Federal Prosecutors Are Starting To Sound Like Campus Activists About Sex and Consent
With the OneTaste case, the Department of Justice has embraced infantilizing ideas about women, consent, and coercion.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is now embracing ideas about coercion and consent that rose to prominence on college campuses during the Barack Obama administration.
That's the implication of the OneTaste case, in which a jury has returned a guilty verdict against Rachel Cherwitz and Nicole Daedone, who stood accused of a conspiracy to commit forced labor during their time with the sexual and spiritual self-help organization.
I have written many words about this case already, and I'm going to try to refrain from rehashing all of the details in today's newsletter. (If you're new to the case and want to dive deep, here you go. If you want a couple of overviews of how the trial played out, see here and here.)
What I want to focus on right now is the larger implications of this case. They're not pretty.
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From College Campuses to #MeToo to the DOJ
If these ideas about coercion and consent didn't start on the college campuses of the 2010s, that's at least when they became fully institutionalized —adopted as not just the framework favored by activist students and women's studies professors but by college administrators and the Title IX offices they were beholden to. There was affirmative consent, sure, but also a broader suspicion of consent as a worthwhile standard, or at least a willingness to dismiss it for more arcane ideas about sexual permissibility.
Suddenly it wasn't enough to say no and it wasn't even enough to say yes—one had to consider a complex set of power dynamics, alcohol consumption levels, subtle nonverbal cues, and so on, to determine if consent counted. It stopped just short of taking astrological signs into account.
We went from a reasonable corrective (acknowledging that sexual assault needn't necessarily involve force or violence) to women getting support for claims of sexual coercion and violation even when they seemed to willingly go along with sexual activity at the time but later said that they weren't enthusiastic enough about it and a partner should have known that and stopped. Basically, it was only consensual if a woman felt deep down in her heart, during and after, that everything had been OK.
We saw this idea migrate from campus newspapers and Title IX offices to the broader world during the #MeToo movement. It's perhaps best exemplified by a story about the actor Aziz Ansari. A young woman went to dinner with him, then back to his house, and later excoriated him in Babe magazine for not reading her cues about not wanting to fool around and allegedly pressuring her to do so. The piece called it sexual misconduct and a violation. But when the woman explicitly told Ansari no, he stopped, per her account of things. And when she wanted to go, she left.
The Babe article provoked a huge debate about whether this sort of thing—which in another era we might have just called a bad date or caddish behavior—was a form of sexual assault and where responsibility lies here. Are sexual partners supposed to be mind readers? Do women have any responsibility for explicitly making their wishes known?
Infantilizing Women
Obviously, not all or even most campus sexual misconduct or #MeToo stories were like the Aziz Ansari story. But there were enough that it was clearly not an isolated idea or belief system. It was a new paradigm—and one sold, perversely, as empowering to women.
That was a lie. Broadening the parameters of nonconsensual sex like this does women a disservice, portraying us as somehow having less agency and less moral culpability than male peers (which could have consequences far beyond the bedroom) while also telling women that it's normal—desirable even—to just shut up and go along with unwanted or uncomfortable activity in the moment and then object afterward. Rather than encourage women to be bold and unflinching in expressing what they want and don't want, it encourages putting out with a promise that later they can get their vengeance in public opinion or in court.
We're uncomfortable as a culture with "assigning women complete sexual responsibility, even though we want them to have complete sexual liberty," said Kat Rosenfield on a recent episode of the Feminine Chaos podcast. Rosenfield and her co-host were talking about the murky way we sometimes talk about women's actions when allegations of sexual misconduct are concerned. People can do a lot of "squirming around to try and make a choice that was made [into] not actually a choice," said Rosenfield. And once you're in that mode, you end up with some real mental shenanigans around consent.
The OneTaste trial shows that these ideas have now crossed over from college values or cultural vibes to legal standards adopted by federal prosecutors with the power to help put people in prison.
Consent Withdrawn 15 Years Later
In the OneTaste trial, prosecutors elicited testimony after testimony from "victims" who admit they consented to various sexual activities, from orgasmic meditation (a core activity in OneTaste courses and communes) to random hook-ups to relationships with OneTaste community members, investors, and students. They not only did not say no, they affirmatively agreed to these encounters or even initiated them.
