some additional scrutiny.
“This suggests women don’t have the agency or judgment necessary to determine what is good for them” is exactly the “feminist” argument anti-Title IX crusaders are constantly putting forth about campus consent standards. She made a choice, now she can’t escape the consequences. That’s straight out of the rape-apology handbook. Since all of us here are concerned about true consent, obviously none of us is on board with that approach to sexual assaults. But that means we’re drawing lines somewhere about when a “choice” isn’t sacrosanct when it comes to questioning the social, physical and cultural circumstances it arises from. As long as there’s any sexual relationship out there, some level of coercion and dominance, that we think is morally questionable, that means the rule isn’t as simple or as elegant as “we all make our own choices.”
No, I don’t think it does, and least not in the sense of involving true consent. By its very definition rape is non-consensual. In fact you’ll notice the question in my OP is whether or not consent is sufficient, and some people instead have tried to argue that my story does not involve true consent. That’s a worthy discussion but it muddies the waters of what I’m actually asking.
We’re talking about very different things. Knowing yourself sexually, identifying what kind of relationships you want, making choices unhindered by incapacitation or fear for your safety, that is the kind of agency I’m talking about. That doesn’t exist in the realm of sexual assault. There are cultural attitudes that fail to make that distinction, but it’s one I think I’m making very clearly in this case. I’m talking about who you choose to have sex with, how you’re having that sex, and why. I’m talking about the polar opposite of rape, the right to take your sexuality and what you do with your body back into your own hands.
There are some feminists who think a woman taking a submissive role in a BDSM relationship is buying into the patriarchy. That’s what I think marshmallow is talking about. I think that is a bullshit argument. Having accepted this part of myself I feel more sexual agency than I ever had at any point in my life. It’s nobody else’s right to override my own judgment about what is good for me. That is just another kind of sexual victimization.
I understand what you’re saying. I’m not sure I’m talking about a different thing from you, though. That’s the point I’m getting at.
I’m certainly not taking the position that it’s anyone’s right to override your own judgment. I’m not saying there aren’t perfectly healthy BDSM sex and relationships, or that there would even be any reason for it to matter if I thought there weren’t. I’m saying that your “realm of sexual assault” as a categorically different sphere of activity from “who you choose to have sex with” is a flawed and untenable framework. These are differences of degree and of severity, not of kind.
To return to the point I wanted to make earlier, the sexual relationship with your previous boyfriend entailed both a significant degree of inappropriate coercion and an important element of self-ownership over your own experience. If we look at that like either it was “rape” or it was “you making a choice,” we’re ignoring the real world experience that you had. If we instead say that you own that experience, you were a part of it and you made a choice that was entirely yours to make, and also that we should look at the behaviors going on around you that influenced that choice, we are I think in a much more productive place. All sex happens in the realm of sexual assault, and it also happens in the realm of choice, unless it’s an extremely aggravated rape (and even in those cases, nearly all survivors of rape had to exercise some agency in determining what to do to keep themselves as safe as possible).
That all makes perfect sense to me.
Back to one of my favored life mottos, ‘‘Context is everything.’’
You notice, the term “passive” was used. Conflating submission with passivity or lack of agency is a pretty reliable flag of not understanding the dynamic.
Wait, what?
Speak for yourself, bub.
Compelling.
I think Jimmy’s point is that dividing sex between ‘‘total agency’’ and ‘‘sexual assault’’ is a false dichotomy due to all the grey areas in between. I think.
Which is more or less what I was talking about with regards to sex workers who have a background of forced sexual exploitation. I’m going to err on the side of ‘‘agency’’ but I’m not going to pretend there are no grey areas. In fact it’s the grey areas I find most interesting.
Yes, there are some grey areas. That’s a galactically long way from saying that all sex is assault.
Sure is. So’s what I said, which was that it’s not true that choice doesn’t exist in the “realm of sexual assault,” because nearly all sexual assaults involve a choice to have sex. Nearly all sexual assaults are “sex.” Not the other way around.