Feminist Law Professor Janet Halley critiques The Move to Affirmative Consent

splodgenessabounds · 2016-01-04T11:27:22+00:00

Thanks for the link.

This strikes me as the nub of it:

Meanwhile, a requirement of positive consent will deliver the boon many feminists are seeking: sex that women have that is dysphoric to them at the time will be punishable. This rule is entirely indifferent to the degree of wrongdoing by the accused: the best guys and the worst will be swept into the scope of punishment.

(emphasis mine) Ties in with what Hannah Wallen ranted about, and very worrying.

Allblacksworldchamps · 2016-01-04T12:54:27+00:00

Long article but well worth reading.

She seems to have made the connection with criminalising entirely desirable sexual behaviour. It's most evident with Harvard removing the "severe or repeated" and "reasonable persons" test from sexual harrasement, meaning that now someone can be tried and expelled for simply asking for consent, if this is considered "unwanted" and detrimental to their education - with evidence presented of their distress after the fact, proving the fact.

And following through from harrasement to rape, it is likely that many women won't use these provisions, meaning the few that do are asking for punishment for actions that other males suffer no penalty for (and if their partners don't complain, we might assume they also don't believe these males should suffer). This in turn randomises the law, leaving the males confused as to why they are being targeted, in circumstances that wider society would endorce as acceptable sexual behaviour, (hence teaching their males this is acceptable, such as endorsing males to take the risks in intiating relations, and setting up a trap that some men will fall victim to).

We have seen before the results of the unholy alliance between feminists and the religious right in the 80's "Sataninic Panic" trials. It's good to see a well written and knowledgable feminist defence of civil liberties (not to mention common sence)!

Worth forwarding to your MPs or congressmen/women.

RfrankieR · 2016-01-04T11:45:07+00:00

The truth is this law makes dealing with women extremely dangerous.

Imagine if this affirmative consent law was applied outside of colleges & to married couples, which feminists would absolutely want to. Wow. You'll constantly have to ask for consent for even touching your partner in your own house.

F that. Fleslights & sexbots FTW.

aesopstortoise · 2016-01-04T10:52:43+00:00

Fascinating and disturbing article. Thanks, this is what I subscribe here for.

franklindeer · 2016-01-04T15:52:14+00:00

It will be interesting to see what the professional fallout of this is/will be. It seems there is a long history of feminists who are not dogmatic reconsidering their associations with the movement after they criticize the rhetoric of their fellow feminists.

coke501 · 2016-01-04T10:42:32+00:00

TLDR but,

the increased leverage they will give women in sexual encounters

Yeah, as if (young) women needed more leverage (I know that this isn't the opinion of the author but of the lawmakers and advocates)

blueoak9 · 2016-01-04T15:53:34+00:00

This sums the whole situation up very well:

"But are they small-l liberal also—that is, progressive, emancipatory, substantively opposed to a social-conservative ideal for social life? I am going to argue in this essay that they are not; that instead they are conservative. They show us that the branch of feminism that advocates for them has turned sharply and decisively to the right. This branch of feminism—which many feminists have dubbed dominance feminism—originated on the radical American left.[4] But in its prolonged engagement with the state as a, and even the, primary engine for women’s emancipation, it has cooperated with male paternalist elites and moved rightward."

This explains the Puritanism of modern SJ feminism.

mwobuddy · 2016-01-04T23:14:58+00:00

Suppose a young woman goes to a fraternity party and sips carefully from her drink to avoid losing cognitive control. But toward the end of the evening.. The next day her friends tell her that she was sexually assaulted and raped, and she files a complaint.

The woman in the social compliance hypothesis does not positively consent or performatively consent, but she does constrainedly consent. The constraint was some combination of actual and imagined social conventions that the young woman did not want to flout. She faced a constrained choice: she accepted the sexual contacts initiated by the fraternity member because violating social conventions, disappointing the young man, and walking out of the party were the price she would have to pay to avoid his overtures, and they were, to her, at that time, not worth it.

True, and like the underage person smoking or drinking because of peer pressure, if they were caught, they'd be legally still be on the hook for doing something they aren't legally allowed to do. With women, they're not on the hook for their own actions, and we seek to make the male legally on the hook, in an obscene way, for going along.

Whenever a woman commits an act of self harm, or compromises her own values, she is considered to be at fault... until a man is part of the equation. Once he's in there, it is his fault.

Or suppose a young woman is intensely sexually attracted to a partner who is morally or socially ruled out for her

She has sex with the partner. The next day one of two things happens. She wakes up horrified at what she has done, and her denial takes the form of an emerging conviction that she was imposed upon by the forbidden sex partner; or she writes about the encounter in her diary and it is discovered by a third person who is an enforcer of the prohibition and who demands that she deny the truth of the diary entry. She files a complaint, in good or bad faith, in order to shift the blame for her transgression onto the partner.

Did the woman in the moral ambivalence hypothesis give positive consent? It’s hard to say. She was ambivalent. She may have given performative consent, but she will now deny it, in good faith or bad but perhaps very vehemently and convincingly.

Many permissible interpretations of the California affirmative consent statute will allow women to impose sanctions in cases based on the social compliance hypothesis and the moral ambivalence hypothesis. The question I am posing is: do we want to go there, really? The woman facing the knife and the woman in the social compliance hypothesis are identical under the assumptions that male domination is women’s pervasively coercive circumstance, so that women who prefer unwanted sex to the alternatives are not making a choice among limited options but are in fact coerced. I think this conflation obscures significant descriptive and moral differences between the wrong done to the woman facing the knife and the suffering of the woman at the fraternity party.

At the end, some modicum of sanity, even an acknowledgement of why women want sexuality laws to be so punitive (to avoid personal responsibility), and yet the "wrong done" is still society making the frat lady choose to have sex instead of risk social rejection.

Title	Feminist Law Professor Janet Halley critiques The Move to Affirmative Consent
Author	mankindglobalmedia
Upvotes	27
Comments	10
Date	January 4, 2016 9:42 AM UTC (10 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/3ze5s5/feminist_law_professor_janet_halley_critiques_the/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/feminist-law-professor-janet-halley-critiques-the.963966 https://theredarchive.com/post/963966

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