California's Sexual Consent Law Will Ruin Good Sex for Women
Some feminists are gleefully asserting that California's newly minted "yes means yes" law will not only make sex

safer on American campuses, but also better. But that's as credible as telling little boys that masturbation will lead to blindness. To the extent that the law works, it will actually ruin both good men and good sex for women. I note in my column at The Week:
Supporters have also launched an aggressive "consent is sexy" campaign to pre-empt the kind of comedic lampooning that was unleashed by Saturday Night Live and Dave Chappelle the last time this standard was proposed. It's sexy, they claim, to ask your partner if they'd like it "if I bit your neck" or "spanked your bottom." Think Progress' Tara Culp-Ressler, a consent evangelist, insists that far from killing the mood, making sure your partner is as excited as you are about certain moves and positions will enhance the sexual experience.
Sometimes. Still, such claims are based on a rather simplistic understanding of human sexuality that is out of touch with the lived experience of most people.
Go here to read the whole thing.
Editor's Note: As of February 29, 2024, commenting privileges on reason.com posts are limited to Reason Plus subscribers. Past commenters are grandfathered in for a temporary period. Subscribe here to preserve your ability to comment. Your Reason Plus subscription also gives you an ad-free version of reason.com, along with full access to the digital edition and archives of Reason magazine. We request that comments be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment and ban commenters for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
The "yes means yes" law" reminds me slightly of the skit in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life where the stodgy school teacher is trying to explain/demonstrate sex to his students.
It isn't at all romantic.
"Nibbling the earlobe, kneading the buttocks, and so on and so forth. So, we have all these possibilities before we stampede towards the clitoris, Watson!"
Love that movie. The birth part was sadly prescient.
Is it a boy or a girl?
I think it's a bit early to start imposing roles on it, don't you?
The penis you will note is now, more or less, erect.
hink Progress' Tara Culp-Ressler, a consent evangelist, insists that far from killing the mood, making sure your partner is as excited as you are about certain moves and positions will enhance the sexual experience.
How to have sex explained by people who have probably never had sex in their lives. It is difficult to even know what to say to this. Part of me thinks they is no way they believe this and are just lying because they don't care anymore. But part of me thinks they might actually believe this. That possibly is terrifying because it would mean we have a large number of people running lose who have completely lost touch with reality and will apparently believe anything the movement tells them to believe.
This is how I picture her.
She's actually a precocious 12-year-old girl
The banality of evil.
She does NOT have my consent.
Because what turns them on is not bodies or smells but power and its control.
Rule 34, dude. These freaks might actually be into asking permission for everything.
Yes. When you think about it, sex as they describe it is nothing but D/S kink play.
How does that work when both people are the sub?
They just play video games.
About as well as PC socialism in general. Nobody derives any pleasure from it, but at least they're both equally miserable, and they get to feel smug about that afterwards.
When a mommy submissive and a daddy submissive love each other very much......
The reality is much simpler than all this. The reality is that they made it so all sex is rape. It's a law that no one will comply with, and thus all men will not be exposed.
It's not even something I feel like joking about despite how easy it is. It's sickening how stupid we've become.
Its horrible and will ruin the lives of God knows how many people. The other thing about it is that it harms women too. If you want to make it so that sex always creates the risk of criminal liability, men will just decide that self abuse and internet porn and hookers are not so bad after all. I know people and young men especially love sex but incentives matter. And young women tend to like sex too. And 95% of those women are not man hating screwed up feminist lesbians. The 95% happen to like men and want to have sex with them and get married and have children and all of that. Make having men risk jail to have sex and life is going to get very hard and pretty lonely for that 95%.
These people are utterly evil.
These people are utterly evil.
El correcto cubed.
Progressive puritanism sets back gender relations by several decades; progressives celebrate measure as "sexual liberation." The irony, it burns.
Assuming the law has remotely any effect whatsoever other than stringing up innocent men, which I think is more to the point of the matter.
"Consent is sexy" is the "modest is hottest" of the feminist movement. Consent has nothing to do with sensuality; it is a prerequisite for morality and how one feels about it really has nothing to do with how necessary it is.
