The Rape Of The Swan, Power Dynamics, Inequalities, Part Three Of Three
Consider the situation sans money
Transcript of the video: Video contains additional visual and musical components. Folks can read the whole thing here, or watch the video there, or use the transcript here as a read along aid to highlight the main philosophical component in the video.
Set to the visuals of 'Guest Of Nosferatu: The Secret of Countess Orlok' by vicent digianni, musical score selected works of bauhaus.
Criticisms of the ‘yes means yes’ consent ethic, specifically as it pertains to the capacity and reality of consent occurring within the context of power imbalances.
Consider the situation sans money. For those not familiar with the Moneyless Free Labor Societies series, for purposes of this piece, this means consider a situation in which you have to work at something or another. In the home or out of the home labors. You have some set number of work hours per week that you have to do, and you have an expectation of a set number of years that you’re going to have to do this before you get to retire.
What that work is, however, is up to you. You’re free to choose from among whatever options the society has on the offer. You can freely switch jobs if you want to, you can freely move to another location if you want to, and you can freely start your own business if nothing on the offering is to your own liking.
In exchange, you have free access to all the goods and services the society has to offer. There is no exchange of monies, rather, there is just the abstraction of the agreements, everyone contributes to the society, and everyone partakes from it.
In such a situation the boss still has the bossiness bout them. They still have power over the lowly employee. They still determine hiring and firing, promotions, prestige, and so forth. But a lot of the oomph has been taken away from the concerns. To be fired from the job doesn’t really entail a serious risk to the quality of one’s life. One isn’t going to lose their home over it, or not be able to pay the bills, or whatever.
Likewise, the rewards, while certainly present, are less significant. Dampened. Sure, you can get promoted, and maybe you want that job for this or that reason. Butt, it isn’t so that you can finally achieve the grand aim of, say, having enough means to have babies, or own a home, or get enough food to eat.
The point being that the relationship itself isn’t really the problem. It is the capacity for the consequences to have meaningful impact, the degree of power involved. It is only in extreme cases, life on the line kind of things, which does happen, that we can hold to the line that the power dynamic actually strips someone of their capacity to consent.
In a moneyless free labor society, such behavior is still frowned upon. It still has the bad associated with it, namely, the teleological bad of utilizing sex and love for reasons other than sex and love. But there is clearly agency involved on the part of everyone. Which again speaks towards the positive of this kind of interpretation as to what the ethics of the situation are.
The consent modeling would have a hard time justifying itself that there is anything bad involved in such circumstances. When the circumstances are not dire, in other words, merely sexually using someone for reasons other than sex and love doesn’t really appear on the radar of the consent culturalists as being a bad. Indeed, they might hold that it couldn’t possibly be a bad, because ‘all sex is good between consenting adults’ and ‘the only possible bad is the lacking of consent’. The boss or the employee can use each other for exchanges of favors in the workplace to their little hearts content, provided that the circumstances are not so dire as to amount to a stripping of anyone’s capacity of agency and hence entailing an inability to consent.
Moreover, this interpretation avoids many of the pitfalls plainly on display in the current. Differences in beauty, intellect, social status, any differences at all entail power differences and those power differences entail rape as being committed. According to the consent cultist. Er, uh, oops, I mean ‘consent culturalist’. Easy mistake to make.
Consider such as it relates to age differences from the consent culturalist and from the teleological ethicist.
For the consent culturalist, age differences entail power differences entail rape. Which is silly in most cases, specifically, it is silly beyond the age of consent. A twenty year old with a thirty year old or a forty year old or a fifty year old just doesn’t have the bang for the buck in regards to ethical concerns. Even if it carries with it a lot of bangging of the bucks. The rationales used by the consent culturalists notes various power differentials therein, differences in money, social statures, beauty, security, etc… and actually holds that ‘therefore the ‘weaker’ party in that is under duress, coercion, and hence cannot possibly consent’. Hence it is rape, or at least something ‘rape-like’.
