Okay, so let’s get a few things out of the way.
1) I am a white man who acknowledges and takes care to have awareness of his #whiteprivilege
2) I do not pretend nor endeavor to speak for women. When I speak of women in the article, I speak about my observations only.
3) I am writing this to open a dialogue around the nature of Affirmative Consent, and for us to look at it closely before it becomes woven into the fabric of our society.
4) I’ve read this and this and this and this and this and this. Pretty much the first 15 articles that showed up when I googled Affirmative Consent that appeared to be affiliated with a major news organization and didn’t appear to exhibit any dogmatic bias.
5) I have the spent the last 7 years learning feminine communication by exercising my limbic system through the practice of Orgasmic Meditation. I have around 1200 hours of relationship and intimacy coaching under my belt as of this writing.
First, the good news is that we’re having a conversation about consent at all. As the author of one of the above-linked articles mentions, it is very recent history where the issue of sexual assault, #rapeculture, and the necessity of consent was not even on the radar of the most important institutions in our nation. Schools, Universities, Corporations and Government entities were all content to pretend the problem didn’t exist. Thankfully, due mostly to a group of women who would not be silenced, and who used the power of the internet and social media, that is no longer possible.
Also due mostly to women who would not be silenced, the stigma and perceived futility of reporting sexual assault and rape is waning. I understand that much more work needs to be done, and that more voices and perspectives and avenues for communication must be opened for the critical mass that is needed to be achieved. And. There are now dozens, if not hundreds, of mainstream examples of women who speak out and whose perpetrators are punished. This is to be celebrated, not the least of which because it is normalizing the message to girls and young women that it is correct to report being assaulted and/or raped, and to expect justice. This is a stark contrast to a long history of a culture of slut-shaming and victim-blaming, intended to confuse the issue and keep from having to look at the underlying sickness that creates that culture in the first place.
Now, here’s where I think the idea of Affirmative Consent breaks down, and it’s due primarily to the aforementioned underlying sickness that causes #rapeculture in the first place. For that sickness to grow and fester, it requires our ignorance of the conditions in which it thrives. To counter that ignorance, I’d like to turn your attention now to the concepts of masculine and feminine communication, and how, for some time now, we are trained NOT to use what is at least half of our communication faculties. Through the ignorance of our feminine mode of communication, we have created conditions that have Affirmative Consent seem like a good idea when it’s not.
And yes, we are hard-pressed to quantify the differences in these two modes of communication. For a quick education on the subject, read this excellent article on Masculine and Feminine, as I won’t cover all of that here. However, as my friend and teacher(and author of that article) Nicole Daedone likes to say, women are naturally bilingual. That is, they grow up speaking both feminine and masculine. Whereas men, on the other hand, tend to grow up only speaking masculine. This is a serious challenge when you consider that the segment of the population that is linguistically challenged has also held the balance of power for a long time. How do you get those in power to see that they are deficient in their ability to communicate with the other half? And even more challenging is the trend where women, being the pragmatic beings that they are, have begun to abandon their own feminine communication mode in order to feel more seen and heard by the half of the population that refuses to learn another language.
Affirmative Consent reinforces this idea that in order for women to be taken seriously, they must move towards a more masculine mode of communication (and therefore, a more masculine mode of consent). And while I am an enthusiastic proponent of increased expression of desire by women, my experience with the feminine is that greater expression of desire will not automatically mean more concrete expression of that desire. It may look like an increase in feminine communication in general, and when I am tuned into the communication, I become more aware of her desire. And this does not usually equate to more specific, granular, easy to understand communication. And that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing for men to tune into messages that are communicated in modes that are not simple declarative sentences.
So the biggest strike against Affirmative Consent is that the very nature of adding another layer of masculine communication to an interaction that is inherently AT LEAST 50% feminine communication is naive at best (I mean, how many of YOU understand exactly what your body/soul wants with another human and is then able to clearly and lucidly describe what that is to the other?) At worst it’s one more subtle message to women (and the feminine in all of us) that they will never get what they want unless they give up all that is feminine communication and get with the damn masculine communication PROGRAM already!
