Consent analysed from a laywer's (/feminist) perspective "The Move to Affirmative Consent"

2015-11-11T17:16:30+00:00

They will enable people who enthusiastically participated in sex to deny it later and punish their partners. They will function as protective legislation that encourages weakness among those they protect. They will install traditional social norms of male responsibility and female helplessness. All of these will be the costs we pay for the benefits affirmative consent requirements deliver.

Exactly. As a fellow attorney, I am quite distressed with the legal ramifications of these laws. In my view, it comes down to the fact that we used to define rape as requiring violence or threat of violence and there generally needed to be physical evidence of violence to prosecute.

The affirmative consent laws allow someone to be convicted of a felony based solely on unsubstantiated oral testimony in the absence of corroborating physical evidence. These laws also make it virtually impossible to "disprove" an allegation of rape based on lack of "affirmative consent" because they switch the burden of production to ensure that once the allegation is made, the only thing to counter it is physical evidence, which is virtually impossible.

So, we have gone from a system that is under inclusive by failing to prosecute some crimes due to lack of physical evidence to one which is over inclusive and convicts people for lack of physical evidence.

alrun · 2015-11-11T16:09:54+00:00

I found it a very in depth analysis for affirmative consent.

Going into detail for the historical development and where it falls short. And I love that its a paper with citations for each claim.

Teasers from the text:

They will foster a new, randomly applied moral order that will often be intensely repressive and sex-negative. They will enable people who enthusiastically participated in sex to deny it later and punish their partners. They will function as protective legislation that encourages weakness among those they protect. They will install traditional social norms of male responsibility and female helplessness.

The result has been a wave of new campus sexual harassment policies that make it far easier to hold accused men responsible for sex that was merely unwanted.

Affirmative consent thus poses the possibility of a vast new criminalization.

Conservative Feminism: The California affirmative consent statute may look feminist on its face, but, as a guide for real-world procedures, it installs profoundly conservative gender values and visions. They are embedded deep in the affirmative consent requirement – a law reform project positively advanced by dominance feminist advocacy. I’m not suggesting that dominance feminists, in their ambivalent push for affirmative consent laws, have engaged in yet another collaboration with conservatives; rather, that they are conservatives in today’s left/right politics. The emphasis on punishment as the premier means toward the premier end of social control; the resentment of civil-liberties-based brakes on criminal punishment and severe civil sanctions like expulsion with a stigmatic transcript; the reassertion of dichotomous gender roles reminiscent of the gilded cage, including the encouragement of male responsibility and female passivity; the division of the world into a mere two sexes and the reduction of the dazzling array of human sexualities into a model of (heterosexual) male domination and female subordination—all of these are strong markers of conservative social values.

chavelah · 2015-11-11T21:24:02+00:00

Janet Halley is the bomb.

Title	Consent analysed from a laywer's (/feminist) perspective "The Move to Affirmative Consent"
Author	alrun
Upvotes	13
Comments	9
Date	November 11, 2015 4:03 PM UTC (10 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/3sf1x2/consent_analysed_from_a_laywers_feminist/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/consent-analysed-from-a-laywers-feminist.967454 https://theredarchive.com/post/967454

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