To their credit they do get the age of consent concerns correct, namely, there is a point in life whereby one is vulnerable and ought not be ‘thrown to the wolves’, er, I mean, allowed into the broader dating pool of sexual delights. These are the kinds of concerns raised with grooming. However, their rationale for it is actually incorrect. They are pointing to the correct phenomenon, a significant power imbalance, but they are holding to an absurd position as the reason why that matters, namely, that supposedly the yoots are literally to dumb, too weak, under far too much duress to even have the capacity to consent.
Likewise, they get correct the concerns regarding pedophiles, pedophilia is a bad. And this is, tbh, one of the few places where the consent culturalists view really seems to make much sense. Prepubescent children are in point of fact too dumb to consent, the power relations involved are so extreme simply by dint of their age that indeed they cannot really be expected to ‘stand up’ for themselves in almost any way, they’re physically super weak, and their bodies aren’t even sexually mature.
But then, pedophilia wasn’t really in question.
I strongly suspect that the consent culturalist confuses pedo with age of consent, and they hear ‘age of consent’ and latch on almost unthinkingly so to ‘consent’ as if that were the entirety of ethical considerations on the matter.
The teleological ethical interpretation likewise correctly addresses the issues of grooming, and age of consent. Namely, grooming is bad not due to the sheer stupidity of the minor and thus their inability to consent, but rather, because the teleological aim is poor.
In other words, grooming is bad because it aims at manipulation of vulnerable peoples rather than either sex for sex’s sake or love for loves sake, or for that matter, loves for sex’s sake or sex for love’s sake. It aims, in other words, at the power dynamic itself as a means of manipulation and control.
Age of consent laws are similarly justly structured. That is, the problem isn’t the yoots inability to consent, but rather, it is the focus on the power dynamic towards the ends of manipulation. Pretty much exactly as is the case with grooming, grooming being a derivative of age of consent considerations. That is, the concept of grooming is dependent upon there being a concept of an age of consent. One grooms someone who ‘isn’t yet ready’, and in the case of age of consent the making of an age of consent had to come first before a concept of ‘grooming’ could’ve even really developed.
The explanations are similar to the case in the workplace whereby the manipulation of the power dynamic is the problem. Not ‘lacking of consent’ save perhaps in the most extreme of cases, but rather, because what is good, wholesome, wonderful, and holy; sex, sexuality, and loves many bloomings, is done for reasons other than for sex and love.
Note this also avoids the pitfalls of saying that teenagers ought not or cannot have sex. Or worse still, that they ought not or cannot be exposed to sex education. The point of ethics here has nothing whatsoever to do with the negativity of sexuality, and everything to do with the proper aims of sexuality and loves relations. Teenagers can fuck teenagers, because it isn’t caught up in the manipulations of power between them.
The much older adult ought not fuck teenagers, not because of the teenagers’ inability to consent, they aren’t too dumb to consent, nor because the power inequality is so great as to rob them of their capacity to consent, but rather because the power dynamic involved entails vulnerability of the teenagers that is too easy to take advantage of.
Hmm, I think this distinction ought be examined more closely.
Consider the following realities, each of which are and have been real in various places and times. An of age person is at or bout the age of puberty. At that point, they are given the tools, resources, education, and experience necessary for them to enter into sexual loving relationships with folks who are of some significant age older than them. We needn’t get too creepy with it, maybe something like thirteen year olds with nineteen or twenty year olds, or fifteen year olds with twenty five year olds.
Is there really a power inequality there? I tend to think not, as they’ve been provided the necessary resources, education, tools and support; the whole culture, the society geared itself towards that. This is what used to be the norm and this is something of the major sticking point I think on the issue.
The same aged person who is not given the tools, resources, education, and experience necessary for them to enter into a sexual loving relationship with some equally significantly older person does thereby have a potentially ethically relevant power inequality. The whole culture, the society, is geared towards that not happening in the current.
