Posts by Emma Hart
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to recordari,
ETA: We just turned Emma's thread into Twitter. Oops.
And I said there was no WIN on the internet...
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Sacha,
sounds like an interesting cocktail
Right, adding that to my To Do list for Wellington.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to recordari,
Umm, I do quite a few of them too. Just sayin'. I don't smoke
Okay, we are obviously WAY overdue for a PAS Wham! appreciation party.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to BenWilson,
Ben, obviously I wasn't clear before. The point of the whole "difficult to tell how old someone was" thing, was that you would be attracted to someone, and THEN find out how old they were. So, at least with the people I knew, it wasn't a conscious point-scoring thing, it just happened.
Also... I don't want to get too deep on this, but your list of "immature" things? Is a list of feminine things. I still do all that stuff, thanks.
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Um, yeah, okay... I went to a school where, if you didn't ask, it was quite difficult to tell how old someone was. Not only did we have vertical forms (so your "home room" was a mix of forms 3-7) but our 5th form was about... a third? people having their second go-round. When my age came up in conversation with the guy I was sleeping with in 5th form, he fell off his chair. And I couldn't work out why he was so appalled I was 15. That's how much the legal age of consent impinged on my consciousness, and how much of a pressuring bastard he was.
What I wonder is... how much of the idea that it was Wrong for me to be having sex at 15 is tied to the idea that Sex is Bad?
Sex education that's framed around Enthusiastic Consent starts with two basic ideas. One, sex is awesome. Two, teenagers are going to have sex. Then it focusses on how to get the sex you want, not so much how to avoid the sex you don't. I mean, the sex education we had when we were teenagers? Pretty much never mentioned pleasure, right? It also avoids the idea that all boys are dirty horndogs and no girls actually want sex.
What appears to happen (though for I think obvious reasons it's really hard to get this program into schools) is that, given the idea that sex can be really great, they have a basic right to pleasure, and they really want to get it right, teenagers have sex later. As they do when they come from households where sex is discussed openly.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to bmk,
Say you have a 16 year old male with a 15 year old female who want to have sex with each other, is this wrong? And if you say it is then with the genders reversed is it still wrong?
Yeah... the reason I was going out with guys older than myself at high school was, I think, down to the maturity difference. But there was no power imbalance. And the under-age sex I had certainly wasn't rape, in any way. The first Love Of My LIfe was a scrape under three years older than I, and I was ready for sex well before he was.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
The slutwalk FAQ contains some specific aims:
What we would like to see in the short term is a change in law say that there is NEVER any merit in bringing up a victim's sexual history, as it is NEVER a mitigating factor in sexual assault [currently, defence lawyers have to 'prove its merit' in order to bring up, or interrogate a victim about, a victim's sexual history]. We would like to see journalism standards state that when talking about sexual assault, they should refer to the details of the assault as 'the alleged assault' or 'the alleged rape', NOT 'the victim had sex with' or 'engaged in sexual acts with' the perpetrator, as the latter phrasing is heavily slanted towards the assumption of active consent. And we need to see more compassion and delicacy in the way victims are treated when first reporting their attack—no more interrogations where the victim is accused of lying/being drunk/changing their mind after the fact.
Changing a culture, however, is about understanding, I think, rather than legislation. The most important thing to do would be to change the way ordinary people think about sexual assault.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Andre Alessi,
thought I admit, my first reaction on seeing the number of comments was "Oh lawd, 13 pages already? This can't be good..." Colour me pleasantly surprised.
Heh, I think I actually said at the Welly Great Blend that if one of my threads got over 300 comments, someone had been an arsehole. So pleased to be proved wrong.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to BenWilson,
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't limit things. Some of what I deleted was simply too personal and the telling felt like betrayal. Other things were potentially triggering on the definition you never gave, but I felt it likely to have meant, after the first disemvowelling.
Ben, honestly, I didn't feel good about it, but I KNOW your comment was found emotionally distressing. If you had an email link on your profile, I'd have talked to you about it. I've done it with two other PASers so far. And it's a balance, because while this comment thread has been almost entirely civil and non-threatening, there are still people who find it too distressing to take part in.
I don't think the "not defining triggering" comment is entirely fair, though.
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Up Front: Respectably-Dressed Sensible…, in reply to Russell Brown,
In that Stroppery thread we ended up with Vicki Anderson's affectionate story about Anika Moa and her wife as a manifestation of "rape culture".
Mngh, see, I still feel like I can't really talk about this. But I'm hoping it was clear enough publicly that some of us were Really Fucking Unhappy about what happened on that thread. For me, it is extremely unpleasant to see men pushed out of discussions because they are men.
(Of course, then I end up in a weird situation where a man is telling me to stop being inclusive of men, and I'm telling him to STFU. There is no WIN.)
However. I don't see how noting that something might be "triggering" acts to shut down or limit a conversation. As Gio has I think implied above, it's not just the subject matter, but the degree of explicitness or how it's treated. With the reservations about the subjective nature of the term I've already noted.