adplus-dvertising
Connect with us

Politics

The Politics of Bad Sex – The New Yorker

Published

 on


In “Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent,” Katherine Angel suggests that mixed feelings are at the heart of desire and pleasure.Photograph by David Torres / EyeEm / Getty

When I was an undergraduate at Yale, in the early nineteen-nineties, I went to the university’s gymnasium one evening each week for a women’s self-defense class. We were instructed on how to fight off would-be rapists with physical force, using our knees, elbows, fingernails, and keys, being sure to mark an attacker’s face for police identification. Walking to my dorm in the dark, I was alert to not being a victim. It was part of the informal feminist curriculum that also included Take Back the Night marches and the slogan “No Means No,” one that dates me to an era when women were trying to defy vulnerability.

As a rape counsellor in those days, I remember chuckling with feminist peers when we heard about a new Sexual Offense Prevention Policy at Antioch College. The rules said that consent had to be asked for and given at each new level of sexual activity, with silence conveying a lack of consent. Saturday Night Live mocked the policy: “May I elevate the level of sexual intimacy by feeling your buttocks?” “Yes, you have my permission.” This stilted picture of how sex should proceed seemed absurdly unrealistic and made a small college’s policy a national punch line, despite its serious and understandable aim to prevent rape. At the time, even the category of “date rape,” on which I was trained to educate others, mostly envisioned a forcible act or one imposed on an incapacitated person.

But, three decades later, Antioch’s vision has more than stood the test of time, as evidenced by many young people and their schools’ views about how sexual interactions should be governed. The aspiration of affirmative consent is no joke; it is now mainstream and considered common sense among college students and recent graduates. So, in a typical example, today, Yale’s standard is one of affirmative consent, which it defines as “positive, unambiguous, and voluntary agreement to engage in specific sexual activity throughout a sexual encounter.” The policy goes on: “Consent cannot be inferred merely from the absence of a ‘no.’ A clear ‘yes,’ verbal or otherwise, is necessary. Consent to some sexual acts does not constitute consent to others, nor does past consent to a given act constitute present or future consent. Consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual encounter and can be revoked by any participant at any time.” Whether or not it is actually honored in the breach, affirmative consent is now used for purposes of investigations and penalties.

300x250x1

I’ve seen what enforcement of these standards looks like, as a lawyer representing students complaining of or accused of sexual misconduct. Today, schools that have affirmative-consent policies treat violations as sexual assault. In hundreds of cases, colleges have determined that men and women failed to obtain affirmative consent in a particular instance and have disciplined them, often with suspension or expulsion. In many other cases, students have felt deeply violated even when their partner followed affirmative-consent rules—asking for and receiving a “yes”—because aspects of the situation made them feel that what occurred was not what they wanted. Sometimes the explicit request for permission might have induced them to do something they were conflicted about. Some schools have trained students, as part of orientation, to seek and settle for nothing less than “enthusiastic” agreement to sex. Even under an affirmative-consent regime’s valorization of clarity, “yes” doesn’t always mean “yes.”

The jury is still out on whether our experiment with affirmative consent will reduce rape, prove useful for distinguishing sex from sexual assault, or lead to less experience of sexual violation. But what may well emerge is a recognition that the clearest practices of “yes” and “no” do little to untangle a deep difficulty that makes consent seem promising yet wide of the mark: the altogether human experience of not knowing in the first place what is wanted or unwanted, desired or undesired.

In a letter to Princess Marie Bonaparte, a French psychoanalyst who sought treatment for what she described as “frigidity,” Sigmund Freud wrote, in the nineteen-twenties, “The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’ ” This unanswerable question seems to drive Katherine Angel’s “Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent” (Verso), which welcomes us to experience a twenty-first-century feminist version of Freud’s aporia. We might have supposed that the sexual revolution of the nineteen-sixties and seventies would have liberated women and men to say what it is that they want and to get those wants satisfied. But Angel—whose book takes its title from Michel Foucault’s sardonic declaration, in the 1976 book “The Will to Knowledge,” that, in the wake of the emancipatory movements of the day, “Tomorrow sex will be good again”—deflates any delusions that the goodness of sex hinges on positive affirmation of our true desires. Foucault wrote, “We must not think that by saying yes to sex one says no to power.” Speaking truth to power simply doesn’t cut it, because the truth about our desires is . . . ambivalence, all the way down. The dominant socio-legal rubric that purports to divide permitted acts from prohibited ones—consent—is an on-off switch, not a dimmer. That doesn’t accommodate what, to Angel, is at the heart of desire and pleasure: the mixed feelings, the indeterminacy, the pulling in different directions, the balancing of conflicting considerations, the imbalanced negotiations, the paralysis by uncertainty. All of it is universal, she suggests, and also particular to “the double bind in which women exist: that saying no may be difficult, but so too is saying yes.”