The point here is that the issues are arising not because of age so much as because of how we are equipping the yoots, and to what expectations the society has towards the yoots. See elsewhere in this series regarding the point that we’ve extended childhood, which isn’t necessarily bad.
But here I want to really stress the technical but important point that the issue isn’t because of age. The yoots are not too dumb to consent. Moreover, there isn’t something wrong with the yoots being sexual. There is something wrong with the yoots being sexual when they are not prepared to be so. When the whole of society, the whole of culture has shifted such that they are, in essence, not allowed to be capable of, say, raising a family, this creates the situation folks point to and mistakenly hold that it is strictly because of their age.
In this case we are holding that the age of consent is a good thing for other kinds of reasons, among them avoiding a disposition that is most dubious, that of ‘getting them while they are young’ which is a kind of predation predicated upon their relative vulnerability, naivete, and inexperience.
Geeze, it may be the case that it is a fairly arbitrary kind of distinction. One done, for instance, because we simply prefer to have an educated population. To be clear here, the view is something like the following: assuming that the youth are given the proper education and resources to, say, begin raising a family, there isn’t any kind of obvious case to be made that they are unable to consent, or in any kind of duressed situation regarding power inequalities.
This is why, after all, youths in all cultures tended to be married off pretty much as soon as possible pre-public education and pre-modern effective birth control. It would be odd to put it mildly if post public education and post modern effective birth control, somehow the relevant ethical concerns as they pertain to age shifted.
Tbh the education the youth get is wildly superior, they aren’t dumb, they are able to consent. There is a case to be made that so long as they are hobbled by lack of resources to start a family or enter into a long term loving relationship there are plausible significant issues. And there is a case to be made to prevent the oldies from predating on the young. And there are cases to be made that overall it is better for society to give the youth a longer childhood, hence longer time to educate themselves, and so forth.
I don’t think, in other words, that we need cede ground on the issue in terms of legal or cultural norms. It’s just that the justifications are not as, uh, stringent. I mean to say, the bads associated with it are not nearly so, well, bad. Ultimately we’re talking bout a matter of cultural preference. The teleological reasons remains valid. Namely that the concern is that the aims of such relationships are not towards the proper sorts, namely, sex and love. The notion of predation upon the young ultimately boils down to that. It is predation because it doesn’t aim towards an honest good faith effort at sex and love. It aims to merely use in one inappropriate way or another.
Perhaps most notably, it is a bad because its predation, and it’s predation because it’s aiming due to vulnerability in particular, rather than sex and love.
But is it the case that all such instances of relationships amount to that, the answer has to be no. There are far and away too many examples from history and cultures all around the world to hold the view that there is something inherently wrong with those kinds of relationships. The issues of their vulnerability being strongly related to the modern reality of extended childhood, lack of proper preparations, resources, etc… rather than anything in particular to do with their age.
As noted elsewhere in this series on this topic, we are not speaking of pederasty, we are speaking of age of consent laws, customs and norms that occur post pubescence. These are oft confused by people, perhaps because age of consent used to be defined essentially via the pre/post pubescent reality. To be clear, pederasty is defined by pubescence, age of consent is a different sort of thing that is culturally defined. There is a very good case that prepubescent children are incapable of consent due to the power inequalities involved. That is, there is no amount of education, resources, etc… whereby they become capable of consent. They are dumb. Moreover, their bodies literally are not ready for sexual intercourse.
That age of consent is a cultural choice, however, doesn’t mean that it is thereby wrong either. It may very well be the case that such is the praiseworthy sort of thing to do. Which is I think a fruitful wind to tact ourselves too. The reason why the age of consent is a sound ethic more broadly is because it produces, oh, finer folks. It is better, it is a superfluous good that is worthwhile as virtue in virtue of its superfluousness.
