This is incredible. You (and the others) don’t know what the word means means!
It does not matter what the woman “really wants.” That has nothing whatsoever to do with what the word “no” means.
This is incorrect. It is 100% of the time an instruction to follow. What the woman is “really thinking” or “actually wants” is absolutely irrelevant to the question of what you should do in response when she says “no.” When she says “no,” you stop. That’s it. She has withdrawn her consent.
What makes that statement misogynistic as opposed to merely sexist?
I think I explained my reasoning pretty thoroughly in my earlier posts in this thread. Can you tell me which part of those posts you understand and which parts remaining confusing?
I taught sex education and adolescent boys would say they know whenq girl saying no, really means yes…I told them it doesn’t matter. If she says no and you proceed, YOU ARE A RAPIST!
I also showed the girls how dumb the boys can be so they best make their messages clear.
No, I know perfectly well what the word “means” means.
So you don’t believe intention is conveyed by any other means except the wording?
Yeah, right.
No, it is correct. When a woman says No and means Yes, it is an instruction to continue (or talk her into it, or mention that your multi-millionaire next of kin is on his death bed).
Regards,
Shodan
So let me get this straight. Hot girl presses up against a guy (let’s call him Shodan for the purpose of this post) at a club he is visiting with friends while his wife is at home with the kids. Hot Girl asks if he would like to have sex. Shodan’s body is giving clear signals that he would like to very much, thanks, but his mind is saying “I love my wife, she trusts me not to follow my dick everywhere it goes, so no, I really do not want to in spite of what my body is indicating”. Shodan says no to HG, who, noticing that he really seems to want to, continues to press, rub, push him into a side room, get a hand down his pants. So I’m right in assuming that Hot Girl has correctly interpreted Shodan’s No as Yes and is completely justified in persisting in an attempt to change his mind?
Even aside from all the noes that mean “I have no interest and wish you would go the hell away”, a regretful no is still a no, not an invitation to try and change my mind. Do you think I stopped wanting sex with other men when I got married? Because I certainly did not. I did, however, start saying no (back in the old days when people were still asking) because I was in a monogamous relationship and take my commitments seriously. Treating my no as a challenge rather than a decision may not make you a misogynist, but assuming that any woman’s no is suspect because she is female can certainly indicate some serious sexism.
What she’s really saying is “Uh, get away from me now,”…or possibly “Try harder, stupid,” but which one is it?
-Hitch
What do you mean “the others”? “The others” what? Hysterical women?! How dare you sir!:eek:
Leaving out sex situations altogether, it seems pretty much accepted by men and women alike that women have a tendency to say X and mean Y, and expect others - including their “clueless” spouses - to understand what they “really mean” and act accordingly, to a much greater extent than men, who tend to be more direct. (There’s a whole Mars/Venus meme based on this premise.) There’s no reason to just assume that sex would be any different, but even if it is different, it’s likely that knowledge of this general tendency affects men’s reactions in these situations.
[FWIW, I would speculate that in the specific case of these sex situations, it may sometimes be motivated by the “rape fantasy” that many women have, which involves an attractive partner desiring them so much that he “takes” them over their objections. So I think it’s possible that some women say no even though they really want sex because it adds to the feeling for them. But the specific reason is not especially relevant, I would think.]
Notwithstanding that, I would think someone who decides in a given situation that he can tell that this particular no really means yes is playing with fire. If he’s wrong, he’s a rapist. And who can be really sure of getting it right when it come to these things? So the smarter and safer approach is to take her at her word.
My point is just that it’s not as simple as some people would have you think.
If by “men and women” what you meant to say is “by me, Fotheringay-Phipps, and also by a number of other unpleasant people whose misbehavior is the impetus for the formation of this very thread,” then I agree completely.
Otherwise… well, not so much, I guess.
When my daughter started being able to speak, I started teaching her about the difference between fantasy and reality. This “rape fantasy” you speak of is along the lines of elves and magic rings. It’s different from “rape reality,” I think.
If you’ve got data that there are women out there trying to LARP their rape fantasies with dudes they’ve not been with before, I genuinely would like to see it. Otherwise your speculation is unfounded, and given the topic rather pernicious.
It doesn’t have to be complex, if you simply take ‘no’ to mean ‘no’, as in, ‘no’ is not a statement of a total state of affairs, it’s a lack of permission, and underlying desires are irrelevant.
