These days, women are treated as perpetual victims. In need of safe spaces at their colleges so they dare not hear alternative opinions, suspicious of all men as predators and infantilized by people in power seeking to protect them.
We’ve gotten to a point where society accepts that sex isn’t an action between two equals — we treat the man as always in control of the encounter. A drunk woman is incapable of consent while a drunk man remains responsible for all of his actions.
This is somehow seen as “pro-woman” and not as a way of turning a grown woman into a child, which is what it actually is. In the last year, feeling that this type of infantilization didn’t go far enough, there’s been a growing movement for “affirmative consent” on college campuses. Now consent must be verbally granted at every step of a sexual encounter.
Suddenly that, too, isn’t enough. In a piece for New York magazine called “The Game is Rigged,” Rebecca Traister tells the story of Reina Gattuso, a Harvard senior who wrote a column for The Crimson about a sexual experience she had. At a party, drunk, she’d slept with two men. She admits that it was entirely consensual but that she woke up “dissatisfied and confused” wondering about the power imbalance in sex.
Traister writes: “Eventually, she [Gattuso] realized that what she was grappling with was not just the night in question but also the failure of campus feminism to address those kinds of experiences. We tend to talk about consent ‘as an individual process,’ she wrote.” Instead of asking, “What kinds of power are operating in this situation?” the student complained, they only asked questions like, “Did you or did you not say yes?”
It’s not as simple as “yes” or “no,” she continued. “But ethical sex is hard. And it won’t stop being hard until we . . . minimize, as much as possible, power imbalances related to sex.”
