I am so excited that my new book VIOLATED: Sexual Consent & Assault in the 21st Century, with Remy Green, was recently released. My primary goal with this book is to reshape social conversations, with the secondary and idealistic goal of reshaping the law. You can read the first chapter in the sample selection on Amazon, but I wanted to make sure that everyone also had the opportunity to read the part of the conclusion that matters the most to me. Please keep in mind as you read that there is an entire book’s worth of content leading up to this, but I hope this passage will entice many of you to want to read more. And even if you don’t, that it will give you something to seriously think about. (I’m only allowed 2,000 words here by my publisher).

Sexual violation is an incredibly complex problem, and as with so many social problems, most of us instinctively want to believe there’s one magic solution that will somehow take care of the whole issue. This desire for simplicity helps breed misguided campaigns telling men, “Don’t r–e!”—as if most men were intentionally violating consent and just needed a public service announcement to remind them they weren’t supposed to do that. Of course, the naivete of that kind of campaign is also shaped by our cultural and legal failure to distinguish between intentional, knowing, reckless, and negligent acts of sexual violation [as we do with homicide].

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the law, and I wouldn’t want anyone to walk away from this book with the impression that I think changing the law is all we need to do to fix the problem of sexual violation. I definitely hope the law changes, but my larger goal in encouraging that change is to reinforce different social perspectives and shift the broader cultural discourse, not to treat changing the law as the sole end in itself. I have very conflicted opinions about the idea of securing more convictions in an adversarial criminal justice system, with prison penalties for sexual violations. The adversarial criminal justice system seems to mostly be a grim place for victims; meanwhile, prisons themselves are one of the grimmest hotbeds of sexual violation, so it’s hard to justify the idea of reducing sexual violation overall by locking more people in them. I think the overall shape and scope of our legal system needs to change, with more focus on ideals of restorative justice, victim advocacy, legitimate concern for the humanity of criminals themselves, stopping cycles of violence, and the well-being of communities. As important as these goals are, I want to emphasize my strong belief that all those goals are more achievable if we rewrite our laws on r–e and sexual assault as described in the previous chapters than if we leave them as they are.

I think many of our social and legal struggles around consent and sexual violation come down to arguments about whether we think all sex is r–e unless someone provides consent, or whether we think all sex is consensual unless someone objects. To a large degree, there simply is no criminal parallel to sexual violation. We do not, for example, assume all slapping and choking is BDSM unless someone objects—we assume it’s assault without explicit and direct consent. Nor do we assume that, say, inviting someone into your house for a glass of water constitutes permission for them to take your television with them—we generally assume it’s theft without explicit and direct consent. But the complication here is that we mostly start with a base assumption that most people don’t want to be hit or choked, and most people want to keep their belongings—and that most men want to have sex all the time, most women want to have sex some of the time, and neither particularly wants to admit it. We have no other violent crimes that are “fun except when they’re crimes.” (Indeed, BDSM and sports like boxing are exactly the opposite, being “crimes except when they’re fun.”) So we don’t have an easy reference point for saying, “Sexual violation is like this thing over here.”

[…]

Our assumptions about equal responsibility and vulnerability [for sexual violation] have to extend beyond ideas about gender in heterosexual interactions. Even gay men seem to assume that being penetrated makes someone more vulnerable and often mistakenly imagine that men who top don’t become victims of r–e (Meyer 2022). Sexual roles don’t really provide much protection in the end because power is much more complicated than who penetrates whom. But the cultural belief in the power and protective benefits of penetration remains strong. We need to establish consistent cultural and legal standards of responsibility for sexual violation that apply to everyone—and stay cognizant that anyone’s consent can be violated—regardless of genitalia, sexual role, or gender.

No matter what criminal justice reforms we make, most of us will never sit on a jury for a sexual crime—and that’s okay, because that wouldn’t be a good distribution of our social resources in terms of people, time, or money. But due to the present state of social confusion around sexual norms in general, I think we’re going to be left with a world where sexual violations remain common for the indefinite future. Developing very good consent hygiene is a learning process, and it’s a learning process we’ve mostly left young people to muddle through on their own with little guidance from their elders. And even if we improved our guidance, we’d still have to change norms that expect so much sexual activity to occur while intoxicated. So what do we do
about all these violations in the land of sexual confusion?

