they said yes, but in the time it took you to boil that kettle, brew the tea and add the milk they are now unconscious:
You should just put the tea down, make sure the unconscious person is safe, and — this is the important bit — don’t make them drink the tea.
If someone said yes to tea, started drinking it and then passed out before they’d finished it:
Don’t keep on pouring it down their throat. Take the tea away and make sure they are safe. Because unconscious people don’t want tea. Trust me on this.
If someone said ‘yes’ to tea around your house last weekend:
That doesn’t mean that they want you to make them tea all the time. They don’t want you to come around unexpectedly to their place and make them tea and force them to drink it going, ‘but you wanted tea last week,’ or to wake up to find you pouring tea down their throat going ‘but you wanted tea last night.’4
Rape culture: Is it just people promoting rape? (No.)
Rape culture (n): ‘a complex set of beliefs that encourage male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. It is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent. In a rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violence that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women as the norm . . . In a rape culture both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life, inevitable . . .’ ~ Emily Buchwald
One of the first things we need to understand about rape culture is that it’s not just a whole society simply saying, ‘rape is good!’ and promoting it but something a lot more intricate and low-key. It is the implicit and undercover ways we excuse and tolerate sexual violence. It is about how it creeps into our every day through our language, thoughts and beliefs. It is about how it sneaks into our cultural and social practices. And even though a whole bunch of the talk is about how rape culture affects women, it can affect people regardless of gender or sexual orientation.
Examples of rape culture:
•Thinking that being sexually attractive/sexually open allows for someone to be sexually aggressive towards you (e.g. ‘But she posts those sexy selfies/blogs about sex/ wears those outfits.’)
•Blaming the victim (e.g. ‘They asked for it.’)
•Trivialising sexual assault (e.g. ‘Boys will be boys!’, ‘But you can see they want it …’)
•Sexually explicit jokes
•Thinking of sex as a hunting game – with a predator and prey (e.g. ‘going out on the prowl’)
•Tolerance of sexual harassment (e.g. when people say ‘But they are just admiring you’, even if it makes you uncomfortable)
•Assuming only promiscuous people get raped (e.g. ‘She is one of those “loose girls” so it was bound to happen.’)
•Thinking that only ‘bad men’ rape, that rape happens only with psychopaths who are strangers, so your husband/boyfriend/friend/loved one could not have raped you. (e.g. ‘My friend/brother/father/loved one is not a rapist.’)
•Refusing to take rape accusations seriously (e.g. ‘Was it rape or did things just happen badly in a way you didn’t like?’)
•Highlighting the cases of false rape and inflating those numbers (e.g. ‘Yeah sure 7/10 women get sexually assaulted in their lives but what about the two women who lied in 1992?’)
•Teaching people to avoid getting raped instead of teaching sexual predators not to rape (e.g. ‘Do not leave your drink unattended, do not wear this or that)
•Publicly scrutinising a victim’s dress, mental state, motives and history as if this allows for sexual violence against them
•Gratuitous gendered violence in movies and television
•Defining ‘manhood’ as dominant and sexually aggressive (Like saying. ‘I shall give her the d!’ *thumps chest*)
•Defining ‘womanhood’ as submissive and sexually passive (e.g. ‘Do not get down on the first night.’)
•Pressure on men/masculine people to ‘score’/get laid’/‘give it to them …’
•Pressure on women to not appear ‘cold’ or play sexually coy
•Thinking that men don’t get raped or that only ‘weak’ men get raped.
4
RISKY BEHAVIOUR OR PRETTY PLEASURABLE: WHAT ARE THE MESSAGES AROUND SEX?
Learning about sex is hard. The way that the information is put out there has changed over time, up and down and back and forth. Across history there were (and still are) numerous examples of sex positive societies, ones in which people were taught about sex and sexuality in a healthy holistic way.
Want to know about your body – explore it. Want to know the touch of another human and what it feels like? Want to know what that raging vortex is inside that seems to pool in your pants/small square of cloth that covers your front bits?
In Africa, the pan-ethnic Sande and Bandu, kpanguima (safe spaces for teachings and ceremonies) taught the power of pleasure as an energy that needed to be handled and teachings in the curriculum taught that everyone had a right to enjoy sex.5 Within these sexuality schooling spaces, sexual pleasure was seen as a social good, and sexual expression as a normal part of adulthood, which meant there was no need to police it with harsh measures.
Basically, sex is a part of life so be chill.
Then there were eras where people put it in the law that you couldn’t even show your ankles and having a sexual appetite was so pathologised women had to visit their local GP. Should I even quote the Victorian greatest hits here or do we all know them?
Society has gone back and forth on how to engage in comprehensive sex education and is now (again) at a crossroads: shall we scare the living heebie-jeebies out of everyone and put everyone in a sexual box? Or should we have a holistic and healthy approach that looks at everything around us in an ever-changing growing world?
The great debate rages on and here are the two main contenders: a risk-based approach and a pleasure approach.
| Risk-based approach | Pleasure approach |
| 1.When the message that goes out it is all about classic spook tactics: HIV, STIs, unwanted pregnancies and other deep and scary parts of sex. | 1.The message is about practices that promote pleasure and wellbeing, and sex being about living your best life (rather than sex leading to your worst life). |
| 2.Completely forgets about the lovely parts of why people have sex, like pleasure and enjoyment. | 2.Sexual pleasure is not about ignoring the negative parts of sexual activity like STIs, HIV and unwanted pregnancies but giving accurate information about them. It is about giving this information in a way that empowers rather than scares people. It revolves around changing the messages from ‘Feel fear and shame!’ to ‘Here is some info, make an informed decision.’ |
| 3.Focuses on shaming people and making them scared of sex in order to avoid it. Freaks people out so they protect themselves: e.g. if you do not use a condom you will get HIV and become pregnant, and also be generally an awful person. | 3.Understands that people are having sex for pleasure and it is what drives people to do the things that happen between the sheets, so pleasure drives how we make decisions about our sex lives. |
| 4.Only looks at the medical/biological information that comes with the negative consequences of sex (STD symptoms, testing, treatment). | 4.Pleasure = key ingredient when people practise safe sex. The two are not mutually exclusive but intrinsically linked, e.g. super thin condoms that allow for skin-to-skin stimulation, the internal (female) condom is able to stimulate the clitoris, using lube can make vaginal or anal sex more pleasurable, getting tested for STIs gives peace of mind if you want to go wildin’ out at any given time. |
| 5.Reinforces traditional
|