“Boys learn not to worry about girls’ pleasure, and when girls and women have sexual encounters that don’t feel good — whether they’re just unsatisfying or actively abusive — they’re primed to accept that’s just how sex is.”— Jaclyn Friedman, vox.com
“Studies show that most rapists are perfectly aware their victims aren’t into what’s happening. And social science has also clearly demonstrated that men (and women!) are perfectly capable of understanding social cues, even ones where someone is saying “no” without using that actual word.”— Jaclyn Friedman, vox.com
“Teaching affirmative consent does something profound: It shifts the acceptable moral standard for sex, making it much clearer to everyone when someone is violating that standard.”— Jaclyn Friedman, vox.com
“But the most damaging thing that happens when we leave pleasure out of sex ed is that we allow girls to go on thinking that sex is something that’s not really for or about them.”— Jaclyn Friedman, vox.com
“Consent education does something else transformative: It tells girls that sex is supposed to be for them.”— Jaclyn Friedman, vox.com
“The patriarchal power structure might sometimes be hamhanded in enforcing its oppressive norms, but often it’s tricky. It hangs back amid an organic feminist boom and then disguises itself amid the earnest supporters, using their revolutionary vocabulary to argue for the status quo. It sows division…”— Claire Fallon, huffingtonpost.com
“The backlash has decided it’s here, but that doesn’t mean we have to let it crush us. It’s not the ’90s anymore.”— Claire Fallon, huffingtonpost.com
“Find a woman who will sell out solidarity for a pat on the head and a cookie from the establishment, and use her identity as a dodge for claims of overt misogyny. If you’re really successful, this tactic will bear fruit for generations, as the precocious Katie Roiphes of yesteryear become the season…”— Claire Fallon, huffingtonpost.com
“But where Jones frames this as a clash between feminist factions ― 'One group of feminists will try to define sexual assault and another group will call them alarmists' ― it appears rather to be a modern elaboration of an age-old antifeminist tactic: Make it clear that you’ll give top dollar and top…”— Claire Fallon, huffingtonpost.com
“The sharper sting comes from a more intimate betrayal: woman after woman using her prestigious media platform and her disingenuous claims of feminist identity to undercut a movement that uplifts women’s voices and questions sexual norms that harm them.”— Claire Fallon, huffingtonpost.com
“I would love to live in a world where women feel safe saying NO, loudly & clearly every time they feel uncomfortable but that’s something that is often impossible for women. After all, the word no hasn’t been taught to us. We haven’t been given the freedom to say no all the time.”— Arnesa, twitter.com
“Heed it: Coercion is an exacted, parallel form of assault. If we are leaving out the grey areas of these difficult conversations, then we are not fully addressing the enormous disparities of power between men and women. Coercing. A. Woman. Into. Sex. Is. An. Abuse. Of. Power.”— Amber Tamblyn, twitter.com
“The line between seduction and coercion has shifted, and shifted quickly, over the past few years (the past few months, even). When I was in my 20s, a decade ago, sex was something of a melee. 'No means no' was the only rule, and it was still solidly acceptable in mainstream social circles to bother…”— Lindy West, nytimes.com
“There is a reflexive tendency, when grappling with stories of sexual misconduct like the accusations leveled at Ansari this past weekend — incidents that seem to exist in that vast gray area between assault and a skewed power dynamic — to point out that sexual norms have changed.”— Lindy West, nytimes.com
“In 1975, 42 years before the comedian Aziz Ansari reportedly brought a date home to his apartment and repeatedly tried to initiate sex with her after she told him 'next time' and 'I don’t want to feel forced,' Susan Brownmiller published 'Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape.'”— Lindy West, nytimes.com
“The notion of affirmative consent did not fall from space in October 2017 to confound well-meaning but bumbling men; it was built, loudly and painstakingly and in public, at great personal cost to its proponents, over decades.”— Lindy West, nytimes.com
“The story had the unfortunate effect of leaving the door a little wider for self-righteousness, allowing detractors to reiterate their shitty assumptions about millennial women and their motivations instead of questioning a set of injustices so commonplace that many people seem not to register them…”— Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, jezebel.com
“There was potential with Grace’s story: the conversations that followed could have given us a real shot at cracking away at the imbalanced sexual power structures that plague us—the power structures that tell us a man’s desires are more significant than a woman’s, and that conditioned Grace not to “…”— Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, jezebel.com
“The situation in the post is actually pretty clear cut. People claim to need “more explicit” refusals, but they really just want to find a way to blame an assault victim for being in the room with her assailant. It’s the same thing we always do, and it’s garbage.”— Sady Doyle, twitter.com
“3) “But why didn’t she leave?!” Because - and this is crucial - he kept telling her he was going to stop. He systematically paused right before she fully freaked out, made her feel safe again, then resumed assaulting her, at a greater level of assault each time.”— Sady Doyle, twitter.com