Instead of sitting in a courtroom, advised by a judge, we’re far more likely to find ourselves in situations where we’re judging the actions of friends, lovers, strangers, and ourselves in informal conversations. Our responses in these everyday situations can make a world of difference in how our society comes to treat sexual violation. For example, I used to have conversations with friends that went something like this all too often:

Friend: I was r–ed last week.
Me: I’m so sorry that happened to you! Do you want to tell me more about what
happened?
Friend: [Relays a story in the context of broader physical intimacy in which a
sexual experience occurred that they didn’t want, which someone hadn’t explicitly asked them permission for, and which they didn’t try to stop]

When those types of encounters occur, most people seem to respond with a mixture of depression, guilt (because they never tried to stop it), and anger (at the other person for not asking and/or for not reading their signals correctly). I was young and inexperienced myself when I had most of those conversations, but what I wish I had said in response was, “Unfortunately, it’s normal to freeze up in those kinds of situations and not say the things you wished you’d said. That’s just the way many people respond in unexpected situations like that. Let’s get you in touch with a therapist, and see if they can help you work through your own feelings and how you want to manage things with the other person.” Alas, being young and inexperienced, I’m pretty sure what I actually said was exactly the wrong thing: “Is it really helpful to call that ‘r–e’?”

Those conversations from my youth have haunted me well into my middle age for so many reasons. For starters, I wish I’d been a more helpful friend. Lacking support after a sexual violation makes someone much more likely to be traumatized by the experience (DeKeseredy et al. 2019), and I hate feeling like I may have contributed to those traumatic cycles. But I also recognize that my failure to be supportive was due to other massive institutional failures: as discussed earlier, I went to a high school where my sex education classes began with our teacher announcing she was still a virgin and encouraging us to remain abstinent until marriage. I researched contraception on the internet myself, but I never got around to researching empathy until I was much older.

Another reason those conversations haunt me is because, like Sanyal (2018) and Hirsch and Khan (2020), I’m appalled and frustrated that Western cultures spend so little time teaching young people how to say no to sex they don’t want, in spite of considerable evidence that doing so massively reduces their chances of being sexually violated. If we think about sexual violation as a public health problem, that’s like society refusing to vaccinate teenagers against a very serious illness that could easily plague them for the rest of their lives—it is, in short, a grim waste of young lives and opportunities. And this resistance to better education is buffeted in part by our misguided belief that all “r–es” are intentionally committed by bad people instead of understanding that many “r–es” are actually committed by ignorant, intoxicated, and/or naive people who really didn’t understand what they were doing or what was happening. Using a single word and a single concept to describe both of those things obfuscates the fact that those are almost certainly two fundamentally different problems with fundamentally different solutions. Presumably the kind of violator who is a genuinely bad person is either actively excited by or really doesn’t care about violating someone’s else’s consent, while the other type of person never wanted to hurt anyone and would be horrified to know they had done so.

And that is the third reason those conversations haunt me: because I think I was technically correct in saying that framing those experiences as “r**e” was unhelpful in the broader context of personal narratives and social experiences (but that was hardly the moment to be mentioning it). These were sexual violations, to be sure, but these particular stories were exactly the same kinds of collegiate violations that Grigoriardis (2017) profiled in her book Blurred Lines, lacking the intentional malice or even reckless disregard for consent that the concept of “rape” usually implies in our culture. Grigoriardis admits that she was surprised to find in her interviews with college men who had been officially reprimanded by their universities for sexual assault that the majority were lacking malice or reckless disregard (but of course, college sexual violations may or may not be representative of the problem as a larger whole). We need more words and better concepts for framing these types of experiences. As a culture, we seem to really struggle with the idea that bad things can happen to people without it being anyone’s “fault.” This concept applies as much to sexual encounters as it does to more mundane interactions like tripping over someone and breaking your leg. In either case, it’s possible for someone to be really hurt without someone else being totally responsible for that hurt. In the case of sexual violations, survivors often blame themselves for what happened to them, which is terrible. But sometimes It’s no one’s fault they got hurt—theirs or the other person’s.

Even more confusing, we may have to acknowledge that people who feel the worst about being assaulted sometimes really do have the least “criminal” experiences, because not saying no when you felt like you should have can make you feel especially traumatized. Again, if we try to get past a judge-and-jury perspective, where everything about consent is viewed through a cultural lens of criminal justice, we can simply provide sympathy for someone who experienced a terrible but incredibly common experience without having to blame anyone or cast aspersions. It’s normal to freeze in certain sexual situations. It’s normal to occasionally make bad choices. It’s normal to fail to speak up for yourself just because you’re afraid of the social consequences or hurting someone’s feelings or looking foolish. We can validate someone’s distress in those experiences without having to turn it into a criminal case and without “blaming the victim.”

We may not sit as a jury in a box, but we often sit as a jury in a living room, and we have not been given good model instructions from a judge. We need a social vocabulary to support one another without necessarily being immediately asked to blame someone, but we also need to be able to gauge the types of offenses that probably warrant a phone call to authorities. We haven’t prepared most eighteen-year-olds well to handle these types of situations (and they’re one of the most at-risk age groups), and we also don’t give them much in the way of direct assistance from their elders. We do a lot of work to teach them to drive responsibly before they get behind the wheel of a car alone, but we do next to nothing to teach them how to fuck responsibly. We should do both.