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| re: Buzzfeed on sexual harassment in the theater | |
| Posted by: Singapore/Fling 06:41 pm EDT 04/01/18 | |
| In reply to: re: Buzzfeed on sexual harassment in the theater - TheOtherOne 05:41 pm EDT 04/01/18 | |
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| "Even in the first instance, what did she take her clothes off in his apartment for after telling him she didn’t want to have sex?" A good question, and one that points to the necessity of these dialogues. Perhaps the most important message of the consent movement is that a person must give consent before the other person performs an action. A person removing their clothes is not an invitation to have sex, it's an invitation to be naked together. If a person says, "I will get naked, but I will not have sex," do you feel that sex is still on the table? As for why Swirsky got naked, my interpretation is that she felt trapped. If she rebuffed this more powerful person in her industry, she risked career repercussions. She may have also had other personal reasons to feel responsible to please a man who was expecting sex. And yet, she did not want to have sex. She appears to have felt that she could somehow please him by getting naked, while expecting that he would honor her stated desire to not have sex. As a gay man, I have stronge aawareness of how it feels when a man is pressuring you for sex, and the calculations that go into trying to get out of the situation while preserving a path to friendship. Now that I'm older, I know that those friendships never would have worked, but as a 20-something, I didn't have the same level of reasoning skills. That's not to say that I have been in Swirsky's position, just that I can relate to it and understand what she read going through. Anytime that people get into a sexual situation, there is a potential for one or both parties to have their judgment impacted by their hormones, their psychology around sex and intimacy, and the physical demands or pressures of the stronger party. The crux of both the consent movement and #MeToo is to prevent these situations from reaching the point where a person may feel pressured to have sex in order to keep another person happy, particularly when that person has higher status in one's career field. Again, we don't have to view Swirsky as an innocent to regard the director as penetrating her against her wishes. She clearly made some bad choices, and the director appears to have his own psychological issues around sex. Still, at the end of it all, he burned heart with his own ego insecurity, and he penetrated her against her wishes. You write that she used him, but I don't see what she got out of these encounters. She agrees with you that she only came to regard this as rape after the fact, and the fact that no names are named strikes me as an admission that these are difficult situations to adjudicate. It's all very murky once we get into the bedroom, and that's one reason why it is so important to teach people that no means no and that one musthey consent before sticking their penis into someone else's body. |
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