Angel is the author of two previous books on female sexuality, “Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell,” from 2012, an aphoristic work crossing memoir, prose poetry, and philosophy, and “Daddy Issues,” from 2019, a long essay on the father-daughter dynamic. In “Unmastered,” Angel evinces skepticism about words as an adequate medium for conveying desire: “When the doing is dominated by speaking, when there are too many words words words, it is because, in fact, you are somehow not enough. By which I mean that you do not feel yourself to be enough, and that feeling makes you shrink, in your eyes and mine.” Yet in what Angel calls “consent culture,” preventing sexual violence and insuring sexual pleasure rest on a woman expressing what she wants. “Woe betide she who does not know herself and speak that knowledge,” she writes in her new book. This vision dovetails with what Angel terms “confidence feminism,” in which self-respecting women are supposed to be outspoken and assertive, so as to claim their equality and empowerment. (Cue Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” or Amy Cuddy’s TED Talk on “power poses.”) In sex, this mode translates into the consent solution: a (strong) woman speaks to get the sex that she wants. If she doesn’t speak up, she risks assault, but there is also such a thing as bad sex, which we tend to see as an inevitable life experience, not rape. This is where Angel wants to intervene, refusing to brush aside bad sex just because it may be consensual and not legally punishable. “ ‘Bad sex’ doesn’t have to be assault in order for it to be frightening, shame-inducing, upsetting, and a legal concept has trouble drawing out this difference,” Angel writes. “Bad sex is a political issue, one of inequality of access to pleasure and self-determination, and it is as a political issue that we should be examining it.” Angel is with critics of consent culture in observing that affirmative-consent rules blur the distinction between sexual assault and bad sex, but she diverges from them in her view that bad sex is also a serious political, if not legal, problem, worthy of our attention.

“Bad sex,” Angel writes, is “miserable, unpleasant, humiliating, one-sided, painful” sex. Much consensual—even affirmatively consented to—sex is still bad sex. And, when affirmative-consent standards are adhered to, bad sex may become even worse; a woman might judge herself for a gap between what she says and what she feels, or for not having more clear-cut desires. The pains of sexual life are unfairly distributed: sex for a woman can involve the risks of pregnancy; slut-shaming; judgment, of her assertiveness or her diffidence; blame, for wanting it or not wanting it. Studies show a significant pleasure gap between men and women. What should we do about women who are experiencing what Angel calls “so much misery-making sex”? Since consent can’t distinguish effectively between good and bad sex, Angel proposes, we need to shift focus. The solution is to acknowledge “the fact of women’s vulnerability to violence” but stop trying to “make them invulnerable in response.” The hardening project of my college self-defense class and today’s earnest affirmative-consent push would be twin failures in that regard. Instead, Angel writes, we should acknowledge that “we don’t always know what we want,” in order “to allow for obscurity, for opacity and for not-knowing.” All those hours in therapy, working on knowing ourselves, only to see that “self-knowledge is not a reliable feature of female sexuality, nor of sexuality in general; in fact, it is not a reliable feature of being a person.”

Does this disavowal of knowledge actually open the door to good sex? Despite the wryness of her book’s title, Angel seems to offer an enthusiastic “yes.” Indeed, the final chapter, a paean to vulnerability, moves unabashedly from philosophical description into a surprisingly utopian self-help or how-to exposition on sexual fulfillment. She advises: “Pleasure involves risk, and that can never be foreclosed or avoided.” Leaning on the queer-theory classic by Leo Bersani “Is the Rectum a Grave?,” Angel writes, “We are all at someone else’s mercy in sex, and we all experience helplessness, that originary anguish and bliss; we all become infantile, dependent. . . . There is great joy, strength and transcendence to be found in the fracturing of the composed, adult self.” Sexual desire, she continues, “can take us by surprise; can creep up, unbidden, confounding our plans, and with it our beliefs about ourselves. But this giddiness is only possible if we are vulnerable to it. If asked, we might not say that what we want is sex in a hotel with a gruff stranger. It might be inaccurate to say either that we did, or that we didn’t. Desire isn’t always there to be known. Vulnerability is the state that makes its discovery possible.”

