The Donnas vs. Feminism, and Control Issues

Tantalizing Question: If a woman “can’t say no”, when (and why) does this constitute rape?

You’d think this has an obvious answer. Well if you are using the philosophy of predominating modern-day feminist perspectives, you’d be wrong. See the “obvious” answer would be something like “of course it’s rape, when she is unable to give consent!”

But in the context in which I came up with this question, equating “unable to give consent” with “can’t say no”, is essentially saying that men in such situations have magical powers over women, with which they are able to render women unable to think clearly, appropriately inhibit their thoughts and/or behaviours, and subconsciously coerce them into consenting to something they otherwise would not. And this is assuming both parties in the scenario are completely sober.

Considering the context, though, it is likely there was some amount of alcohol involved, which makes answering this question even more unclear!

The Donnas, who people probably would sooner identify with feminism than “versus” it, have a song by the title “Like An Animal.” Repeatedly this song makes mention of someone (a female) who “can’t say no” and “lose[s] control.” The question of whether alcohol was involved is not yet relevant here. What is important is the fact the song as a whole has got absolutely NOTHING to do with regrettable, let alone nonconsensual, sexual encounters. Quite the opposite!

So what I’ve deduced from this information, with my tiny, sex-obsessed, useless man-brain… ;) is that the hypothetical female narrative in this scenario would not think the “inability” to “say no”, nor the loss of control, to be negative on her part. The entire theme of the song in fact seems to be essentially celebrating a situation (a sexual one) involving lowered inhibitions, a lack of self-control, heightened impulsivity and, of course, primal thought processes (oh, hey, kind of like a man’s!) :)

This is what leads me to think that the idea of “a woman having lowered inhibitions = rape, regardless of whether or not the man also had lowered inhibitions”, is pretty much total bullshit. And the “pretty much” is really only in there to account for things like unconsciousness. In cases of consciousness/coherence on the part of the woman, it is simply total bullshit. Further, it leads me to think that the reason intoxication of the woman (whether by a man, or by herself) in a sexual encounter came to be, by its very nature, definitive of rape, is because of feminists who have control issues. Or, to be more specific, they may have a more submissive side to their sexuality than they deem acceptable, and feel effectively victimized by this—by their own sexuality! Tsk tsk… that’s “female empowerment” for ya.

It’s funny, because the way men are often demonized by these very same control freak-types, is by characterizing them in the same way: impulsive, with no self-control, unable to say no, etc., in sexual scenarios. In fact, I’d argue that one of the foundations of feminist theory, at least as it is today, is about controlling this aspect of male sexuality. This would explain why in situations where a man has (god forbid!) a decent amount of self-control, inhibition, etc., feminist “types” (i.e., anyone of this mentality, whether they self-identify as a feminist or not) will ultimately have to resort to guilt-tripping (“you must not love me”; “you aren’t attracted to me anymore”/”you think I’m fat!”;”why, what did I do wrong?”, etc.); ad-hominem attacks, often aimed at the infamous “male ego” (“hey, not my problem you can’t get it up!”); or the gay card (“I should’ve known any man who wasn’t a total creeper only appears that way because he’s focusing his creeping on huge cock!”)

It’s the same insecurity at play as with (speaking of gay men…) homophobes who keep themselves distracted from their own homosexuality by making fun of it in others (often, where it likely is nonexistent, or something exaggerated upon to seem quasi-existent.) By ridiculing the man’s poor impulse control or ability to “say no” to sex (again, often nonexistent faults anyway), the control freak feminist-minded won’t have to face their own insecurities with such “faults” in themselves. And I am using quotes for a reason – somehow these sort of characteristics of submissiveness are by definition faulty, because feminism has no place for a submissive woman! (And, by extension, a dominant man, because “dominant man” is obviously just a friendly euphemism for “rapist.”)

And this is the crux of it all; this is why The Donnas are blatantly anti-feminist, why potentially ANY woman who has written lyrical content of a similar nature is blatantly anti-feminist; this is why there are clearly huge problems with conflating “can’t say no” with rape: feminism by its nature does not allow for submissiveness and empowerment to co-exist. At least, in this variation of “submissiveness”, i.e., concession of most inhibition and/or higher rational thought to lust. The difference here is that unlike men (and unlike the Donnas, and many other female musicians/singers/music groups), women who have this sort of view of course end up feeling victimized by their own desires…so of course they’ve got to find a scapegoat, an explanation for why they feel victimized, that is a source outside themselves. Admitting the explanation is their own inability to “say no” that led to the transpiring events, would be like admitting a horrible weakness for someone whose entire view of sex is that only the man can lose any self-control in the situation, “giving in” means submissiveness (that much is perhaps true, and likely a reason for the type of guy considered “pussy-whipped”…), and being sexually submissive indicates weakness.