There’s a covert premise that the “no doesn’t always mean no” crowd are using, and that’s that men can or should try to go ahead in this tricky “I’m saying no but I mean yes” situation. No, you shouldn’t. Back off. In the very unlikely event that a women is actually using no to mean yes, or at least hope you’ll override her stated intent, it’s her damn fault if she fails to get laid because she wants to play circuitous word games or work out power issues. For myself, all the complexity, all the grey area, all the ambiguity, is washed away by the simple default of “no means no”.
I say this as someone who dated a women who was trying to get me to ravish her in the Victorian sense of “desired rape”, meaning she wanted to excite so much lust in me that I’d take her (which she wanted) despite her cries of “no, no you beast”, and there was no discussion about this or agreement to role play because she wanted it to be “real”. This took place over several weeks, and twisted me up a lot, and I never tried to do it, and in retrospect I’m so thankful I didn’t. She had a lot of issues, and even had I correctly interpreted her wishes and fulfilled them, I realized I wanted to have no part of that.
“No means no” isn’t a perfect description of reality, it’s a policy designed to prevent a lot of rape. If it has a secondary effect of straightening out communications between the sexes, that’s a twofer.
I agree.
I wrote pretty much the same thing in my post.
What an individual person should do in this situation is pretty clear. The overall picture of why this happens is what’s more complex.
Agreed.
So you say, yet you procede to prove otherwise.
The meaning of a word is not always the same as the intention that is conveyed. If I say “cats are reptiles,” what I said doesn’t mean snakes are reptiles, even if I intended to convey that thought. Rather, what I said means cats are reptiles. Meaning and intended communication are distinct concepts. They often coincide in extension, but not always.
This is the rule when it comes to consent. It does not matter what you think the intended communication was. In fact, it doesn’t even matter, really, what the intended communication was. What matters is the word that was used to communicate. When she utters “no,” she has withheld her consent. Again, it does not matter if you thought she was actually hoping you’d have sex with her. Indeed it does not matter if she really did hope you’d have sex with her. None of that affects the fact that, when she said “no,” that was a withdrawal of consent.
Now I’m wondering how many women you’ve raped.
I guess we’re not getting anywhere on the definition of misogyny, so I’ll address the ‘no’ thing. It would help not to just echo ‘no means no’ when there are plenty of circumstances where it doesn’t mean that, or even if it does there’s nothing wrong with being insistent. We are talking about touching here folks. If I ask a girl if she wants to get it on, and she says no, I can ask her again as many times as I want. I’m not doing anything illegal, at worst it’s stupid and annoying. ‘No means no’ applies to physical acts, not words. If someone says they don’t want to be touched, don’t touch them. And if you want someone to believe you when you say ‘no’, don’t touch that person. I don’t care what’s right or moral, if you say ‘no’ to a guy and then start grinding his crotch he’s not going to listen, and I don’t blame him.
Misogyny has a negative emotional component, where plain old sexism doesn’t So misogyny is always sexist, but sexist behavior is not always misogyny.
Women aren’t good at math is a sexist statement, but not a misogynistic one. Now if the reason we are spouting women aren’t good at math is because we are threatened by girls who do math, its misogynistic. It contains the negative emotional component - threat.
Rape culture are those stated and unstated components of culture - media, jokes, attitudes - that contribute to the objectification and the treatment of women as sexual objects that exist for men’s enjoyment - at least at some level. When you’ve objectified women, rape - not necessarily that stranger jumps from the bushes rape - but including date rape, acquaintance rape, marital rape - become more likely.
I think they also need some kind of essentialist statement to really be sexist.
For instance (and be aware that I’m making some of this example up for the sake of argument), we’ll take your “girls aren’t good at math.” Let’s say that aggregate test scores show that girls and women generally score lower on math tests and in math classes (not sure if that’s in any way true), and note that women are less likely to move into math heavy fields (that last one is true – ask anybody in a Women in <Computer Science| Math |Engineering | etc> organization).
It’s only really sexist, IMO, if you’re making the statement in the sense of “women are bad at math because they’re women.” It’s not really sexist if you start from the premise of “at the moment women seem to underperform at math (i.e. are bad at it), this is weird, especially since there undeniably exist female math whizzes. What is the cause of women, in general, having poor math skills (lack of interest in learning it? Teaching habits in math classes cater to men?) and how can we solve it (female-oriented marketing campaigns that math is cool? Free tutoring programs in STEM subjects for girls?)?”
Thank you Dangerosa. That is easily one of the most cogent posts, if not the most, on this topic spanning multiple threads.