Angel criticizes certain other contemporary feminists, represented recently by Laura Kipnis, whose 2017 book, “Unwanted Advances,” excoriates a campus culture of Title IX investigations for infantilizing women and “restoring the most fettered versions of traditional femininity through the backdoor.” Angel objects to such “individualizing, shoulder-shrugging criticism of young women who are using the tools available to them to address the pains of their sexual lives.” But despite Angel’s more empathetic tone, hers is no less trenchant a critique of the most prominent of the tools available right now—affirmative consent. If anything, hers is more cutting, the knife going in softly; we understand her point to be that clinging to affirmative consent as a bulwark against sexual harm brings a fate far worse than infantilization. To Angel, it leads to tragically missing out on what makes sex good: “abandon, adventure, release, playfulness.” The “ideal of joyful vulnerability” that she extols is said to be “murkily inaccessible to our dominant understandings of sex.” She urges “letting oneself go to places of intensity, to the hairsbreadth space between knowing and not knowing what you want, between controlling the action and letting the action take over—being spat out of the flume into this coursing water taking you God-knows-where.” She avers that “the fixation on yes and no doesn’t help us navigate these waters; it’s precisely the uncertain, unclear space between yes and no that we need to learn to navigate.” This means placing radical trust in one’s partner not to abuse—with the risk that that entails—rather than having faith in consent rules to ward off abuse. What’s at stake is simply ineffable: “intense pleasure.”

For centuries, our legal system criminalized all sex outside of marriage, and two decades ago we still had enforceable laws against gay sex, adultery, fornication, and sodomy. None of these acts ceased to occur because of the prohibitions against them, but they carried painful burdens. Many of these stigmas continue today, though they’re no longer addressed through criminal law. It should not be surprising that we gravitate toward elaborate rules to sort permitted sexual conduct from the force field of sexual conduct that remains prohibited, namely rape. Well-developed rules beyond criminal law, governing sexuality in workplaces and schools, and regarding unwelcome conduct—unwanted touching, gazing, commenting, complimenting—are also part of the residue of the enforcement of sexual morality, even as the rules now explicitly aim to serve equality and autonomy. If the parts of Angel’s book that read as “how to make sex good again” were followed, we might well “discover things we didn’t know we wanted.” But, as Angel also understands, a lawyer would have to genuinely fear for people who tried this at home, because, in our current paradigm, such sexual surprise risks bringing on serious institutional penalties, not to mention profound feelings of harm. It also may be naïve for oldsters to assume that young people’s risk-taking around current consent rules wouldn’t invite the vulnerability of being at another’s mercy—the ever-present risk that one or the other might be dramatically shamed as a sexual deviant and banished from the community, or worse. It’s possible that the bells and whistles of consent policies multiply opportunities for transgression and thereby foreground danger, heightening the contradictions and possibilities of pleasure. Even on Angel’s hedonistic terms, perhaps affirmative-consent proponents have the last laugh.

“Sex, if we are lucky,” Angel writes, “is not just exciting and satisfying; it also touches our deepest fears, our deepest pains.” The notion that pain and fear are not to be eradicated from sexual experience but instead understood as central to its pleasures involves a kind of luck that we don’t tend to acknowledge as such these days, particularly in the immediate post-#MeToo years, at least publicly. Could people’s sexual luck, apart from their legal luck, be improved, gradually, by teaching them not just “yes” and “no,” but also “maybe”? That’s a clear maybe.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Politics

Larry David shares how he feels about Trump – CNN

Published

 on


Larry David shares how he feels about Trump

“Curb Your Enthusiasm” star Larry David shares how he feels about former President Donald Trump and the 2020 election. Watch the full episode of “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace,” streaming March 29 on Max.


03:21

– Source:
CNN

Adblock test (Why?)

300x250x1

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Politics

Trump's claims on crime rates clash with police data – NBC News

Published

 on


Surging crime levels, out-of-control Democratic cities and “migrant crime.”

