this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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[–] [email protected] 44 points 6 months ago (14 children)

Here's the basic line of thought:

Men occupy a more powerful position in society due to the generally patriarchal structures. Women occupy a less powerful position than men, even when a particular women holds more overt power (e.g., a woman that's a CEO). As a result, sexual relationships between men and women always have a power imbalance; that imbalance of power means that women can never really be consenting, since there's always some form of 'threat' involved. A woman that believes she wants sex believes that way because society has conditioned her to be that way, rather than that being something she chose in a vacuum.

And theoretically, this is all true, kind of. But it also isn't, because that would mean that women can never have any agency over their own body or their own sexual choices. ...Unless they "choose" to be lesbian, which isn't actually a choice at all.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (3 children)

No, it's not all true, not even theoretically. The idea that women can't consent to sex is complete and utter horseshit, not to mention insanely sexist.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I mean it is true to an extent, it is just treating consent as an absolute and not a spectrum. Power imbalances absolutely impact where that needle is.

I've had lots of sex like "yes please". I've had sex where I was like "ill probably enjoy enjoy this" or "I genuinely don't really care one way or another and it will please my partner" (who I'm not vulnerable to in a societally enforced way) and all of them would fit the binary of consensual but are at various points on the spectrum.

The last example is an illustrative example where it would clearly fall at different points on the spectrum if I was more or less dependent on/vulnerable to my partner.

Sex negative feminism had some points that were correct to some extent, sex negative and sex positive feminism both synthesized into a more sex neutral position for a reason.

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