Doing so improves the lives of the youth, and hence too, the lives of everyone, for we are all of us youths at some point.
It is a kind of good that accrues through the innovation of public education and modern effective birth control. Each of these provide for the capacity of the youth to, in effect, live an extended childhood. They gonna fuck, after all. Again, traditionally the solution was ‘marry them off’ to ‘get them settled down’ so they don’t ruin their lives. It is a culturally relative sort of ethic, but more than that, it is a praiseworthy sort of one. It doesn’t entail ‘looking down’ upon cultures that do not do this.
Maybe especially in regards to societies that do not have modern effective birth control and/or strong public educational systems.
Nonetheless its praiseworthiness stems from the improvement of the lives of people. We might hold that those kinds of social structures are the sorts of things other societies ought to aim for for that reason. And that insofar as they manage to obtain said stature as a society, regardless of their culture, such practice becomes an ought of norm.
The proper teleological aims of sex and loves relations have shifted with the adaptations of the technologies and cultures. The age of consent shifted.
In other words, it would be a bit odd to live in a society that has access to these things and to refuse them and thereby claim that it is therefore an ethically fine sort of thing to do to have much older people have a free for all with the youth sexually or lovingly speaking. Likewise, it would be a bit odd to not currently be living in a society that doesn’t have those things and specifically seek to not have them.
I want to suggest that this seems like the most sound sort of ethical answer to the issues of power dynamics in sexual interactions. I think that the teleological solution touches all the right places in all the right ways on this;) Moreover, that it avoids many of the rather horrid pitfalls in the current ‘consent culture’, whereby the latter is clearly oft picking out the wrong sort of ethical solutions. Worse still, it is picking out categorically sex negative kinds of solutions, and indeed, it looks a whole fucking lot like it is trying to instate caste systems. It is misusing the notion of consent as a means of control; it is the seed of destruction, the colonialistic mode that understands all other cultural expressions from itself as ‘wrong’.
I want to also address a possible concern regarding the teleological sex and loves ethics, namely, as it pertains to at least two aspects of concern that the consent culturalists tend to get right, and the teleological ethicists tend to get wrong. I feel it important to address these even tho they are technically off topic, that is, they are not bout power dynamics. It is important because insofar as folks take the teleological ethics seriously, which they ought to, they ought also be able to properly handle the ethics of sexuality and loves relations more broadly.
The first is prostitution. This kind of transactional relationship isn’t inherently wrong in the teleological ethic. Rather specifically, it isn’t wrong insofar as the prostitute is doing so out of necessity. More broadly we can speak of sex work and hold to similar kinds of points. Sex work is ethically valid provided it is done out of necessity. As with other aspects, the ethicity of it changes a bit in a moneyless free labor society, namely, there is no necessity for prostitution, indeed, prostitution as such likely goes away entirely in such a system.
Sex work, however, does not.
From a teleological ethical perspective, among the key problems of sex work in a monied system, be this prostitution or otherwise, is that it uses and abuses people. And here I don’t just mean the sex workers. The folks that utilize their services are likewise used and abused, taken advantage of, treated as instruments to other ends, etc… rather specifically, towards the ends of money and oft enough gaining power and control over them.
There can be other concerns, namely, community cohesion, but tbh I don’t think this hits the radar of ethics much, and insofar as it does, I strongly suspect that it has more to do with folks having dim sex negative views than anything being wrong bout the actions themselves as they relate to the community as a whole.
In a moneyless free labor society, those kinds of aspects just disappear. And I want to strongly suggest that such is the proper frame from which to understand the ethicities involved. A monied society distorts the reality to monied concerns; forces the ethics to be bout the money, rather than the people, the actions, etc… In a moneyless free labor society, sex workers do so for, well, for what reason?
Because they freely chose to.
