Sex as Construct, Rape as Reality, and Consent as Healing
I grew up in a culture obsessed with sexual ethics. As part of a group of Christian teenagers in the Midwest in the 1990s, one thing we all knew, for certain, was that our religious and moral identities were directly linked to our relationships to sex. This was the culture that birthed virginity pledges and organized for abstinence-only sex education. I remember going to one of those Protestant mega-gatherings with youth groups from all over the country. The speaker gave us two messages that I carry with me to this day. The first was that we had to stop relying on our parents’ beliefs and develop our own relationship with God. The second was that we should not have sex and that anything that gave us sexual pleasure was sex. He was trying to head off our questions. Sex was bad, but what was sex? Could we have sex that didn’t risk pregnancy? Could we masturbate? What if we were engaged?
I remember what it was like to feel the anxieties of sexual morality when this man used such a radically broad definition of sex, which oddly mirrored what I would later hear as an extremely sex radical and positive stance, while also teaching us that sex was bad. I’m not talking a little bit bad. I’m talking whole nature of who you are, even in the eyes of God, bad. But we knew sex was potentially defined as many different things, potentially unwilled, and potentially unwilling. I think I was psychologically primed to come to believe that virginity was a construct, as Jessica Valenti argues in her book The Purity Myth: How American’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women. Because sex was everywhere. It was too problematic. By the time you figured out that sex was wrong, you’d probably already had it.
During and after college, I grew into a culture obsessed with sexual ethics. A group of friends and I actively increased our feminist consciousness by sharing books and blogs, and spending hours in conversation. During that time, I first heard the word consent used in a discussion of sexual ethics. My favorite book on the topic became the anthology Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Power and a World Without Rape, and I spent hours on the Yes Means Yes blog. Whereas before, the ethical journey was in staying away from sex – an elusive moral beast that could appear anywhere and everywhere – now it didn’t matter what constituted sex, because my ethical True North in any and all sexual territory was consent.
Then I got lucky. I might have ended up on the long, problematic road to deconstructing rape. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen people go on this logical path: if sex is a construct with a changing meaning, does that mean rape is a construct with a changing meaning? We’ve probably all heard an argument that goes something like: If women in the past did not conceive of their rape as rape, then they were not traumatized by it; therefore, feminists are traumatizing women by creating consciousness of rape. But, like I said, I got lucky.
Because I suspected my religious upbringing had potentially harmed my sexuality, I read the book Healing Sex by Staci Haines. One of the most important books written on recovery from sexual trauma, I read it and applied it to my life even though I did not consider myself a survivor of child sex abuse. The book remains the backbone of my feminist thought and practice today. Using a somatic approach to healing sexual trauma, Staci Haines places the mind-body connection at the center of sexual wellness and consent. The book gave me a crash course in skills our society never teaches us, as it instead teaches us to flee from the body and emotion and all other pesky, feminine, problematic sites of meaning-making and into obedience or detached, universalized reasoning.
The body has long been understood as the site of the political by feminist thinkers and activists. But arguing for the body as the locus of consent can become problematic if you have already determined what you are supposed to find there. Historically, what we define as sexual dysfunction and how that dysfunction gets treated are deeply political in nature. This is the case in arguments that praise the female vaginal orgasm as the hallmark of female sexual health. Before mutual satisfaction (as primarily, if not solely, evidenced by mutual orgasm) was considered important in marriage, doctors were treating female hysteria by inducing orgasms; when mutual orgasms became the hallmark of sexual fulfillment, doctors began testing female patients before marriage for vaginal receptivity and responsiveness in order to increase the likelihood of successful female orgasm during intercourse.[1]
Medicalized shortcuts to sexual wellness and fulfillment that do not take on the complex reality of the necessity of mutual consent for sexual satisfaction and partnership cannot offer what they promise. The tendency to correct human bodies, desires, and behaviors based upon societal standards of morality, normalcy, and desirability pervades media, medicine, and helping professions of every kind. This approach seeks to manage the body and emotions to bring them into an unproblematic alignment with what society offers, without punishment, as appropriate sex. Like the pastor from my childhood who tried to protect us from God by teaching us a sexual morality founded in charismatic and total compliance to God’s will, this approach to human sexuality approaches it from an angle that I see as innately violent. This approach to alleviating human suffering regarding sex cannot help us, because it cannot lead us to our own consent.
This history is also written in our bodies. Much of it is a history of trauma. As I realized from my own experience of somatic practices how the contest to control my sexuality had left its imprint in my own body, consent became real for me, something more than abstract, on both a personal and societal scale. I was able to see how consent must be socially enabled. You have to have knowledge and some material access and freedom from or successful resistance to coercion in order to consent. But consent, like our bodies, is deeply and utterly real.
Some other voices talking about consent:
http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/
http://www.generationfive.org/
http://www.brandeis.edu/projects/fse/
http://www.goodvibes.com/main.jhtml
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1 Carolyn Herbst Lewis, “Waking Sleeping Beauty: The Premarital Pelvic Exam and Heterosexuality during the Cold War,” Journal of Women’s History 17:4 (2005): 86-110.
Featured image: From Edgar Degas, “Young Woman with Ibis,” Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Sex Without Consent Equals Rape,” Jason Taellious
Jenna Tucker was a graduate student in English at the University of Oregon. She studied Creative Writing at Emerson College in Boston and maintains a personal blog under a pseudonym on the complexities of practicing an ethic of consent in everyday life.