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

men “get some.”
     
    The commodity model is shared by both the libertines and the prudes of our patriarchy. To the libertine, guys want to maximize their take of tickets. The prudes want women to keep the tickets to buy something really “important”: the spouse, provider, protector.
     

Nice Guys TM : Applying for Access to the Pussy Oversoul
     
    The term “Nice Guys™” has evolved in the feminist blogosphere to refer to passive-aggressive hetero men who complain that they are refused sex in favor of other men when, apparently, they deem themselves deserving. Usually, their belief system involves the idea that other men, who treat women badly, are much more appealing to women, and that they themselves are disadvantaged in a sexual marketplace by their refusal to abuse or trick women in certain ways. Their entire worldview depends on the commodity model, and on a corollary view of their own entitlement: that there must be some “proper” way for them to act and “get” sex; that if they do all the “right” things, they will unlock the lock and get laid. By contrast, do musicians really think that if they just do the right things, someone must form a band with them?
     
    The combination of passive-aggressiveness, entitlement, and the certainty that sex is a commodity leads the Nice Guy™ to argue, in all seriousness, that rape is caused because Nice Guys™ seek sex but are rejected, and rape is their reaction to unfair rejection. A paradigmatic example of this argument appeared in a mammoth discussion of rape in a thread entitled “Some Guys Are Assholes But It’s Still Your Fault If You Get Raped” at Alas! A Blog on June 15, 2005. Commenter Aegis posted this argument, which neatly encapsulates Nice Guy™ thinking:
     
    “Rape. As far as I understand, some of the times a man rapes a woman, it is after she has already rebuffed his advances. Male confusion about how to seek sex will obviously contribute to those males being rebuffed. Hence, male confusion about how to seek sex contributes to situations where rape is more likely to happen. In short, imagine a situation in which a proto-rapist becomes an actual date rapist because he didn’t know how to induce the woman to be interested in having sex with him; if he had succeeded in doing so, she would have consented, and the situation where he decided to rape her would never have occurred.” 15
     
     
     
    Aegis thus conceives of rape as the result of a man’s frustration when he is refused something (the commodity) that he would be granted if he submitted a proper application for it. There is a term for something that is meant to be granted upon proper request: entitlement. To the Nice Guy™ way of thinking, the commodity is an entitlement: Women are gatekeepers to the Pussy Oversoul, and should grant access upon proper application; or, more crudely, women are pussy vending machines. 16
     
    If only the Nice Guy™ were unique in this sense of entitlement! Rather, the Nice Guy™ expresses clearly the undercurrent of entitlement that runs through the culture. Men generally are constructed as the pursuers of sex, and taught that their proper pursuit will be rewarded. What straight men really need to learn is that women are humans, too, who get to make their own decisions about whether and with whom to have sex; and that nobody owes anyone sex.
     
    Aegis lays out an argument that this entitlement leads to rape, but the path from rejection and disappointment to rape does not depend on misunderstanding, as Aegis believed. Instead, entitled men who believe that sex is a commodity and that they have been denied it wrongfully see rape as repossession. It belongs to them, and they resentfully use any tactic necessary to get it. These men see themselves as being in the same position as a man who finds that his stolen car is in the custody of a garage: He may not know whether the garage stole it or found it, but it is his, and he is entitled to get it back.