Not to make dollar bills y’all, but due to a love of sex perhaps, or because of a sense of purpose bout them to ‘do good to others via their good fuckin’, or because they want to provide deeper levels of intimacies to folks whom otherwise might be lonely. There just aren’t many, perhaps any, other real likely justifications for it. In such a situation they are aiming well with their sex and love. They are doing with sex and love what they ought be doing, aiming for their delights, their fulfillments, and the many bloomings of loves thereof.
Queers are the second aspect to touch well upon here as regards teleological ethnicities of sex and loves. The elephant in the room is the disposition to hate the queers under the auspices that it is ‘abnormal’ or ‘unnatural’ and what folks mean by that oft enough is exactly a kind of teleological ethical justification, namely, that sex is ‘meant for making babies’ and hence ‘the only proper mode of sex is penis inside the vagina until it blows its load in her’.
I am going to just point out the obvious bout this: this is not a teleology of sex and loves, it is a teleology of reproduction. Folks making this claim have a very misguided understanding, a narrow, dim witted, foolish, perhaps even evil understanding of what sex and love is. In terms of colonialistic mentalities, insofar as sexual expressions, gendered expressions, constitute a fair amount of cultural expressions, this particular view is egregious in the same kind of way as the consent culturalists’ view.
All cultural expressions, all sexual expressions, all gendered expressions not devoted to reproduction ought be condemned according to this view. It is animalistic in its understanding, lesser than human. Crude. Fascistic. Hateful and mean to the point of murderousness. Indeed, to the point of genocidal tendencies.
Sex for sex’s sake, or sex for love’s sake, or love for love’s sake, or love for sex’s sake it is not. It is not a teleological view of sex and love. What is wonderful and beautiful bout queer sexuality and loves is exactly their propensity to focus on sex and love without undue regard to the reproductive acts.
It isn’t that there is something extra special bout the queers, it is among other things, that the queers are of course a part of the teleology of sex and loves. It is also that absent the labels, sex and loves’ beauties far outstrip those of reproduction. The contest isn’t even close. As I am trying to make clear here too, to make that kind of error regarding the teleological ethicity, to mistake sex and love as merely reproduction is a kind of abhorrent abomination that ought be snuffed out with as much vigor as ethicity can allow.
The Kiss, The Point of Disagreement: The unconsented to kiss. The victory dance that culminates in a kiss unasked for, unconsented to, and without necessarily any furtherance to it. It is done simply as an expression of exuberance.
It has some kinds of sexual undertones to it, the sexual victory dance, but it remains just a kiss. Here the questions are ‘is it wrong’? Is there something morally wrong, and if so, to what degree of wrongness is it. Conversely, is it right, is it a good, and if so, to what degree might it be so?
I want to answer the latter first, it is also largely my position on the matter. It is a good, specifically, a praiseworthy sort of good. It is a cultural and emotional kind of good. It is beyond the keen of lesser peoples, it is abnormality, queerness, a show by the aristocracy. It is the rights of queens and kings, it is victor’s expressions of sex and love.
It wasn’t and isn’t bout consent, anymore than any kind of cultural or emotional expression may be. One doesn’t, in other words, ‘consent’ to prom. Or to the wearing of fashions of the day. Or to the general decorum one might have in a restaurant. Nor are these rules of a sort of law, and insofar as they are such, they are very likely committing the big bad of mistaking aesthetical ethical concerns for obligatory sorts of ethical concerns. These are rules of customs, aesthetics, and hence we might hold that there ought not be such a custom as the victor’s dancing kiss; something like ‘it is taboo to give such a kiss’.
Tho I’d retort straightforwardly that the breaking of that particular taboo is exactly the point of the action in question. It is a kiss that is expressly unconsented to, unasked for, and its correctness or not lay entirely within that realm of consideration. It’s the special circumstances of the situation, the victor’s dance, whereby it gains a kind of praiseworthiness to it.
