Marsden is Here

If I am honest I have been procrastinating starting this post. But I have also been rolling bits of it around and around in my head.

To start go and read the comic No 'I' in Sex from Toby Morris's PencilSword, if you haven't seen it already. The rest of this post will wait :)
( continued )

So this weekend the periodically re-occuring discussion on behaviour and consent at KAOS parties fired up again. And it feels like there is a new vibe to it this time, a more positive one than I have experienced in my going-on-20 years of seeing it repeated.

This post collects a lot of my thoughts and opinions on the subject into one place. Because FB discussions are hard to reference later and verbal discussions even more so, and heck some of these are just jotted down in my notes for my contribution to an somewhat improvised speaking at the 48-Hour party just been.

Rules and Disclaimers

1. Mild trigger and hot-button warnings for conversation around sexual assault, non/consent and KAOS party behaviour.
2. I've tried to keep this as gender neutral as possible - I know we're socially conditioned to automatically cast thse events in a M-on-F light but F-on-M, F-on-F and M-on-M events are equally problematic, and often more difficult to speak up about.
3. Comments on this post to be directed at the Dreamwidth version please. Anon comments will be screened automatically.
Update: conversation seems to have started at the Livejournal post anyway, so comment there.
4. These are my opinions; opinions do not exist in a vacumn. I'm happy to engage further in conversation/debate; I'm happy for people to share their experiences if they feel like doing so; I will not tolerate personal attacks, criticism of peoples actions/reactions in an event or well-intended advice in response.
5. At points in this post I've straight out borrowed from a few other people who have already said the things I would like to say, often better, with permission for the big chunks. I haven't attributed these because I want people to be able to choose if or how they enter the conversation. If you recognise someone's voice or comment from elsewhere please respect that. If you see your words in here, thank you.

( A matter of scale )
( Surfacing the experiences )
( Framing the problem )
( Partial solutions )
( Missing stairs )
( Calling people out )
( Your responsibilities when you bring a friend to KAOS )
( Modelling consent )

This series started with the statistic that "6% of college age men, slightly over 1 in 20, will admit to raping someone in anonymous surveys, as long as the word "rape" isn’t used in the description of the act."

One obvious conclusion is that many of these men don't view themselves as "rapists". They genuinely believe this is the way things are done. Or to quote a comment on my previous (filtered) post (which I hope the OP doesn't mind me using):

one time when I was quite young there was an incident with a slightly older guy, and I was convinced then (and still am) that he was only doing what he thought he was supposed to be doing with no malicious intent, and I was too naive to realise what was happening.

I'm unhappy to have known people who believe that that the way it is done is you "get a girl drunk to get laid", or "they all play hard to get" and "you have to show her that you mean it" ... but it's still all too common. And that's because our society is still growing up.

After all it's not all that long ago that slavery was still "the way it is done". Or that a wife was the "property" of her husband. (Marital rape became a crime in NZ in 1985. And we're pretty progressive about it. Wikipedia has a list). In some cultures and sub-cultures that's still very much the way it is.

So what we are doing now by

- effectively broadening the scope that the term rape (with all it's negative connotations), is applied to, and
- getting rid of the mostly false stranger-danger narrative

is setting a better "normal". One where the understanding "this is how it is done" does not include assuming, overriding or removing the ability to consent on the other person's part. And where this understanding is gained

- less by actions taken and corrected after the fact (because actions taken and -not- challenged reinforce the current understanding)
- more by the new understanding being woven into the very fabric of society

This change takes generations. We are still at the stage of challenging actions taken because of the old understanding. And hell, even with the benefit of self-knowledge trying not to make our own mistakes.

Mistakes will always be made at the individual level as part of the learning process and simply because of the intricacies of negotiating and communicating (and withdrawing if necessary) consent. But better baseline expectations can let these be caught earlier, responded to better, and thus less likely to result in learning negative behaviour.