I’d like you to remember the last time you found it difficult to give an explicit “no” to somebody in a non-sexual context. Maybe they asked you to do them a favour, or to join them for a drink. Did you speak up and say, outright, “No?” Did you apologise for your “no?” Did you qualify it and say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I can’t make it today?” If you gave an outright “no,” what privileged positions do you occupy in society, and how does your answer differ from the answers of people occupying more marginalised positions?
This form of refusal was analysed in 1999 by Kitzinger and Frith (K&F) in Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal. Despite the seeming ambiguity in question/refusal acts like, “We were wondering if you wanted to come over Saturday for dinner,” “Well, uhh, it’d be great but we promised Carol already,” they are widely understood by the participants as straightforward refusals.
K&F conclude by saying that, “For men to claim [in a sexual context] that they do not ‘understand’ such refusals to be refusals (because, for example, they do not include the word ‘no’) is to lay claim to an astounding and implausible ignorance of normative conversational patterns.”
What concerns me — and should concern everyone for that matter — is the inherent sexism that comes along with ignoring a woman when she denies consent. By doing this, we are saying that we just don’t believe a woman who doesn’t agree to something, and not just in cases of rape. Society as a whole has a huge problem with accepting the fact that no means no. Just take a look at some of the shows on TV today; many feature a woman turning down a man’s advances, but the man refuses to give up, as though she didn’t really mean what she said. We’re taught that, if one is persistent enough, that no will eventually turn into a yes. It’s an incredibly problematic way of thinking.
(Source: unmiraclededieu)
Coercive sex can have many faces. It can come from a seemingly positive place, like when someone says, “I really think you should have sex with me because I love you.” It can also come from an obviously negative place through instances of blackmail. Neither is okay. We need to teach youth that it isn’t okay to pressure others into sex and that it is okay to say “no” to sex even if it hurts someone’s feelings.
1. No.
2. No.
3. No.
4. No.
5. No.
6. No.
7. No.
8. No.
9. No.
Also see: Nope (English); Naw, dawg (Bro English); Nahhh (Stoner English); Nuh-uh (Four-year-old English); Negative (Military English); No way, Jose (Mary Kate and Ashley movie English); No (Spanish); Non (French); Nein (German); Lo (Hebrew); Chúi muá (Hmong); Nem (Hungarian); Nei (Icelandic); Hindi (Tagalog); Ne (Czech); Nej (Swedish); Iie (Japan); Naamik (Greenlandic); Nem (Hungarian) La (Arabic); Nee (Afrikaans) and Sod Off (Slang British).Read more at http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/9-things-that-no-means/#gf1sDBMFVQdj1JAz.99
// No always means no. But yes doesn’t always mean yes. //
If you say yes because:
- There’s no point in saying no
- They won’t listen to no
- They haven’t listened to no in the past
- You’re afraid of what they will say or do if you say no
- You’re afraid of what someone else will say or do if you say no
- You don’t believe you have the right to say no
- You don’t think you matter enough to say no
- You don’t think a person “like you” gets to say no
- You think that you “owe” them a yes
- You or they think that because you’ve done something else to hurt them, you have to say yes to this
- You or they think that because they’ve been nice to you, they “deserve” a yes
- You think they’ll no longer love you if you say no
- You think they’ll hate/hurt themselves if you say no
- You think they’ll hurt someone else if you say no
- You said yes before and don’t think you can revoke it
- You have said yes to other people and think that means now you have to say yes to whoever wants you
- You are being threatened
- You believe it is your duty to say yes
- You are being offered a reward if you say yes
- You have been told you “have to” do a particular act to be a “real” ______
- You think it’s “too late” to say no
- You didn’t understand what they wanted to
- Any reason at all other than you actually want to engage in that specific act at that specific time with that specific person with full knowledge of what it is, freedom to say no without fear of consequence, and the full belief in your own agency to make your own decisions about your body
It’s not a real yes. It’s not real consent. And what happened to you was still a real violation and your feelings about that are also very, very real and very okay.
ETA: To the partners - you are responsible for getting a yes. If you get a yes, you’re responsible for having not in any way coerced it, including through any of the methods listed here, and for being reasonably certain that your partner was in a sound frame of mind and body as well as old enough and of a reasonably similar-enough power situation to offer that consent. If you do not obtain uncoerced consent from your capable-of-consenting partner, you have committed sexual assault/rape. That simple.
If you obtain consent with reasonable belief that they could give it and without coercion but one of these other issues exists in your partner’s head (such as the belief that they can’t say no because they said yes to someone else, etc) and you didn’t know that, their trauma is still genuine, their consent is still invalid, their pain is still genuine, but you are innocent of having committed a wrong. The two are not mutually exclusive, and if you devalue or deny their pain because you didn’t know about their situation, you are still a douche.
Drawing on the conversation analytic literature, and on our own data, we claim that both men and women have a sophisticated ability to convey and to comprehend refusals, including refusals which do not include the word ‘no’, and we suggest that male claims not to have ‘understood’ refusals which conform to culturally normative patterns can only be heard as self-interested justifications for coercive behaviour.
I read through quite a bit of this article and it was actually very interesting so check it out!
This is a really great article that I had to read for school and which prompted really interesting and often problematic discussions with my students. The authors are arguing that we need to expand the ways we understand “no” in sexual encounters because in other conversational situations we understand a variety of types of “no”s and in fact “just saying no” is really conversationally unusual. It’s a really interesting read.
(Source: darkjez, via slutwalkseattle)
Rapists look for the spots where boundaries cannot or will not be enforced. They don’t really care why. They are opportunists. They do what works. They can’t be changed. And we sure can’t wait around for the people who can’t defend their boundaries to change it; they’re doing what they can with what they have where they are. More than that, the boundary violations tend to work by degrees, so that the little ones build the foundation for the big ones, and by the time the rape happens the rapist stands on a stepladder of disempowerment. What we as a wider community need to do, if we care about solving the problem, is to take down the ladder. We need to look for the places where boundaries can’t and won’t be enforced … and fix them. We can’t start when and where the rapes happen. We have to start at the beginning. We have to believe that bodily autonomy is a human right, and that the little violations matter. If the whole culture believed that, it might not end all rape, but it would end a culture where rape is normalized and generally unpunished.
“Consent is based on choice. Consent is active, not passive. Consent is possible only when there is equal power. Giving in because of fear is not consent. Going along with something because of wanting to fit in with the group, being deceived or feeling bad is not consent. If you can’t say ‘no’ comfortably, then ‘yes’ has no meaning. If you are unwilling to accept a ‘no,’ then ‘yes’ has no meaning.”
(Source: 20something-blather, via catharsisproductions)
- Not “You have the right to say no as long as you’re nice enough.”
- Not “You have the right to say no but I’m gonna try to change your mind.”
- Not “You have the right to say no unless I think you’re wrong.”
- Not “You have the right to say no once you can give me a satisfactory explanation as to why you’re saying no.”
When someone says no, the correct response is “Okay.” If you don’t understand, that’s fine. You don’t have to understand. Maybe the other person will be willing to explain. Maybe not. But they don’t owe you an explanation.
Sexual Assault Center of East TN provides compassionate free services for victims & survivors of sexual violence. Advocacy, Therapy, Education, SANE. 865-522-7273