What's more, feminists don't give a shit how "hot" consent is for the participants -- they just don't want to seem lame by focusing on morality, especially since some people might disagree with them on their particular take on consent. Better to wrap it around a dubious connection between consent and enjoyment -- a connection which cannot be true in all cases for all people, since if it were there would be no rape, murder, theft, etc.
Does this apply to gay sex, too?
'cause it would be kinda funny hilarious if California allowed gay marriage but started prosecuting gay single people left and right for having sex--just like they always did before.
It will eventually you watch. The thing to remember about the left is that they always have to have an enemy so they always end up eating their own. A hundred years ago we had the old Bohemian communists who were all about free love and destroying the evil bourgeois moral values. By the 1960s and 70s they had won and premartial sex was expected and extra marital sex was a lifestyle choice. But since leftists always have to have an enemy and never quit, they just turned on their own after winning and we are back now to having a more repressive set of mores than we had to begin with.
The same thing will happen to gays. You watch. Give a few years and let Muslims become a big money donating minority group and being openly gay will suddenly become hate speech that discriminates against Muslims and the gays are going have to get their asses back in the closet because the movement demands it.
It could happen that within a few years, gay people will have more freedom in Utah than they do in California--even if they can't get married there.
I love women. I'm married to a gorgeous hunk of goodness with great brains, tits, and ass. I get the whole objectification thing and mostly reject a lot of it because I'm an ethically sexual being.
However, nothing comes close to hyper-objectifying the beautiful treasure called 'woman' than this law.
It makes female a machine-creature. A thing you poke and prod with questions and a bell-curve of propositions firmly verbalized in a desexualized manner. A smooth silky substance you have to research BEFORE and DURING copulation. A true marvelous thing you ultimately want nothing to do with.
This law is the ultimate reducer of woman because she is now a calculated risk. Instead of the indescribable sizzling bonds of chemicals and reciprocated passion intertwining organically we get paralysis and a tribalized distance between man and woman. This, my friends, is what happens between man and machine (the ultimate object).
Pics or GTFO
In fairness, I bet he wouldn't have said goddess as a wife much longer if he started posting pictures of her for the leering pleasure of various internet letches like you and me.
As a rule we don't post pics online. We are quite open shall we say but we prefer to stay underground and direct. It's more interesting that way.
On another note, tho, there is nothing wrong with 'leering pleasures' if all parties are agreeable to it and enjoy it.
So it requires a subscription. I got it.
I keed!
Nah, we play with others.
And it utterly robs women of the power of sex. If men view having sex as a calculated risk of jail, women will no longer be able to use the prospect of sex to manipulate them.
I honestly don't think the worst misogynist could come up with a more effective way to harm women than this policy.
Women have already started to give up that power by having regrettable one night stands and they don't like the consequences. This is an extremely ill-conceived way of restoring that sense of power.
The actual solution is personal responsibility, which has and never will be sexy. Not so women can be manipulative, but so they don't have to regret actions they never should have made in the first place.
and btw, another upside to more women taking responsibility might be a decrease to the skyrocketing rate of single mothers. Not that feminists would ever see that as a problem.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a one night stand if all the parties are emotionally and ethically mature enough to appreciate their decision without guilt. This is adult personal responsibility and the joys of fucking.
Regret twisted around sex is usually related to a lack of emotional/ethical intelligence.
It's sexy, they claim, to ask your partner if they'd like it "if I bit your neck" or "spanked your bottom."
So the implication here is that even if a girl consents to sex, but the guy spanks her bottom without asking, it's rape and she's going to need years of therapy and baggy clothing to get over it?
The alt-text could have at least said whatever is written on their backs.
or Where is a wall mirror when you need one?
I believe it says "fun people do fun things."
Culp-Ressler is more than just an evangelist for consent. Taking "retro" too far, the hip Ms. Culp-Ressler goes back to the turn-of-the-century (the 19th), and like those Progressives of yore, finds the justification for her social crusade within her deeply held "faith". Of course, like a Steampunk aficionado, she's taken some modern ideas and restyled with with a Victorian-era aesthetic; however, when one delves beneath the surface of her zealous crusade for social justice, one finds the social mores of Bronze Age Levantine semi-literate shepherds.