Obviously, this is certainly not the case, if women who are commonly seen as “empowered” are using a situation of loss of control in seemingly a very “dominant” way. To me that is more what empowerment is about – embracing what is there (whatever you want to call it..loss of control for the sake of consistency here); not denying its existence, projecting it onto someone else, blaming them for your behavior, and convicting them of serious crime in the process.

Then again, what does it matter what a simple-minded, sex-obsessed, misogynistic man thinks anyway? I mean, obviously the only reason I bothered to write all this - and actually made it sound somewhat intelligent! :O – is so that I don’t feel guilty for contributing to rape culture, and for my own rapist mindset towards sex!                                    

(^ sarcasm, for all you morons who can’t read between the lines.)

From Now on, if Anyone Asks Why I'm Single (It's Complicated)....

...and because so many people tend to not believe my answer anyway, I am changing the way I answer. (Admit it, anyone who asks people that, you know full well what you're really asking is "why can't you get any action?"/"so what is it, you just suck at getting girls?"/"what could the problem possibly be other than you simply aren't attractive to most men/simply have no confidence around women/are a prude/are a creep?"; you just want to hear them say it themselves. So that you can feel superior, or be patronizing by pitying them or offering "help", or fuck knows what else.... damn, humans are sick sometimes! Please, you think the hindrance is always all about dating/sex? lol!)*

So instead...I will just refer them to this song. And instead I will just say "so that I don't have to start giving this song like a speech..." --no --  "...a recorded speech playing on a broken record, after every breakup."
I don't like apologies. I am very unforgiving, and I can't apologize to someone and feel genuinely sorry, unless it was an honest mistake. Basically because apologizing to me is meant for when you genuinely went into something with no knowledge in advance of whatever it is for which you're apologizing...something you can't really be held accountable for (i.e., an honest mistake.) I can't say that I don't know how cold, bitter, cynical, etc. I can be. And usually that happens more and more the less distant I become with people. Call it a fear of commitment, if you want. In many ways that's what it is... becoming a cold-hearted asshole to protect myself. I've been emotionally and mentally violated far too many times to trust anyone to the full extent most people do, in ANY close social relationship. It's not even playing with fire, it's, why start out that's not even there?
(I will have to elaborate on that last bit at some point when I'm less lazy, more inspired, and have more time to write elaborate narratives.)

See also (not sure what "ambitious" is referencing, really, but the description itself is much more fitting for me than the "nice guy" or "jerk"/"asshole" ones ever have been!): "The Three Types of Men - The Ambitious Man"
(Yes, it is a bit oversimplified with the whole "there are three types of men and they all just want sex in the end"...but I couldn't find any hardcore science or other sorts of measurements on this one, sadly. ;) )

*Yes, I know, the link I posted keeps going on about "friends with benefits", but with friendships, as with any non-platonic relationship, I don't go out of my way to look for them. What I do go out of my way to do is avoid certain female friendships. Ones that I wouldn't actively pursuit in the absence of sexual attraction (i.e., like everyone else.) Because that obviously means I'd only be after sex. Which means they aren't a "friend with benefits" at all, as whatever thereafter unfolds, was built upon the sexal attraction...or perhaps tension..whatever the case may be. That's totally ass-backwards! If you want sex with random hot strangers then it's fine. I know, why don't I do this then?
That's a long story, again, for that longer post I'm putting off, but it basically goes back to my cynicicsm and that it's not worth the effort of active pursuit right now (as with dating in general.)
---PS, anyone (male or female) who can explain to me why it seems that most people, and especially men, don't seem to get this concept of things being backwards when you pursuit sex as a segue to friendship or to getting a girl/boyfriend; or, why it seems most people who actively pursue a relationship -- male or female -- seem to do so in a similarly backwards way? I mean why even date someone you've never even met before, if your goal is something more complex than hooking up with strangers for one night/a few times or paying for a hooker??... please do because I don't get it!

    

I'm sure I'll be doing some sort of "part 2" on this topic, as I've only skimmed the surface on several ideas, such as the ones in the annotated asterisk-afterthought-thingy above (forget what those are called.) ;)

Cerebral Vasoconstriction, aka I’m not crazy, I’ve been tested; aka only Freud thinks naughty things about balloon animals

Yes, the Blogosphere is well overdue for the madness to follow! I was originally going to say “major”, but this almost certainly isn’t exclusive to undergrads; emphasis on the “almost”, as there is really no such thing as 100% certainty. Even Richard Dawkins would agree. ;)

[For those who are open-minded and still willing to be confronted with some support for the claim I’m not (or, at least, was not predestined to be at birth) crazy/delusional/Sheldon Cooper, Ph.D, see also: “Psychology Makes You Crazy.”]