Former President Donald Trump regularly cites all three at his campaign rallies, in news releases and on Truth Social, often saying President Joe Biden and Democrats are to blame.

But the crime picture Trump paints contrasts sharply with years of police and government data at both the local and national levels.

300x250x1

FBI statistics released this year suggested a steep drop in crime across the country last year. It’s a similar story across major cities, with violent crime down year over year in Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C.

NBC News analyzed crime data to evaluate Trump’s assertions about the topic.

U.S. and big city crime rates

Trump’s campaign often refers to crime levels, regularly pointing the finger at Biden.

“On Joe Biden’s watch, violent crime has skyrocketed in virtually every American city,” the campaign said in a news release published this month on its site.

Trump himself has made similar remarks.

“Four years ago, I told you that if crooked Joe Biden got to the White House, our borders would be abolished, our middle class would be decimated and our communities would be plagued by bloodshed, chaos and violent crime,” Trump said in a speech last month at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “We were right about everything.”

Government figures don’t support that characterization.

Reported violent crime dropped 6% across the board when comparing the last three months of 2022 to the same period in 2023, the FBI reported.

The reported drops were especially pronounced in the big cities that Trump often assails, many of which have Democratic mayors. Violent crime dropped by 11% in cities with populations of 1 million or more, according to FBI data, while murders dropped by 20%, rape was down 16%, and aggravated assault fell by 11%.

Reached for comment, the Trump campaign pointed to other reports indicating that certain types of crimes increased in specific cities.

At the national level, the reported rate of violent crime in 2022, the most recent full year with comprehensive FBI data, was 380.7 offenses per 100,000 people. That’s lower than the overall reported violent crime rate from 2020 — the last full year Trump was in office — when the figure was at 398.5.

The lowest reported violent crime rate of Trump’s presidency was in 2019, when the metric was at 380.8 — in line with the 2022 rate.

The FBI said it will release more comprehensive 2023 crime data in October, just before the election.

The Trump campaign, reached for comment, cited certain categories of violent crime, such as motor vehicle theft, as having increased during the Biden administration, according to FBI figures.

“Joe Biden is trying to convince Americans not to believe their own eyes,” campaign press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement, adding that “Democrats have turned great American cities into cesspools of bloodshed and crime.”

New York City crime

Trump, who was born and raised in New York but now lives in Florida, often rails against what he portrays as an increasing crime rate in his former hometown.

Those references to soaring violence have only increased as he faces criminal charges in New York accusing him of falsifying business records related to hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. Trump, who has pleaded not guilty in that case, must also post a $175 million bond to prevent state Attorney General Letitia James from collecting the judgment from a New York civil fraud case.

“I did nothing wrong, and New York should never be put in a position like this again,” Trump posted on Truth Social about the civil judgment in all capital letters. “Businesses are fleeing, violent crime is flourishing, and it is very important that this be resolved in its totality as soon as possible.”

In a separate post, he claimed that “murders & violent crime hit unimaginable records” in the city.

However, major crimes in New York City are down this year by 2.3%, according to police department data comparing year-to-date figures to the same period in 2023.

Those figures for last year were also far below the highs from recent decades. In 1990, more than 527,000 major crimes were reported, compared to more than 126,000 last year, according to New York police data — a drop of more than 75%.

In 2001, more than 162,000 major crimes were reported in New York. The figure dropped by more than 20% over the next two decades.

At the same time, New York City data indicates that the number of major crimes increased in the past few years, though reported violent crimes like murder and rape were down last year from previous years.

‘Migrant crime’

Trump’s dehumanizing language about migrants has become a mainstay of his political speeches since he first sought office in 2015.

In a news release this month, his campaign said the “border Crisis has created a tragic surge in violent crime against innocent American citizens at the hands of some of the world’s most violent criminals.”

Trump has also focused his energy on high-profile cases such as the death of Laken Riley, who was killed in Georgia while jogging. The suspect is a Venezuelan citizen who entered the U.S. illegally in 2022.

“Every day, innocent citizens are being killed, stabbed, shot, raped and murdered because of Biden migrant crime,” Trump said in a video posted to his campaign’s X account last week.

However, there is no evidence of a migrant-driven crime wave in the U.S., according to local police department data.

Crime reports have decreased in several major cities targeted by Texas’ Operation Lone Star, a program backed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott that flies or buses migrants from the state to Democratic-run cities across the U.S.

