Tuesday, November 02, 2021

[bxzutaqn] social class who consider consent impossible to obtain

i strongly suspect there exists a large group of people who hold the following belief: the idea of anyone willingly consenting to have sex with me is preposterous.  their belief is supported by their personal experiences of asking and being rejected, so is accurate.

for this group of people, the only realistic ways to achieve having sex are through force, psychological manipulation, deception, inducing or taking advantage of errors in judgment, or payment.

evaluate educational materials and policies advocating consent culture from the perspective of these people.

it might be horrifying to consider their point of view.  on one hand, these people must exist.  (look in yourself: there are people you don't want to have sex with.  given the homogeneous nature of society, your preferences are likely correlated with those of other people in society.  therefore, just among the people you don't want to have sex with, there is likely a good chunk of them that no one wants to have sex with.)  on the other hand, these people may be so unpleasant to think about -- some may consider these people not worthy of human rights, people who should be destroyed -- that one may prefer to pretend they do not exist.  i suspect a great many people, including policymakers, do the latter.

to these people, "consent culture" at best falls on deaf ears because consent is impossible.  perhaps "deaf ears" plays out as follows: they ignore descriptions of what consent should be and instead calibrate "consent" to their own experiences, experiences populated with the non-consensual and not-very-consensual methods of achieving sex mentioned above.  those experiences get calibrated as consent, objectively incorrect of course.

at worst, consent culture to these people may foster resentment against people who advocate consent culture: resentment against people who are ignorant (perhaps deliberately so, as described above) of this group of people, resentment against people who are using (or perceived to be using) consent culture as a weapon to make this group of people feel unwelcome, Othered.

inspired by considering a previously proposed method of advocating consent culture, one that focuses on encouraging people to avoid false accusations of rape.  for these people, avoiding accusations of rape, whether false or true, would eliminate all possibility of having sex, so this avenue of advocacy would not be effective on them.

this group of people does not have a name.  there is some overlap with incel (but there's a battle raging about whom that term encompasses, whether to characterize a group by its extremists, those who advocate violence), but this group also includes people who do achieve having sex, perhaps often, but through the non-consensual or not-very-consensual means listed above.  "loser" might be pretty apt term though rarely precisely defined, though it too doesn't seem to encompass those who are good at force, deception, or manipulation.

both incel and loser are typically applied to men, but this group contains all genders.

possible difficulties with this model:

everyone has people who they want to have sex with, but the desire isn't mutual.

there are some people, on a good day, who will willingly consent to have sex with anybody, and this is well-known, so conversely nobody believes their chances are actually zero: you might get lucky.  though perhaps the people who are the subject of this post (correctly) believe their chances of encountering or accessing (future post) such a person are zero.

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