mulling consent · 7:44pm Apr 19th, 2020
henlo. this is a topic we've been thinking about for a while but not posted on because of the inevitably empassioned and likely scary conversation that would follow. as a result, we're going to try and tackle this subject from a more personal standpoint, and see if it helps us reach an understanding at all.
Disclaimer: WE DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCE, CONDONE CHILD ABUSE. Whatever the age of consent in your local territory is, respect it. Don't initiate sexual conversations with kids, don't groom them, don't do anything that someone else watching from the sidelines would say "WOAH WHAT THE FUCK" too if it includes another person, especially a vulnerable or sensitive one.
now here we go.
our first memory of anything sex related is in elementary school. we lived in a big house in the country with a sliding glass door. our mom went out one night to the bar, and my sister and i woke up in our room to the sound of her and the two guy's she'd brought home fooling around. most of the dialogue and exchange from the night is blurred at this point, but i distinctly remember conversational snippets around the idea of "well I wasn't going to go home with you, but then you came up behind me and grabbed my nipples...". i remember my sister wanted to go out to use the bathroom, but she didn't want the men to see her in her night-clothes.
then our grandparents died and a lot of other stuff happened.
after that, sex fit into kind of what seemed like a ubiquitous role amongst the youth: something no one mentioned or talked about or even maybe knew about, except that we all probably knew a fair bit, but weren't given an opportunity to talk about it anywhere. the only form of sex ed or biology education we received in elementary school was from our music teacher, Mr. Gardner, when he took one or two lessons near the end of the year to, instead of teaching music, go over statistics with us and point out what percentage of us horrible things would happen to. one of us would be dead. five of us would be addicted to drugs. only two of us would be in college. i don't know how anyone else felt about those classes, but i liked them a lot. i liked Mr. Gardner.
at some point before middle school, after we'd moved again, i heard my mom having phone-sex with someone at night. it was the first time i ever got hard, but i didn't know why, or what was going on, just that i liked the noises my mom was making on the phone but didn't feel like i should be listening to them.
when i got to middle school, probably around the first year, we hit puberty. almost synonymously, we discovered masturbation, even though i don't think at the time our cock got hard or even ejaculated. we just found out all of a sudden that touching your penis felt good, and jerking it up and down felt really good, and we would do it all the time we could: at home, at school, after school, on the bus home (someone saw us once but didn't say anything), in the back of the truck when we were on family trips... the reason we eventually stopped doing it all the time was because our penis started bleeding at some point. then we took a break for a while and i don't remember when we started again.
in middle school, we started to notice girls a lot. they looked different than us and we wanted them to pay attention but that was hard to do. we knew we were gross and ugly and that most people didn't like us. our mom wasn't around because she was working somewhere far away.
the popular kids in our classes seemed to know and talk about sex. they looked like the 'older kids' in high school, only they were twelve or thirteen. i remember on a school camping trip a lot of the kids got into shenanigans at night when the teacher's couldn't watch. and the popular girl in our class, Hope, got a picture of her in underwear shared around on the bus once. i sat behind her in chorus and one time her thong was showing and i thought about it a lot later but didn't masturbate to it.
the only sex ed we had in middle school were diagrams of body parts and their functions. the teachers seemed more nervous about it than the students.
also around this time, we got the internet, and it was pretty much all downhill from there. the first porn we ever remember looking at was an illustration of Bart and Lisa Simpson in bed together, naked under the sheets. Marge was tucking them in for bed, and Bart and Lisa were fucking underneath the sheets without letting her know. around this time i felt like i was interested in incest, though i didn't stop to think about why. if you loved your family, why wouldn't it be nice to have sex with them too?
i don't remember anyone talking to us about what 'consent' was, or how to know when we were ready to have sex, or what sex even really was. it probably just translated as 'scary masturbation' in my head, even for decades afterwards.
in high school, we got our first girlfriend at 16, and things followed a more-or-less typical path after that. on and off relationships, good and bad times, obscene amounts of sexual deviance fueling existing interactions. the only understanding at this point was that sex is a forbidden, dark magick, and you either know about it or you don't, and if you don't, maybe you're just out of luck forever.
so how does all this wrap around to consent?
i don't know.
i don't think at this point we feel 'mature' enough to understand the full ramifications of having sex with someone. what kind of feelings it can cause permanently, how it's possible to reconcile them. how all of this surfaces around an act of mutual genital stimulation.
at what age does someone understand what sex really is? i think even if you can define it academically or even esoterically, that doesn't mean all the results are laid out in front of you. 'power dynamics' are the biggest part of why consent laws seem messed up right now. it's important to protect people from manipulative forces they might never be able to see themselves. if your teacher loves you more than the other students, is it reasonable or even possible to expect them to mark you fairly? if you're in a romantic relationship with your father, will you ever move out of the home and grow and learn about different types of people and realities? are most of these just stopping blocks for generally curmudgeonly ancient practices that are nowhere near as harmful now?
let's imagine that there was a committee responsible for assessing whether or not you were mature enough to have sex.
how many of you think you'd pass the test?
we can either imagine sex and love as elevated, mysterious, sublime and indiscernable forces, or we can count them as understandable, physical interactions, and make rules to account for the extent of that interaction. i can't vouchsafe for the relationship between two people once they decide to mash their genitals together. i don't know that even if i put 'adult' in one column and 'kid' in the other that anything becomes clear. only that one half of the equation is supposedly in power, and the other half supposedly isn't. but does any adult in the world feel like they're in power of anything? especially when it comes to sex, i feel like all the decisions were made without my knowledge or awareness. i don't know why i like butts. i don't know why i like folk younger than me. i don't know why i like hurting and being hurt and all the weird squicky things inbetween, other than 'people who were messed up before me liked them', and 'regular sex seemed boring after about five times'.
i also somehow think we managed to perfectly avoid addressing the subject we set out to tackle. probably nothing was gleaned or revealed.
share yr thoughts in the comments below. pls be polite. <3
I was just pondering the effect of replacing 'sex' here with any action considered to be the exclusive domain of adults. Who gets to be on the committee - how do we decide who gets to decide? How do we become adults with no consensus on a rite of passage? Sorry - no answers, just questions.
5246096
that's okay. it's much along the same thought process we're engaged in. for one, i'd vouchsafe that probably only 25% of adults use alcohol 'responsibly', but that's obviously coloured and not in any way a real statistic. it also engages the idea of bodily autonomy... at what point do we determine a universal standard for when someone or something is 'old enough' to make healthful choices for themselves? if we surveyed everyone alive, would we find they were making good choices anyway? better or worse than the ones someone half their age would make?
5246097
In support of your point, people change too. Any hypothetical committee's decision, while valid, let's say, on the first examination, may cease being so should their supplicant regress, or have their perspective altered by life's many inconsistencies.
5246100
right. so we're basically asking the impossible question of defining all of these dumb nebulous terms to an agreed upon, universal standard.
good luck, right?
- sex
- harm
- consent
- age
- pleasure
- 'old enough'
- 'informed consent'
- 'understanding'
etc.
would be nice to come up with like a quiz version of this that could be theoretically possible though. like an interview you get at a certain age and then you retry again next year if you missed it. like a driver's test. :x
I, honestly don't know what to say...I don't think I have anything of value that feels like it's my place