"Yes means yes" policies and the notion of "the initiator."

I hadn't noticed this "initiator" concept before. Here's a NYT article — "Affirmative Consent: Are Students Really Asking?" — which gets to the topic of a drunken couple having sex or, as a University of Albany male student named Tyler Frahme is quoted: "You both get drunk and it gets heated and you get into it." The student — who is concerned that these policies "cast men in a predatory light" and are not "gender-neutral" — is questioned by the author (whose name is Sandy Keenan):

Can a really drunk person give consent?

“My answer to that is no,” he said. He was right. “Consent cannot be given when a person is incapacitated.”

Mr. Frahme posed a (not-so-hypothetical) scenario of his own: “You both get drunk and it gets heated and you get into it. If the next day she regrets it and formally complains, to me that’s just plain wrong.” The initiator, in fact, is responsible for securing consent, but because the other party is intoxicated, it may not be obtainable.

It's interesting that the author's statements do not appear in quotes, but the student's answers do. Did Keenan say "really drunk" or did she use Frahme's word "incapacitated"? If one person is fully incapacitated and sex takes place, we know who the actor is. If both are completely incapacitated, there is no activity. So a hypothetical is needed to get at the difficult case, and Frahme aptly steps up with a scenario in which both are drunk and both are active. He thinks it's wrong for her to complain under those circumstances.

I would want to develop the scenario with additional questions about who did and said what in this encounter, but without more, the student deserves the respect of taking the hypothetical as it was offered: 2 individuals, doing the same thing, getting drunk and having sex together, neither doing more nor less than the other during the sexual encounter, and the woman being the one to take the affirmative step of lodging a complaint.

The author does not give the student this respect. She doesn't play fair according to the standards of discussing a hypothetical. She says: "The initiator, in fact, is responsible for securing consent, but because the other party is intoxicated, it may not be obtainable."

The initiator! What initiator? There was no initiator in the hypothetical. It was a shared and utterly equal interaction as the student phrased it. The "other party is intoxicated"? Both were intoxicated. How did the woman become the victim and the man the aggressor? If the author wants that to be the hypothetical, she must take responsibility for changing the hypothetical. The leap she made, the leap the NYT editors accepted, was that the man was the man is "the initiator." And so we see that the student's apprehensions were warranted. He's right should be concerned that the policies are not gender-neutral and that men are cast as predators.

What mental sloppiness the author and the NYT editors display here! The word "initiator" glosses over the gender-specificity. The author — intentionally or blindly — imposed a sex stereotype on the gender-neutral hypothetical. The male is visualized as the active partner. Why? That's not the way Frahme put it. It's certainly not a necessary implication from the fact that the woman later opted to lodge a complaint.

What immediately follows in the article is this:

[Another student, Jill] Santiago, who knew all about the issue, having helped put together university-mandated training in sexual assault prevention for her sorority, jumped out of the interpretive rabbit hole, locked eyes with Mr. Frahme and said: “If guys realize they have to ask and get permission — and I’ve been asked before, it’s not that bad — this could wind up protecting everyone.”

It wasn’t such a mood kill, she said, when a partner paused and asked: “Do you want to do this. Is it O.K.?”

But Mr. Frahme wasn’t buying it — at least not yet.

First, I just have to say, I don't know what an "interpretive rabbit hole" is or what you do when you're down in it, but rabbits don't lie in wait and jump up when aggravated. They flee from confrontation. And they never, never, never lock eyes. They can't. Their eyes are on opposite sides of their head. That configuration works for the animal's strategy of staying alive through vigilance and flight.



But we're asked — through this confrontational rabbit nonsense — to view Santiago as equipped with greater knowledge and insight as she uses the gendered word "guys." Guys could proactively ask for permission as they proceed in a sexual encounter. It wouldn't be too much of what the author paraphrases as "mood kill" and it "could wind up protecting everyone."

But in the hypothetical both are drunk, both proceed gropingly/casually/whatever, and we don't know who said what to whom. So the purportedly superior mind of Santiago is, like the author's, failing to acknowledge the words of Frahme's hypothetical. When are we in the "interpretive rabbit hole" and when have we emerged?

Isn't it strange that the people who are saying use language — you can do it, just ask permission and elicit a response — are demonstrably incapable of hearing and understanding the language we can read in this article promoting the communication solution. They themselves are terrible communicators, leaping and distorting and inattentive to their own lapses. And yet they tell men that they will be able to protect themselves by saying the right things in the middle of an encounter, as if these words will be understood, remembered, correctly repeated to others, and interpreted accurately.

You'd be a fool to believe in that protection.

By the way, I'm only talking about a small part of a long article, the beginning. But I think you should know that this Frahme character is wheeled out again in the very end. We're told that, interviewed a month later, he says he's "been practicing consent almost religiously."

He now asks for consent once or twice during sexual encounters with women he knows well, and four or five times during more casual or first-time hookups.

He seems to have had sex with at least 4 women in a month's time. But what a good little man he's become in the author's world view.

Personally, I can't see why "practicing consent almost religiously" is much. Almost? So, in a month, you had at least one encounter where you did not get consent? Or does that mean he sometimes had sex with a "first-time hookups" and slipped to the women-he-knows-well standard of only checking in once or twice? In my world view, the greater question is whether any of this sex is good.