The repercussions they now claimed to have feared if they didn't do these things—many of which were core parts of the intentional communities and/or classes they chose to partake in, applied for, paid for—were things like social disapproval or missing out on opportunities to move up in the OneTaste ranks. Some were not even employees when the activities in question took place, and even among those who were, much of the action they talked about took place in contexts outside their employment.
Prosecutors argued that Daedone's ideas (like daily orgasmic meditation being good for you, orgasm as a way to clear out bad energy, and the importance of being open to sexual encounters that might be out of your comfort zone) and Cherwitz's encouragement or shunning amounted to a form of coercion that rendered these women's seeming consent invalid.
We're supposed to ignore the fact that these women admittedly never told Daedone or Cherwitz, let alone their sexual partners, that they were uncomfortable or didn't want to do these things. We're supposed to ignore the fact that contemporaneous accounts of these acts—emails, texts, journal entries, social media posts—often showed sunny feelings about what was going on. And we're supposed to ignore the fact that these women didn't report any crimes or labor violations at the time and are only testifying after being approached by FBI agents a decade or two later.
The defendants are being held accountable for how these women feel—or at least told FBI agents who were making promises and extolling their victimhood that they feel—about 10- and 15-year-old sexual activity that everyone seems to have been perfectly fine with at the time.
We're looking at campus kangaroo courts come to a federal courthouse, with U.S. attorneys fully embracing ideas about consent that were weird and radical just a decade or two ago. I'm sure this will be cheered by some people. I find the prospect offensive and dangerous.
It's a total affront to due process, giving people little notice about how to avoid liability (since consent in the moment clearly doesn't matter). And unlike on college campuses, the arbiters of these disputes now have the power to help put people in prison for long stretches.
It creates a dangerous situation not only for people who engaged in sex acts with someone claiming, decades later, that their consent was invalid but also for anyone who might be said to have "conspired" to have encouraged these sexual encounters or to have "participated in a venture" that received any benefit from them. It opens the gate to forced labor or sex trafficking prosecutions based on sexual regret.
It's also one more step in the total infantilization of women, negating the gains in sexual and social autonomy that we've won. This situation where we expect all the rights of adulthood but none of the responsibility can't last. We're going to start seeing—we are seeing—rights chipped away at, too. At a time when many are keen to use sexual "harms" to justify everything from online censorship to limiting LGBTQ expression, curtailing reproductive rights, and encouraging women to give up on college and just have babies, no feminist, friend of women, or woman who cares about her own bodily autonomy and ability to consent should be cheering this safe space–ification of the DOJ.
More Sex & Tech News
• The slippery slope of age-verification laws for adult content is on full display in France, where the "government is considering designating X as a porn platform — a move that will likely have the platform implementing strict age verification requirements," per Politico. It's not hard to imagine the same thing happening in the U.S., rendering laws aimed at carding people who visit porn websites as a backdoor to either require age verification for social media, too, or make social media websites ban sexually oriented content and accounts of any kind.
• President Donald Trump is expected to once again extend the deadline for TikTok parent company ByteDance to sell the company or be banned. "Remember when TikTok was supposedly an urgent national security threat that required emergency legislation? Funny how that 'emergency' keeps getting 75-day extensions," Techdirt Editor Mike Masnick writes. That "should tell you everything about how 'urgent' this national security threat actually was."
• "It would help immensely if the critiques of porn, did not confuse 'sex' with 'porn.' The push to be 'sexy' and sexism are not rooted in one form of media," comments Mike Stabile, director of public policy at the Free Speech Coalition, in response to a New Yorker review of the new book Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. "But linking both evangelicals and anti-SW feminists is the idea that sexist evil can be traced to one tantalizing source. To do that, in these sexual monotheories, porn has to be a monolith. That it presents women one way (submissive) and with one look (skinny, with big tits). Antiporn texts depend on a charicature [sic] of porn, a flattening of sexual speech, in order to establish a clear directional effect on culture."
As to the idea that focusing on consent in porn is somehow insufficient, Stabile posts: says: "We focus on 'consent'…because it's how we restrain the urge to police other people's fantasies and sexualities. Because saying 'your articulation of sexuality' is damaging to ME, is the same impulse that underlies anti-LGBTQ censorship."
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