Several of those cities — New York, Chicago, Washington and Philadelphia — have had decreases in year-to-date reported crime totals compared to the same period last year.


Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Politics

Federal government promising a 'renters' bill of rights' in upcoming budget – CBC.ca

Published

 on


Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that his government will introduce new measures — including a new “bill of rights” — that he says will help protect those who rent their homes as part of the upcoming budget.

Trudeau said the new measures are specifically geared toward younger people, who are renting more than previous generations.

“It’s about changing the rules of the game in a way that meets young people where they are,” he said on Wednesday.

300x250x1

Ottawa will work with provinces and territories to develop a “renters’ bill of rights” that would introduce a national standard lease agreement and implement requirements for landlords to disclose an apartment’s pricing history to allow tenants to negotiate their rent.

The new measures will also include a $15-million fund for provincial legal aid organizations that help tenants fight against “renovictions” and landlord abuse.

The Liberals are also proposing to change federal rules so that making rental payments on time will count toward someone’s credit scores, something Trudeau said is meant to help renters looking to one day buy a house.

“If you look at someone who pays a $2,000 [per month] mortgage, they’re getting recognition and credit for that from their bank as part of their credit score,” the prime minister said.

“But if you’re paying $2,000 a month on rent, you get no kudos.”

Typically the government doesn’t discuss what is in an annual budget until it is introduced in the House of Commons. But the announcement was made weeks prior to the release of the Liberals’ next budget, which is slated to drop on April 16.

Releasing tidbits from the budget ahead of time is part of a new communications strategy for the Liberals, sources told CBC News. Trudeau and his ministers are expected to make a number of similar announcements in the run-up to the budget, the sources said.

WATCH | Trudeau says new measures aim to help tenants: 

Liberals promise ‘renters’ bill of rights’ to fight housing crisis

5 hours ago

Duration 2:07

The Liberals are looking to create a ‘renters’ bill of rights’ to help deal with Canada’s housing crisis. Justin Trudeau says the plan is geared toward younger people suffering from a rising cost of living. The Conservatives call the measures meaningless.

Before revealing the planned rental measures on Wednesday, Trudeau took a moment to plug the April 16 fiscal plan, saying that the budget will be about “fairness.”

“For Canada to succeed, we need everyone to succeed,” he said.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland joined Trudeau for his announcement and hinted about further announcements ahead of budget day.

“Over the coming days and in the April budget, we are going to launch a no-holds-barred plan to wrestle down the cost of owning and renting a home,” she said.

Wednesday’s announcements came on the same day that the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation released a report that found a surge in new apartment construction drove housing start increases in several major Canadian cities last year.

But the report also cautions that demand continues to outweigh supply.

The opposition Conservatives, who have enjoyed a healthy lead in recent polls, have made housing — and other cost-of-living issues — a key point of attack against the governing Liberals.

Following his announcement, Trudeau was asked whether he thinks he bears any responsibility for people feeling left behind in the current economy and whether the new measures would be enough to convince younger people to support him in the next election.

In response, Trudeau suggested that a recent rise in the cost of living is not unique to Canada.

“Young people who are key to our present, and obviously key to our future, are seeing a system that is stacked against them. That’s true in Canada but also true elsewhere around the world,” he said. “What we’re focused on now is making sure that young people can see their success in the economy.”

Opposition parties criticize Liberal announcement

Scott Aitchison, the Conservative housing critic, said Wednesday’s announcement was Liberal posturing that won’t get results.

“Today’s photo op is just another set of meaningless measures that won’t result in building the homes Canadians need,” he said in a statement.

NDP housing critic Jenny Kwan criticized the announcement for not going far enough.

“The Liberals are so out of touch with what Canadian renters are experiencing that they keep offering half-measures instead of a real action,” Kwan said in a statement.

The NDP is calling on the government to invest more in affordable housing while temporarily preventing for-profit firms from buying designated affordable-housing spaces.

WATCH | Liberal government promises better protections for renters in upcoming budget: 

Liberal government promises better protections for renters in upcoming budget

9 hours ago

Duration 11:39

The Liberal government unveiled three new proposals Wednesday to better protect renters in Canada. Power & Politics speaks to Marci Ien, minister of women, gender equality and youth, about the proposed protections.

Adblock test (Why?)

728x90x4

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending