So here’s a thing:
For a few years now, SAVE Edmonton has been running an anti-sexual assault campaign, Don’t Be That Guy, which puts the focus not on women’s behaviour (short skirt, took a drink in public, etc.) but men’s. It’s the epitome of working to prevent rape by saying Don’t rape instead of Don’t get raped. It’s been successful/notable enough that it was exported to Vancouver, and there’s been talk of bringing it to Toronto as well.
This week, a group called Men’s Rights Edmonton launched a counter-campaign. As described in the Star article:
“The poster depicts attractive young women drinking in the company of young men, and has the caption: ‘Just because you regret a one-night stand doesn’t mean it wasn’t consensual.'”
“‘Nobody wants to see sexual assault happen, nobody wants to see rape happen, but we have to stop thinking of this as a gender problem,’ says a member, who would only identify himself as Raz.”
It’s hard to not get whacked in the head by the subtext here, and by where the problem is.
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So pretend you’re a person with this worldview: That all around you is the risk, any time you have sex with a partner, that they might — out of revenge — report you for rape. That sex is something that women have and frequently regret, and that regret translates into punitive action for their innocent partners.
If that’s your world? There is something very wrong with the sex you’re having.
Who am I to tell you your sex-having is wrong? Well, here’s my data: Sex under the ever-present threat of criminal charges, regret, and recriminations sounds like no damn fun for anybody, and that’s an awful lot of work and risk for something that’s no damn fun.
I mean: You’re in bed with someone who will regret being there. That’s no fun: Why not hold out for the person who is overjoyed to be in bed with you?
You’re in bed with someone who is so risky to report you for a crime that you have to make a postering campaign to shut her up. That’s no fun at all. Why not go to bed with people you can talk with about a problem before it gets to, oh, the cops? Someone you can talk to face to face, and not just through public posters? Someone who trusts you, and who you trust?
If sex is a vulnerable act for you, one that exposes you to risk, are taking reasonable precautions? (A condom is a reasonable precaution. So’s explicit, clear, and continuing consent — yes, yes, yes. So’s deciding someone is too much risk and opting for the low-maintenance reliability of your hand.)
Why not make explicitly sure that the people you take to bed leave your bed happy?
Why are they so vengeful and regretful when they get out of bed with you?
No, really: Why is the direct effect of sex with you regret and anger?
Person with this worldview, you have a problem on your hands.
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And yes, it is your problem: Not because of issues of fairness or blame or whatever, but because you’re the common factor in it, and while you’re not even by far the only person whose safety and happiness will be impacted by this problem you’ve got, I assume you want to be safe and happy. You do want to be happy, right?
You, having identified that safety in sexual relationships is not just an issue for women, want to act so that you are safe from harm, right?
You want to have the fun, awesome, seconds-please sex with people who think having you there is the best and will spend the next week walking around with a little secret aw yeah smile on their face?
Well, then it is time to do some problem-solving.
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That’s not an accusation or a burden: It’s the things that are our responsibility that are ours to be able to change. We can change how we think about people, and change how we treat them and behave toward them.
We can change how we take someone to bed and how we act toward them: asking rather than assuming what’s good for them, and telling them what’s good for us.
If we’re not 100% sure someone is able to consent to sex — that later, they might regret it, or that this might be rape — we can say: Maybe we should rain cheque this shit for another time. We can ask them: Are you into this? It is cool if you are not into this. If that sex was going to be there in the first place, it’ll be back later. If it doesn’t come back, it was likely never there, and we’ve saved the both of us a lot of grief and bullshit.
If someone is less than happy after we’ve been in bed together, we can sit up and ask them: Hey, is everything okay? What can we do to make that better? What do you need?
If we don’t care what they need, or if they’re happy after, we can do the whole world a favour and not take that person to bed. Then there won’t be any regrets or rape cases against us, right? Much tidier and easier for everyone.
We can grow ourselves some standards, and not settle for less than someone who absolutely wants us. Whether we want each other for a week, for three weeks, for a year, forever — let’s just not settle for less than yes, yes, yes.
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Because if you have this problem and you don’t solve it? I’m afraid you are Being That Guy. And no amount of counter-postering campaigns, and trying to get people to shut up about it, will be able to change the words out of your mouth and the deeds you choose with your hands.
And you’ll be having this fight forever.
And that’s no fun for anybody.
Yes. I’ve been that guy and I remember very clearly what it’s like. It’s about being so desperately afraid of not being able to get laid that passing up a shitty chance at banging someone who will probably hate you the next day is tantamount to suicide. To start to understand this, you have to understand that it isn’t fear of the actual event of failing to get laid, or we just wouldn’t try, rejection stinging the way it does; it’s fear of falling into the culturally defined category of “guy who cannot get laid”, with all that entails. Every one of the many, many dollars pouring into the pickup artistry industry is driven by that fear. Living in that state of surging status anxiety is a miserable existence, which is why so many men subsisting in it are such bitter, vicious little fucks.
