What if yes meant yes?

I am tired about hearing about Todd Akin.  He made some ridiculous, revealing comments that shouldn't really surprise anyone.  I, like many other, found it incredulous at first blush but then was worn down to accept that this is the level of rhetoric.  I found myself more shocked by his hillbilly science than his qualification of rape as "legitimate."  Not that the former is any more abhorrent than the latter, but discussions about what rape "really" means are not new.  For the last week, pundits and politicians have been bandying about the term rape like we all know what we are talking about.  Even Obama has stated, "Rape is rape."  Like it's self-evident.  I applaud the sentiment and am proud that we have a president who will unequivocally side with the powerless, yet we have this one concept that is definitely across the line, that we can all point to and say, "This we will not accept."  It's easiest to agree on the circumstances if it is a female victim, assaulted by a stranger, and she struggled and there was violence.  Definitely wrong.  When things deviate from this norm, the responses to rape get more complicated.  As I understand some extremist views, it is as if rape were some magic trump card that women keep in their back pockets to be played for their own amusement.  When I hear reporters discussing rape, like it is some digital on/off switch, I am frustrated for a couple of reasons.

First, I was in a sexually exploitative relationship at 15 with a 41-year-old friend of the family.  It messed me up for years.  Worse than what actually happened (I'll spare you the gory details, although doubters usually want salacious specifics to judge for themselves), was the fact that I never said no.  I threw up after I'd leave his house.  I'd cry myself to sleep.  I started sleeping with anyone with a pulse.  But I knew, deep down, that it was my fault.  I hadn't said "stop."  Since then, I've been through enough therapists to hold a poker tournament.  I went to Take Back the Night rallies. I tried on the term rape.  Was he a rapist?  Was I raped?  I still don't know.  It was wrong.  It shouldn't happen to anyone.  But the "rape is rape" slogans do not capture my experiences.  If I had gotten pregnant, could I have been an exception to pro-lifers' hard line?  Probably.  I was young and white and pretty.  When my parents found out, my father threatened to kill his friend.  In the end, though, my parents decided it was better not to press charges.  They didn't want to make a spectacle out of me, especially given my otherwise unchecked sexuality with people more my age at that point.  Looking back, I am not sure my parents really believed that it was that serious.  I don't have children so I will never be confronted with that choice.  I struggled for years to make sense of what happened.  I don't know that a statutory rape charge would have made that process any easier.  Sometimes, I thought it would be less complicated if I had been forced rather than coerced.  And despite all of the repercussions, I didn't play the rape card.  I didn't drag him through the courts.  I know there were other girls after me.  I did my best to warn them for the couple of years I was in the same circles.  But then, in order to save myself, I let it drop.  What does that make me?  His accomplice?  It still haunts me.

Second, in our mad rush to stamp out rape (please do not mistake me, I agree with the stance that rape is wrong and shouldn't be permitted), we forget that the "no means no" chant relies on negation.  How can we expect people in powerless positions to say no and have it respected?  Wouldn't it be better if we relied on "yes means yes?"  If a person has enough power to say "yes," "no" becomes an option.  Affirmative consent is not a silver bullet.  They are still people willing to exploit and manipulate and force, but how different would things be if we believed that silence isn't consent?

Working in the kinky community has taught me about consent.  People I worked with thought about consent deeply, discussing it, picking it apart, questioning their own and others' assumptions.  In another post, I'll probably hold forth on what that looked like from an ethnographic point of view.  In addition to requiring a "yes," people were of critical of their partner's ability to consent, judging how much alcohol or how many endorphins disqualified someone from consenting.  The default position is until someone says "yes," the answer is "no."  Perhaps it assuages some of my guilt over my own situation, but I find it a more empowering position.  In one of my interviews, a person said, "I think consent matters.  I think rape is bad and consensual sex is good but there is a lot of gray areas and there are times when consent is not enough."  Sex is complicated and messy.  At the poles we can point to acceptable and unacceptable but the vast gray area in the middle is not served by the simple rhetoric "rape is rape."  We should all take a stand against victimization, but I worry by eliding different experiences, we do little but pat ourselves on the back for being righteous without addressing the underlying problems of power.

Cyborgs

I just finished Deus Ex Machina: Human Revolution, a video game set in a dystopian future where some people are augmented with cybernetic devices.  One of the highlights of the game (which I loved) was the tension between "augs" and "pure" humans.  At the lowest level of society are people who cannot afford augs, while slightly above them are people who can afford rather second-rate augmentation by paying installments (pay day lenders, anyone?).  These augs are very obvious, prostheses made of medal and wire.  Soldiers fall somewhere in the middle with access to the most cutting edge technology yet being the most easily marked as augmented.  Some affluent people choose augs to enhance social skills while maintaining a pure human look.  The richest people (for the most part) remain unaugmented, unless they were involved in some trauma and lost a limb or an eye.  All of this takes the pulse of our current societies uneasy relationship with technology as impacted by a number of factors, including class.  Who has access to the latest technologies?

