Four years ago, I wrote a post titled Conservatives Cannot Comprehend Consent, and this week, events have borne this out. Rush Limbaugh actually came right out and demonstrated that he does not understand the concept of consent:
You know what the magic word, the only thing that matters in American sexual mores today is? One thing. You can do anything, the left will promote and understand and tolerate anything, as long as there is one element. Do you know what it is? Consent. If there is consent on both or all three or all four, however many are involved in the sex act, it's perfectly fine. Whatever it is. But if the left ever senses and smells that there's no consent in part of the equation then here come the rape police. But consent is the magic key to the left.
Yes, rush, consent is the magic key. If three or four or more individuals want to dress up in fursuits or latex bodygloves and engage in a mass orgy involving vegetables and baked goods (but not animals, which cannot give consent), then it is perfectly fine. Kink is not immoral or amoral if everybody is consenting and the safety of the participants is taken into consideration.
This is pretty much sex education 101- one should not use another's body without affirmative consent. Conservatives such as Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh hate women. Trump may bloviate that the women who have accused him of sexual assault were 'too ugly' to grope, but this is patent bullshit- sexual assault is about dominance, not sex, which is something that Trump pathologically tries to assert over those around him.
I've had that suspicion for some time; it's as though conservatives were actively hostile to consent. Of course, it might be because many "right"-wingers seem to believe that no one not coerced would want to have anything to do with them.
ReplyDeleteI don't get it. Consent IS in fact the key, isn't it?
ReplyDeleteWithout consent, the people who come after you aren't called the rape police. They're just the plain old police.
it is a bit gobsmacking how it seems to be totally outside of their perception, like a two-dimensional creature being told about 3-dimensional existence. They just cock their heads and look at the same as a dog does when you sing to it...
ReplyDelete...of course, it also plays into the 50s suburban/ evangelical belief that a man's wife and children are his property to do with as he will...
ReplyDeleteI am not using baked goods for the S-E-X; they are for eating, & not that kind, smarty pantses.
ReplyDeleteVegetables, on the other hand, are not for eating. Stick them where you will!
ZRM: "'50s?" Try proverbial Dawn of Time. Lotta "tradition" to resist there.
Consent presumes equality of status. So for misogynists, to ask for consent is already to confer equality where, in fact, the act is about affirming fundamental inequality: you are weaker than me, you have no rights, only privileges I confer or withhold on my own volition. This is of course The Story of O 101.
ReplyDeletesure, Bouffant, but the Imaginary Fifties provides a comforting home base for the "way things used to be" fetishists.
ReplyDeleteInquiring minds are wondering precisely what ZRM sings to his dog.
ReplyDeleteThis is what I sing to my dog.
ReplyDelete~