-----Original Message----- From: That*&%#*#RogersWoman <debburz at yahoo.com>
Ironically, we teach defensive driving to kids learning how to drive a car, but defensive living gets thrown out a window when it comes to the sanctity of white middle-class feminism that seeks to further isolate and "protect" the female by someone removing all perceived forms of objectification, damage or harm.
http://www.soc.umn.edu/~samaha/cases/sexual%20correctness.htm http://www.antioch-college.edu/Community/survival_guide/campus_resources/sopsap.htm This essay appeared in the Journal of Social Philosophy 28:1 (1997): 22-36. It was reprinted in my The Philosophy of Sex, 4th edition (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), pp. 323-40. (Project funded by the Research Support Scheme of the Central European University.)
Antioch's "Sexual Offense Policy":
A Philosophical Exploration* According to the Policy, a verbal "yes" replaces any possible bodily movement or behavior as the one and only reliable sign that proceeding with sexual activity is permissible. If I ask, "may I kiss you?" I may not proceed on the basis of your bodily reply, e.g., you push your mouth out at mine, or groan and open your mouth invitingly, because even though it seems obvious what these behaviors mean ("yes"), I might be making an interpretive mistake: I see your open mouth as presented "invitingly" because I have with undue optimism deceived myself into thinking that's what you mean. So I must wait for the words, "yes, you may kiss me,"25 about which interpretive unclarity is not supposed to arise, else the problem Antioch set for itself is unsolvable. The verbal "yes," after communicative probing, is Antioch's Cartesian foundation. But can the ambiguities of the verbal be cleared up by language itself? How much communicative probing is enough? This question opens up a hermeneutic circle that traps Antioch's policy. Her "yes," repeated several times under the third-degree of communicative sex, can always be probed more for genuineness, if I wanted to really make sure. But, losing patience, she shows her "yes" to be genuine when she grabs me. The body reasserts itself.
My continuing to probe her "yes" over and over again, to make sure that her heart and desire are wrapped up in the act to which she is apparently consenting (must I ask her whether her agreement has been engineered for my benefit by "compulsory heterosexuality"?), is a kind of paternalism. Because the robust respect that Antioch's policy fosters for a woman's "no" is offset by the weaker respect it fosters for her "yes," conceiving of the Antioch policy not as attempting to foster respect for the autonomy of the other, but as attempting to prevent acquaintance rape, i.e., harmful behaviors, is more accurate. At best, the relationship between Antioch's policy and autonomy is unclear. One Antioch student, Suzy Martin, defends the Policy by saying that "It made me aware I have a voice. I didn't know that before."26 Coming in the mid-90s from a college-age woman, the kind of person we expect to know better, this remark is astonishing. In effect, she admits that what Antioch is doing for her, at such an advanced age, is what her parents and earlier schooling should have done long ago, to teach her that she has a voice. Thus Antioch is employing an anti-autonomy principle in its treatment of young adults--in loco parentis--that my college generation had fought to eliminate. <snip.
Michael Pugliese