 

You Know You’re a Psychology Student When…

1. You have created something with a title such as “Cerebral Vasoconstriction” – though this is probably also applicable to biology, health sciences, and/or medical students.
2. When arguing with someone, you point out their subconscious defense mechanisms in an effort to discredit their argument(s) (or piss them off), just to be an asshole.
3. When arguing with someone, you point out their logical, cognitive, formal, informal, etc. fallacies in an effort to discredit their argument(s) (or piss them off), just to be an asshole.
4. If people ask what you’re studying and you tell them, they ask if you’re trying to read their minds; they may even give you a look, kind of like they might look if they were asking Miss Cleo or one of those girls in Girl Interrupted, if she reads minds.
5. Usually, you’re psychoanalyzing yourself, not reading other people’s minds. Or at least, you’re trying to psychoanalyze other people much less often.
6. You are aware that the scenario in #5 is arguably as much an indication of paranoia as that in #4.
7. You like to read/learn about things like bizarre sexual fetishes, Hellraiser-esque torture chambers, or what goes on in the brain during an acid trip, because it makes you feel more sane and normal.
8. You aren’t sure whether it’s better to argue for a ‘hard’ or a ‘soft’ science.
9. You anticipate that the moment people hear or see words such as “hard” or “soft”, they are very likely to either start snickering or make some type of dick joke out of it. At which point you aren’t sure where to go with the conversation topic.
10. You wonder whether your acknowledging such possibilities as the one in #9 says something about your subconscious’ secret taboo relationship with penises.
11. You wonder whether your subconscious was more attuned to “soft” or “hard”, because that may hint at something.
12. You wonder why you are still thinking about penises; this seems to make the entire thought process thus far a pointless waste of time.
13. You wonder if, when you tell people introverts are introverts, because their minds are more interesting than what is going on in their external world,  that this was an effort on the part of your subconscious to free itself from its repressed ability to express phallic-themed thoughts.
14. You use abbreviations like “i.e.”, “e.g.”, and “et al.”, in the majority of (at the least) your academic writing (but probably also your written communication in general.)
15. You have had at least one professor who used at least one of the above abbreviations verbally in lecture.
16. In colloquial/casual contexts, you omit the comma following one of the above abbreviations, so that you don’t look as nerdy as you would if you always used the comma.
17. You actually know the difference between the meanings of “i.e.” and “e.g.”
18. You start noticing professors’ lecture slides are APA-formatted, and then lose focus on the actual lecture and start wondering if that’s mandatory, or if it was a cover-your-ass-type thing, because they don’t want the IRB or some other ethical board on their ass for plagiarism of lecture material. Then you start thinking what a pain in the ass it must be to have to not only make all those lecture slides, but also APA-format them. And you wonder how they can possibly remember all those rules. And how many tries you think it’ll take before you stop fucking up the formatting on your hypothetical slides at sometime in the hypothetical future…then you stuff your feelings of quickly surfacing fear that won’t stop haunting you.. “Who ever said you have a future?” Then you realize you just missed a shitload of lecture notes.
19. You wonder if there is any explanation as to why you would use the word “ass” three times in one list item, other than possibly some subconscious repressed thought screaming to get out, and take all the penis-filled thoughts with it.
20. You then start wondering if you only started wondering this so that your mind can rationalize the images of anal sex that would follow.
21. You eventually realize that trying to analyze yourself on the most superficially rational level, is not going to inform you of whether or not your subconscious secretly wants to fuck men, any more than staring at the cover of Maxim would inform you of the same.
22. You explain your own thoughts/internal processes in structural and visual terms, such as “superficially rational” to represent the outermost parts of the cortex.
23. You wonder whether being very visual is a sign something is wrong with you.
24. You wonder whether you’ve already gone far beyond simply, “Psychology Makes You Crazy.”
25. It is not uncommon for you to be awake at times like 12:30AM, doing things like writing a blog entry in which you list relatively ubiquitous, yet idiosyncratic scenarios that are characteristic of psychology students (which may or may not contradict a previous claim regarding self-analysis vs. that of others..?)
26. You start to question yourself on moral principle, after someone gets weirded out when they find out you fairly confidently had long presumed something about them, that they never actually told you; or, when you somehow were able to manipulate someone (usually in a verbal manner) to get them to say something they hadn’t anticipated – nor hoped – to mention… by which point you pretty  much nod along when they call you an asshole.
27. You understand certain women better than they can understand themselves…and you know that “certain women” essentially means (to all the “other” women as well as to men) “the ones you don’t want to engage in any social interaction with”, (and sadly, that many men don’t know essentially means “the ones you don’t want to engage in any sexual relations with.”)
