“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
“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 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