Hence what is supposedly morally wrong. It lacked consent. There is undergirding the point that same kind of sexual negativity alluded to before; there is something wrong with a kiss unless and until it is ‘bless with breath from the lips’. Kissing is, in other words, in need of redemption, because it ‘has a sexual undertone to it’ and due to that sexual undertone, it is dirty, in need of cleansing, in need of a special magical phrase of words passed by lips to make it pure.
There is no harm in the kiss. There is no recourse to the claim that someone is the victim of ‘assault’, and hear well that the proponents of this being wrong do use the morally and legally charged term ‘assault’; as if a grave and most heinous crime has been committed.
The kind of ‘harm’ involved is an emotional and cultural sort of harm. The actors who purport that such is of significance in concern are those who seek to eradicate all cultural expressions not of their own, not of their own liking at any rate. We can accept, for instance, that such may run counter to their culture, counter to their emotional desires, that they ‘feel violated’ and they have been, utterly and completely violated, insofar as their cultural expressed norms may constitute a violation that is.
Akin to, quite literally, utilizing the wrong fork at dinner.
It is a frightfulness against the sensibilities of all folks with good sense bout them.
We can grant all these things, and then ask justly; so what then? What are the pragmatic choices involved?
We could ban it, as in criminalize the behavior. Outlaw that cultural expression, and many, many others. We can haul people to jail over hurt feelings, we can send folks to re-education camps to teach them proper and good sense. We can measure out some kind of punishment, in equal part to the degree of hurt feelings and bad sense. Perhaps, for instance and in all seriousness, a stern and dour look upon them as we slowly shake our heads.
We can taboo it. But then, and again, it already has been. It always was. The victory kiss is a breaking of a taboo against randomly kissing someone. The victory kiss, again, is for queens and kings, not plebs. It is something the queer aristocracy takes part in, high above the lowly plebs rutting around in their ‘good sense’.
Regardless, in either of these instances, the important aspect to recognize is that by doing so one is merely selecting a certain cultural aesthetic concern over others, and going out of their way to snuff out all others. Vast apparati to enforce the norms. Police, special task forces, all aligned to hold up the will of some ‘good common sense’. Intricate laws, reams of legal structures to prosecute them, to make them see the error of their ways, to toss them someplace where they cannot be seen. Perhaps just to murder them. Would they be so lucky?
Such is the ‘default to the prudish’ that the plebs do. The sex negative view, again, that holds there is definitely something wrong with sex, sexuality, and loves’ musings. Something only they can rectify with a sacred set of words they must utter before any kind of touching occurs. Lest they become soiled, coated with ill funk from the lips of another.
To ignore those concerns? To sneer upon the plebs? To hold to a sex positive view? To see lips parted in kiss as a delightful gift? What are the consequences? Even to the most aggrieved of parties?
A touch.
Such is the ethical analysis of it.
Here now, and try to recall, such are the limits and functional wants of consent alone. That is, consent lacking any more fundamental issue involved. When there is no harm involved beyond that of ‘cultural harm’ and ‘hurt feelings’, but these are so tightly connected, consent amounts to control. It becomes control over others from afar, predicated upon a whim of feeling, and a sense of proper decorum.
One’s feelings, hurt or not, stemming from one’s cultural dispositions. A quite light and levitied sort of thing, unless you a pleb. Beware those who take them too seriously.
Who’s consent we speaking of anyway? Whereby consent is a matter of cultural norms, when it is understood that the notion of consent ‘needing to be vocalized’ is but a different sort of cultural norm, a predication of power and control by a certain set of people, whose consent ought we be concerned with?
There are at least these broad distinctions of notable worth:
There are those cultural consensual norms that seek to eradicate all others. We call these domineering cultural norms. Colonialistic mentalities. Moralistic views. Sex negative views. Views that hold that there is something wrong with sex, something wrong with love, intrinsically. Something only ‘they’ can rectify, only via their own expression can they be made right and just.
And then, there are cultural consensual norms that don’t do such things.