28. You love disturbing psychological thrillers – the more fucked up, the better (though not in a freaky sex fetish way…just speaking for myself here…) [Note: See #7.]
29. If you’ve ever dipped into the world of Evo-Psych… you’ve had to put up with political extremists who either start violating your personal space to rant at you about how you sound like a Social Darwinian Marxist; or those who do the same but accuse you of pushing a right-wing agenda: Both are equally plausible statements: Marxism was an ideology heavy on the cleansing of the genetically unfit, justified in the name of Darwinian theories of natural selection; and the right-wing agenda, it goes without mentioning, has always exploited evolutionary theory as its sturdy backbone.
30. You actually understood all the sarcasm above (or other things like it.)
31. People seem slightly surprised when it occurs to them you are the one telling them that most of Freudian psychoanalytic theory is a bunch of quasi-pseudo-scientific-wishy-washy-hoo-ha.
32. You don’t analyze your own thought process to death when you use terminologies such as “hoo-ha”, the way you do with terms like “ass”, “hard”, “soft”, and “phallic-themed.”
33. There’s always about 1000 people nearby who are drunker than you on the average college campus, but you are almost always the one most likely to be talking about illicit substances.
34. You’re wondering why a list like this one hasn’t already been made – or you’re assuming that’s impossible, and you just must not have found it (them?) yet.
35. XtraNormal is a type of cartoon entertainment.
36. You mentally pick apart song lyrics when you listen to music, and/or mentally pick apart the artist, often based upon the song lyrics or overall content.
37. You have ever wondered why some musical artists are notorious for excessive, liberal use of profanity, while others of the exact same genre are not.
38. You wonder if all the scientific/social scientific studies ever published making the claim men on average have a higher libido than women, are some sort of female vendetta-conspiracy against men, in light of the fact almost every female rock musician seems to carry the libido of about a half dozen men… though drawing such conclusions solely based on the nature and content of artists’ creative works is hardly conclusive evidence. ;)
39. In non-academic contexts, you have actually used phrases such as “drawing such conclusions…” and “..hardly conclusive evidence”, and you weren’t actually trying to be a smartass.
40. For at least a fraction of a second, the thought occurred to you that it would be funny to create DSM criteria for this list, and state a minimum number of items must be true of the reader to reach criteria for being a psych. student. Then you felt that choosing such a number would be largely arbitrary, unempirical, and wrongly assign to a bunch of people a label that they probably don’t want, or that will become a large goldmine of unjustified social stigmatization.
41. You have attempted to analyze a dream you had, and by the time you get through most of the first main part of it, you’ve forgotten the entire second half of the dream.
42. You wonder if obtaining, retaining, and simply having possession of large amounts of factual information on the topic of sleep, REM cycles, and human dreaming, but yet apparently having a memory lapse when you try to actually apply any of this knowledge, makes you in some way a hypocrite.
43. You want to know if a personal preference for brunettes is somehow a negative indicator of personal  health or “reproductive fitness”, in light of the findings about blonde hair, a youthful appearance, fertility, and the tendency for people to pair-bond based on social rank/approval.'
44. You’re not sure why it matters when you don’t really like kids anyway, so you don’t really want any.
45. You’re once again curious about the irony of the frequency at which you hear about unplanned pregnancies and teen parents, vs. that about long-married couples in their 30s-50s who both appear to some degree, to be virtually infertile.
46. …as well as the irony of the trend towards higher birth rates in lower IQ individuals, coupled with the mysterious generational, consistent increase in average IQ.
47. You’re not opposed to using stereotypes in colloquial conversation, because you know at least a few of them that actually have empirical support.
48. You want to know why “sleep experts” keep reiterating the same bullshit line about insomnia, that they call a “tip”, to reserve the bed only for sleep and for sex; there don’t appear to be very many people today in the modern West who would outwardly refute classical and operant conditioning theory, so these much be the world’s most ignorant experts. That is at least more likely than militant conditioning-theory-deniers, Everyone knows that given the scenario bed = conditioned stimulus, getting into bed to go to sleep = unconditioned stimulus, you will end up with horniness = conditioned response. Or, in other words, every time you go to bed with the intention of sleeping, you’d end up having trouble doing so until you find somebody to sleep with. Most likely a naked somebody.
49. If that last sentence somehow gave you more phallic-themed mental imagery, you’re probably all the way back up somewhere around…Item #11; if it did not, you’re probably not reading this, which means I am talking to myself, which means I seem to have completely different mental health concerns to address altogether.

Random awesomeness. From me, Honorary Founder of Awesome.