And then we miss another opportunity to teach our young men and women that feminine communication is EVERY BIT AS IMPORTANT as masculine communication. We have a very complex part of our brain/central nervous system that is extremely adept at non-verbal communication, generally known as the limbic system. And over the years, as we have placed undue importance on the neocortex, the center for language, reason and complex motor function, our reliance on Aristotelian logic and Broadcast English has become so great that our ability to distinguish nuance, process inference correctly, and otherwise understand someone without them having to spell it out for us has all but vanished from our awareness.
Except it hasn’t. And that’s where our basic, daily cognitive dissonance comes from. We are walking around generally confused by our fellow humans, because what we are picking up from them (non-verbal, feminine communication) and what they are overtly saying (verbal, masculine communication) don’t match. And the rich tapestry of human interaction is being distilled down into boring, stale, lifeless interactions, where fear and doubt rule our receptive abilities. We have stunted our ability to “hear” each other, because we have stunted our ability to process the information being transmitted, and yet some part of us knows it’s there, because our masculine structures become consumed with wondering “what do they actually mean?” when that cognitive dissonance occurs.
And as we are not taught from a young age to hear the different levels of each communication, including the communications beneath, above and around the actual words being said, that by the time we are adults, we no longer trust in our ability to hear the subtle doubt underneath “Yes”, or the hesitant desire underneath “No”.
Let me be clear, hearing those other messages in the non-verbal communication is NOT a license to ignore the words spoken. Instead, it instills greater responsibility in both parties to understand each other, because they acknowledge that there is more information being transmitted than just the words being said.
After years of practice (and still many years of practice in front of me), when I hear the hesitation underneath a “Yes”, I have enough awareness to pause, slow down, and ask if she’s sure. When I do that, I create the space for her entire expression. I communicate that I value what she has to say, even if it’s not what I think I want to hear.
Simultaneously, if I hear a “No” that is anything less than definitive and emphatic, I physically back up a little (to demonstrate that I heard her No), and then ask if she’s sure. Again, because I had enough awareness to hear the subtlety of the message. Again, I’m communicating that I value her entire expression, and I help create the space for it to exist between us.
In either case, she has the room she needs to flesh out the subtlety of her communication, and we have both used a blend of masculine and feminine communication to have a fully expressed interaction. [Damn, that bias is EVERYWHERE, I just unconsciously wrote masculine first.]
At this point, now you may be asking yourself how is that different from the Affirmative Consent being discussed in the media? Right? Like, if she says yes and I say how about now and she says yes again, then I’m good, right?
NO.
Affirmative Consent is based on the Savior/Broken-Wing-Bird dynamic that exists between men and women. This model is basically saying: the guy keeps the pressure on, and he gets permission to keep going at each step of the way. And she says yes or no at each stop along the sex escalation path. At each point the answer is dipolar, and there is no room (nor encouragement of) the exploration of the nuance of each person’s desire. He follows his training to get as much as he can in the short window of opportunity while it’s open; she follows her training to “give up as little as possible” in exchange for the time spent together. This is a model that fails both parties.
It is time to train the young men and women of the world that there IS nuance in communication, there IS a way to hear it, and then HOW to use what you hear to create the space between you so EVERYTHING can be communicated. It’s time to train the young men of the world that feminine communication is real, that it is important, and that it is imperative that they learn to become fluent in it. There are many layers and levels to communication, and we are taught to speak and hear so few. Affirmative Consent is trying to drive the square peg of masculine communication into the feminine round hole of Desire.
When we acknowledge that Desire (in all its forms, not just sexual), is an inherently feminine thing, and when we acknowledge that in order to communicate it completely and well, we MUST learn to hear and speak feminine communication, only then will we learn to fully communicate what we want and clearly set boundaries that all parties want to respect and adhere to.
