Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape Read Online Free PDF Page A

anti-rape activism cannot be separated from action for reproductive freedom, anti-racism, LGBT rights, and broader gender equality; and that the opponents of those movements are the same people who have an interest in maintaining rape culture.
     
    Eradicating rape may very well be impossible. But as long as we continue to view it as a crime committed by an individual against another individual, absent of any social context, we will have little success in combating it. Women must feel fully entitled to public engagement and consensual sex—and if conservative and anti-feminist men continue to argue that women’s very public presence enables men to assault them, then perhaps they’re the ones who should be pressured to stay home.
     
     
    If you want to read more about MEDIA MATTERS, try:
     
    • A Woman’s Worth BY JAVACIA N. HARRIS
    • How Do You Fuck a Fat Woman? BY KATE HARDING
    • The Fantasy of Acceptable “Non-Consent”: Why the Female Sexual Submissive Scares Us (and Why She Shouldn’t) BY STACEY MAY FOWLES
     
    If you want to read more about THE RIGHT IS WRONG, try:
     
    • Toward a Performance Model of Sex BY THOMAS MACAULAY MILLAR
    • Purely Rape: The Myth of Sexual Purity and How It Reinforces Rape Culture BY JESSICA VALENTI

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    Toward a Performance Model of Sex
     
    BY THOMAS MACAULAY MILLAR
     
     
     
    Sally has a problem. Sally is a music slut. She plays with everyone. She has two regular bands, and some sidemen she jams with. When parties get late and loud, she will pull out her instrument and play with people she just met, people she hardly knows, people whose names she cannot remember—or never knew! She plays for money, she plays for beer, sometimes she even plays just to get an audience, because she likes the attention.
     
     
    THIS PARAGRAPH MAKES no sense, at least not when taken literally, but the adoption of the concept of “slut” is so clear that the paragraph is, on even the most casual read, a thinly veiled metaphor for sex. The reason it makes no literal sense is that playing music does not share essential characteristics with the way Western culture models sex.
     
    Rape is an act of war against women, one that can be committed only because of an entire culture of support, which makes most rapes permissible. Not all of the structures of rape support are about sexual culture: racism, classism, and the prison-industrial complex, as just a few examples, create circumstances under which some women can be and are raped with impunity. So simply changing the cultural model for sex will not undermine the social support for all kinds of rape. But many rapists acquire what is sometimes called a “social license to operate” 1 from the model of sex as a commodity (which constructs consent as the “absence of no”) and from its close corollary, the social construct of “slut.”
     
    Without the notion of the slut, many rapists lose their license to operate—the notion exists only within a model of sex that analogizes it to property or, more specifically, to a commodity. The “commodity model” should be displaced by a model of sex as performance, which sits better with the notions of enthusiastic participation (or the “presence of yes,” as distinct from the “absence of no”) that many feminists argue for. 2
     
    We live in a culture where sex is not so much an act as a thing: a substance that can be given, bought, sold, or stolen, that has a value and a supply-and-demand curve. In this “commodity model,” sex is like a ticket; women have it and men try to get it. Women may give it away or may trade it for something valuable, but either way it’s a transaction. This puts women in the position of not only seller, but also guardian or gatekeeper—of what Zuzu of Shakesville, a feminist blog, 3 refers to as the “pussy oversoul”: Women are guardians of the tickets; men apply for access to them. This model pervades casual conversation about sex: Women “give it up,”