Hey, don't knock semi-literate shepherds. I'm pretty sure you could give them a couple thousand years, and they wouldn't come up with anything nearly as insane as requiring conjugal bliss to have every action which takes place within it to be signed in the triplicate.
True.
Nowadays, those semi-literate Levantine shepherds don't ask others' consent for anything at all.
Yeah, they do seem like they'd be on the "Hide your kids, hide your wife" side of the sexuality spectrum.
And yo' husband.
"No wonder all the great intellectual concepts such as monotheism and using the zero in arithmetic come from pastoral societies where herdsmen sit around all night with nothing to do except think things up (Though it is a wonder that more cosmologies aren't founded on screwing sheep)."
I just wonder why there was never a myth of half-man/half-sheep, like a centaur or a satyr?
That's weird when you think about it.
Sheep are only sexy to humans, not gods.
I think its well-established that Zeus will stick, and has stuck, his thunderbolt in anyplace.
He didn't even give an ewe a golden shower...
Oh?
Then how do you explain this, sir?
Magnets?
Swamp gas.
"Now keep in mind that the typical Greek myth goes something like this: innocent shepherd boy is minding his own business, an overflying god spies him and gets a hard-on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is still staggering around in a daze, that god's wife or lover, in a jealous rage, turns him - the helpless, innocent victim, that is - into let's say an immortal turtle and e.g. power-staples him to a sheet of plywood with a dish of turtle food just out of his reach and leaves him out in the sun forever to be repeatedly disemboweled by army ants and stung by hornets or something."
A meep? A shan?
The old Egyptian deity Khnum was ram headed....that is all I could think of.
A meep? A shan?
A California Voter?
Well, it's because--
Perhaps there's a certain tendency which--
I'm sure there's a theorem to explain--
Huh. You, sir, have rocked the very foundations of my worldview with that question.
HM really is the straw that stirs the intellectual drink!
"Men ? the sexual revolution is over
"Self control is due for a comeback. Here's how the church can help....
"SB967, the so called "yes-means-yes" bill would make sex illegal, unless there is "an affirmative, unambiguous and conscious decision" by each person to engage in sexual activity. While the legislation applies only to colleges, some observers believe it's only a matter of time before California expands the law to govern all relationships....
"And so one of the most restrictive sex laws in generations is about to be passed?in California?with strong support from liberal Democrats?and the blessing of many on the political left.
"Wow. I guess the sexual revolution is officially over....
"I'm surprised that more Christian leaders haven't spoken out in favor of this bill. Admittedly, it's weird to be on the same side of an issue as Gloria Steinem. But anything that makes men think twice before engaging in a casual hookup is a step in the right direction. SB 967 is the greatest threat to promiscuity since the scarlet letter."
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/c.....n-is-over/
All this is silly, but at the same time the advice for young men has to be that if she is even the least bit not into to what's happening, get the fuck out of there. Seduction is dead. Fooling around to see if she wants to go further is dead. Falling into bed together after a night out drinking is dead.
Look at the Lena Dunham nonsense: She never told him no, she says she did what she could to seem into it, she even says she didn't even consider it assault for a decade, but this guy is now a rapist because he couldn't read her mind. She didn't use his name, but her whole circle of friends know exactly who she is talking about, and the rest of them don't have to be circumspect. He's a rapist now, and he won't be able to sue her, or defend himself in anyway.
"Fooling around to see if she wants to go further is dead. Falling into bed together after a night out drinking is dead."
I hate it when that happens.
Worse than being considered a rapist, people will know he willingly fucked Lena Dunham.
It is it's own punishment.
To get a woman you have never been with in bed requires taking the risk of making an unwanted pass. Learning not to worry about being rejected and going for it is the most important thing you learn about women as a young man. Unless you are Orlando Bloom, "hey would like to fuck" doesn't work on any woman you are not paying that I am aware of.
What this rule does is make being rejecting not just humiliating but possibly criminal. It will result in one of two things happening; most people will just ignore it and any number of innocent men who are unlucky enough to make a pass at the wrong women will have their lives ruined and the rest of the people will follow the rule and few of them will ever hook up to have sex and will turn to porn and other virtual equivalents. Won't that be great?
99.9% of men and women will pay absolutely no mind to this law. While a few unlucky shlubs (mostly men) will get caught up in it, there will be no deterrent effect on the vast majority of sexually active, or sexually seeking, humans.
