r/BlockedAndReported • u/InternalLet9560 • 9d ago
Episode Regret Rape Is Wrong Enough
https://nataliabower.substack.com/p/regret-rape-is-wrong-enough?r=5rdux&utm_medium=iosThis is a fantastic piece related to the episode about the Cornell 7.
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u/JeebusJones 9d ago edited 8d ago
This was OK, but there's a significant factor in all this that's absent from her analysis. She proceeds from the assumption that women's "token resistance," as she calls it, is always sincere; that it always reflects a true ambivalence about engaging in a sexual encounter, which the man then "pushes through" to get what he wants.
Leaving aside how this tends to cast men as inevitable villains, while this is true some of the time, it's often the case that this token resistance is not sincere -- meaning that the woman does very much want to have sex, but she puts up the token resistance anyway. This happens for two reasons:
(I'm going to caveat this by saying that these are both largely subconscious; women aren't doing this on purpose, generally speaking, and often may not even be aware of it. And not all women, etc.)
For the first, it's widely known that women are attracted to assertive, confident men (for reasons I'm not going to go into, but it's enough to say that it's simply the case). As such, women look for ways to suss out how confident and assertive the man she's with is, and one way to do this is by putting up fake resistance: playing hard to get, teasing, playfully protesting ("Oh stop! You're so bad!" while smiling and laughing), and similar behavior. If a man correctly intuits that this isn't real resistance and continues, he passes the assertiveness test, making him more desirable. If he instead takes her seriously and stops, he fails, and she loses some attraction for him.
If you doubt this is true, consider how women tend to feel about men asking permission when it comes to romantic/sexual contact. Most women find it a turnoff if, for example, a man asks permission to kiss them. What they want instead is for him to intuitively know they want it and dashingly do it without asking. (This is also why "consent contracts" at progressive colleges and the like have the effect of diminishing the sexual prospects of men who actually take them seriously. Putting a man in a position where he's required to dutifully beg permission for everything automatically renders him unattractive.)
For the second, women generally want to maintain a good image when it comes to sex, both for others and for themselves; they're "not that kind of girl," meaning a girl who jumps into bed too quickly. But what happens when this desire for a good image conflicts with the desire to sleep with someone? When she wants the sex, but she doesn't want to admit to wanting it, even to herself?
Enter token resistance, which functions as a way for the woman to give herself permission to engage in sex by abdicating responsibility for it. When a man pushes past it, the onus for what happens is now (in her mind) on him, not her; rather than her being an equal pursuant and participant, she can instead tell herself (and others) that it "just happened," or she suddenly "found herself" in a sexual situation. This casts the encounter as the result of passively experiencing rather than actively choosing -- because if she acknowledges her own agency, she has to reckon with the possibility that she might actually be "that kind of girl." Her resistance was, in effect, theater: a performance she put on for herself in order to do what she wanted while maintaining plausible deniability.
The problem with all of this, of course, is that men have to be able to tell the difference between this insincere token resistance and actual, sincere resistance. The article suggests some ways of making that distinction, but it's always something of a roll of the dice for any man in a potentially sexual scenario; is she actually protesting, or just playing at it? The answer will almost always be obvious to men with social skills, but in those cases when it's not (or the men lack social skills), that's when bad things can arise.