In a twist of confluence, I began re-watching Battlestar Galactica before picking up Deus Ex.  In this television show from the mid 2000s, cylons, a hybrid of human and machine, engage in a war of mutual destruction with their creators, human kind.  The tricky thing about some cylons is that they look human.  They even bleed.  One of the central questions about the show (and the game, for that matter) is "what does it mean to be human?"  At what point does technology obscure or even obliterate humanity?

Given all of these pop references, cyborgs have been weighing heavily on my mind.  In 1985, Donna Haraway wrote The Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century.  In this piece, she embraces the metaphor of the cyborg, its hybrid nature allowing it to exist in the interstitial spaces between seemingly mutually exclusive theoretical camps.  She writes, "By the late 20th century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized, and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs" (118).  The ambiguous cyborg is the result of the dialectical process, synthesis of thesis and antithesis.  Is it possible that technology could amplify humanity?

Feminist theory and fantastic sci-fi promise a future where we will have to answer these questions.  Pondering, I came across a photo essay on the Brooke Army Medical Center.  What they are doing there for wounded veterans is nothing short of amazing.  It was difficult for me to discern the difference between the prostheses of soldiers and the imagined augmentations of Deus Ex.  We're out of time; we have to start answering these questions now.  Ambiguity, technology, hybridity, humanity - where do we go from here?

Body Language

As a child, I would spend hours in the bathtub resting my hands against the surface of the water.  The resistance of the water pushing against my flesh but at the same time forming itself against me fascinated me.  Once I got older, I learned terms like "surface tension" and "meniscus" to describe my liquid daydreams, the behavior at the edges.  When the concepts were explained to me, it was a relief.  All of a sudden I had a vocabulary for my experiences.  I am never entirely certain that my experience of the world matches other people's.  That is a good portion of why anthropology attracts me.  It was only much later that I realized when I say trancing, other people nod and agree but sometimes have vastly different experiences.  Other corporeal states lend themselves to the same assumptions.

Everyone sleeps.  But I had horrible insomnia for the first twenty-five years of my life.  The first time I took an effective sleeping pill, it was as if I'd landed in technicolor drenched Oz the next morning when I woke up.  It was amazing.  I had absolutely no idea what good sleep was and no frame of reference.  Yet we have no easy vocabulary for sleep.  When I say I have trouble sleeping, what does that mean to you?  My dreams sometimes compensate for poor sleep.  I dream incredibly vividly, although in times of stress this often works against me.  My nightmares can be intense.  Words fail me when I try to describe the convoluted logic and skewed perspective that shade my dreams.  I only know I have vivid dreams because there was a point in time when I didn't have them.  I didn't even miss them until my practice changed and they returned.  I thought I had just outgrown them.  I would like to crawl inside someone else's head for a night to see if it is like this for everyone.

In the kinky community, there is a state known as "subspace."  It can be experienced during play as an altered state brought on by physical or mental stress in the form of pain or intense sensation.  It is easy to elide the differences in experience by relying on physiology, writing it off as the product of endorphins or adrenaline. I thought, gee, this is a lot like trancing in some shamanistic practices, possession states in Voudou, religious ecstasy among penitents, the zen of a long tattoo session .  I thought, this must be a human universal.  Even kids enjoy spinning in circles until they fall down dizzy.  People have the drive to feel altered.  Now, however, those comparisons seem too easy.  The significance of the act varies drastically.  Much like sleep (and other bodily experiences, like orgasm and eating and defecating), one only has oneself as a frame of reference.  We can compare notes, mitigated through language.  In some cases, we get to see other people doing it.  I guess it boils down to "How do you know?"  It was very difficult for me not to project my experiences onto others.  I wanted to say, "I know *exactly* what you are talking about."  Working in the kinky community expanded my vocabulary, allowing me to communicate finer distinctions about bodily experiences.  I am more confident that my experiences are at least similar to other people's, if we agree on terminology and forego naturalizing assumptions.

Sometimes, I think corporeality is numinous.  There is a mystery in trusting one's own experience.  There are epistemologies of the body, knowing things that cannot be nailed down with words, no matter how erudite the language.  And while I can't know we mean the same thing by subspace or sleep or that the significance is the same, it is part of being human that allows us to share that space.  Sweet dreams, all.