It’s worthwhile asking the question of what purposes it serves for us, culturally, to jam these ideas into so many men’s heads when they cripple and derange their hosts, but it wouldn’t be useful for me to try to explain the answers to that.
What I can tell you, guys, is let go. Let go of getting laid as a measure of your value or something you have to prove, let go of the always-present, never-spoken idea that if you can score enough points in the eyes of your buddies by banging hot chicks, this will somehow eventually make your life stop being broken. Very importantly, let go of your fear that if you don’t somehow make women want to have sex with you, none of them ever will. It’s okay, seriously; you don’t have to do all the work around here.
As an exercise, I recommend going out to a club or bar or bars or what-have-you and carefully keeping your objectives to Having a Good Time. Concentrate on enjoying yourself and being pleasant company for the people you’re spending time with. (You should interact with people, if that wasn’t clear.) If you get to the end of the night and a good time was had by all, congratulations, you have won, and you are getting Being That Guy out of your system.
And, not for nothin’, YMMV, but my experience is that it doesn’t take all that many nights of doing that at all before some sweet creature decides that you are smoking hot and she simply must have you.
Did we mention that sex with somebody who powerfully wants to have sex with you is way fucking better than sex with somebody you had to talk into it?
Good advice: to just let go of it. (In my head, that’s “grow up,” and that’s a thing men, women, everyone has to face.)
I would append, though, that letting go of one’s own bad ideas doesn’t work if we’re doing it with one eye over our shoulder, waiting for someone hot (a human person, please, and you’ll understand why in this of all discussions, I’m not cool with calling a woman a “creature”) to notice our Brand! New! Enlightened! Awesomeness! In short, you can’t do this as a way to get sex. It’s the same trap.
You have to actually, honest to God, I-may-never-sleep-with-anyone-again-and-that-has-to-stop-running-my-life…let go and grow up.
Or the goggles will do nothing.
It’s true, what you say. I want to add to it a bit further, though, because to That Guy it sounds very close to saying one has to not care about sex, which will scare him off, which doesn’t need to happen.
A big part of letting go or growing up is thinking real hard about what you (speaking to hypothetical considering-growing-up-guy reader now) actually want to be doing in your life. It is perfectly likely that sex with women is one of the things that will go on that list. This is fine and presents no interference to getting past getting-laid anxiety. It goes on the list as something you want. Like anything else you want, it needs to be, at a fundamental level, something you are okay with not getting (because the things you want are not the things you need). Not as happy as you might be with it, but okay without. This might be hard to actually achieve; some people I’ve met seemed to just be there naturally, and some people, like me, had immense amounts of work to do to get there. But it is indispensable to get there if you aren’t.
Part of you, hypothetical reader, may be freaking out that if you’re okay with not getting sex, that’s like inviting no-sex to happen. It really isn’t. Rather the opposite.
I hope I’m not too painfully discordant by maintaining a clear message that there’s sex on the other side of getting over oneself, Charybdea. It’s just that, some guy who’s me at 22 is going to read this sometime, and there being no sex on the other side of getting over himself is exactly what he’s afraid of. And it’s so goofily untrue I want him to be reassured on the point.
I see what you mean about “creature”, of course, and, well, it’s a shame about WordPress not providing me with edit capabilities.
I can understand why you worry about people turning away, given your own history with the mindset? But it is a little discordant, I think.
Mostly because I think better of hetero men than to believe they’ll turn up their noses at anything that doesn’t have a vagina on the other side.
Growing up — taking steps to make yourself a safer and happier person — doesn’t have to come with sex-bait. People work to be happier every day without it having a thing to do with their pants. And men are people, so…I can’t say I’m concerned about your hypothetical younger reader. He’s got sense, or he doesn’t.
The future may hold awesome emotional and physical relationships. It may not. And I’m not sure that if you don’t truly accept the possibility that you might not get what you want — and just pretend to, or make the motions toward it for points — that you’ll be able to take those grownup steps well.
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Side note: I appreciate that you see the point, and thank you for acknowledging it. But I don’t mind that WordPress won’t let us edit comments; apologies are infinitely better than redactions, for the same reason we’re talking above about taking responsibility for our own actions.
Hetero men in general aren’t my concern. Absolutely, lots of men are in a good enough place that they don’t need reassurance that abandoning their current coping patterns will, at minimum, not necessarily mean a sexless life. I’m not speaking to them because they’ll be fine anyway. The guy I’m trying to reach is the one who’s in a sufficiently bad place that he’s considering things like putting up posters meant to explain away rape accusations. It is quite likely he needs that reassurance.
So clearly we have different approaches to this question, which is cool because we are different people and that’s how people are. I’m glad you’re concerned about that subset of people.
What I don’t really understand is why you’re still arguing with me about it, and so I’m going to wish you a good weekend now.
Also, it’s the habit of our culture to teach men not to understand the difference between wanting sex, feeling entitled to sex, resenting not getting sex, feeling bad for not being able to get sex, and wanting status for having gotten sex. There’s a baby in that bathwater.