I ask people - which group is a greater threat to individual liberty? The progressives, or the Christian right? The word puritan was used once in this topic. It's the only way to describe progressives. They have created thought crimes which they want to use to force compliance and conformity. They have stuck their tentacles into nearly every walk of life.
At this point, the Christian right is basically a nuisance on gay marriage and abortion. Oh, and they want to put Christmas trees in public buildings.
Theocrats are like corporations: Cronyism goes away if the government is small enough.
And on certain issues, like this one, the progressives and the theocrats are aligned. (see above)
I am modestly relieved when progressive idiocy starts self-correcting.
Colleges got rid of parietal rules and stopped disciplining students for extramarital sex. Short of going back to that regime, the next-best thing is making sex so hazardous that men keep it in their pants.
Related:
George Spencer Millet: The Boy Who Was Kissed to Death
That's horrible!
No question about it, Loki is the one true god.
Can you imagine if a 15 year old girl had been stabbed by a bunch of male office workers forcing her to let them kiss her?
Today or in 1909?
Even if it happened in 1909, it would still be a big deal today. There'd be a Georgia Millet Society that was the main advocate for all these laws.
Yeah, I can see that.
That headline made me think for a moment, "oh, well, maybe Slate isn't always 100% retarded..." and then go look at their front page to see what else was on the menu.
Yeah, excuse me while i go bleach my brain to try and erase that experience.
That's because it's not actually Slate content, it's an article they bought from another site called Atlas Obscura.
Slate:
WE ARE OUR OWN WORST ENEMY
in that piece, was this gem of a frisbee-trick
"President Obama told CBS's 60 Minutes that he agreed with National Intelligence Director James Clapper's recent assessment that "we underestimated the Islamic State."
Really? Because i couldn't hear the part where he shared that view over the engine of the Bus.
We all know where this will lead.
http://vimeo.com/m/12915013
I once had a date with a dude who was a friend of a friend. When I told him it was OK for him to come up to my place to take a wizz (because, being a friend of a friend, he was fully vetted), he said, in that whiny beta cadence "thank you for allowing me into your space". Any thoughts I had of putting out quickly went out the window.
So, yeah.
(also, earlier in the evening he tried to tell me how to play poker. Obsequious + condescending)
He tried to mansplain poker? What a little shit. You should have stabbed him with your keys. (I am not joking; condescending people get the keys.)
Yeah, I had folded a hand that would have been a full boat on the river. I was like "aw, damn" and he said "You shouldn't indicate what's in your hand". I had folded the hand before the flop, keep in mind.
Fucker.
If it's the WSOP, yeah. If it's just a friendly game, doing stuff like that's part of the social aspects of the game.
Hell, even at the WSOP I've seen pros say what they would have had had they stayed in through the deal. Scotty Nguyen has done that many times.
In the WSOP, you see guys lie about it as often as not.
Yeah, I had folded a hand that would have been a full boat on the river
*in whiny beta voice*
Could you teach... me how to play poker? I'll buy you a lift ticket.
"You shouldn't help your opponents get better"
That usually shuts them up.
You should have pimp slapped him on his way out the door.
At least grabbed him by his weave.
he tried to tell me how to play poker
He obviously knew nothing about poker, either.
You don't 'tell' people how to play poker, you show them, through valuable life lessons.
"thank you for allowing me into your space"
ooooh, *sexy*
Permission seeking. mmmmmm. I bet he folds his underwear real nice before he gets into the hot partytime
Although... did he say, "Yo, I gotta take a Wizz"? Because that's almost compensatory.
No, that's my word choice. He probably asked "can I use your restroom?"
DEFINITELY A STRANGLER
You made the right move.
He sounds to weak to strangle. I suspect a poisoner.
I hope you made him correct himself with "May I".
Think Progress' Tara Culp-Ressler, a consent evangelist, insists that far from killing the mood, making sure your partner is as excited as you are about certain moves and positions will enhance the sexual experience.
These people are a parody of themselves.
When men react to this by turning to porn and having less sex, the answer will be to go after porn. The whole point of this is to give women the control over male sexuality they lost in the sexual revolution.