05/10/2021
Powerful read.
“What models had I ever encountered for real, enthusiastic consent?”
This is the question posed by Melissa Febos in her latest poignant NYT piece “I Spent My Life Consenting to Touch I Didn’t Want.”
I have been thinking about women, bodies and consent for years. Not just consent to s*x, but consent to everything that comes along with being a woman in a woman’s body. Women are expected to use their bodies to make everyone around them happy and comfortable. We “consent” to dressing our bodies so school principals don’t send us home, husbands don’t keep us at home, colleagues don’t think they can touch us, friends don’t think we’re easy, and some of us “consent” to covering our bodies to try to avoid being r***d. We “consent” to pregnancy because what kind of a woman doesn’t want to have her own child? We “consent” to blistered ni***es because society howls at us that breast is best. We “consent” to a peck on the cheek, a rub of the shoulder, a greeting that’s “just being friendly,” even if we know in our guts it’s eerie and he’s a l**h but to say no or step back makes everyone look at us because we’ve made things awkward and “he’s really a good guy.”
The argument is always made that women can say no. And in the 21st century women have agency now more than ever. But I can tell you that is bu****it. Because some of us have been wired NOT TO say no. No is a practice. It is a habit formed early in life, nurtured by those raising you, buttressed by everyone around you. It is a physical integrity with clear boundaries that demarcate your territory, fencing everyone out unless you want them in. Everyone. Including your mother, your father, your brother, uncles, grandfathers, friends, bosses, everyone. You own your body. No one gets to pierce your baby ears, insist you wear pink dresses and not blue overalls, cut off your cl****is, keep you off the football field, or off a bike or off the streets, burden your body with household chores because you’re a girl and you need to learn how to sew and cook and mop and polish. Girls’ and women’s bodies are subjected to these aggressions, in ways that NEVER burden men’s bodies.
No, to fall easily, naturally off the tongue, is never denied, compromised and continually violated.
On trips to Egypt as a teenager and young woman, older men would flirt with me. Grab my hand, jokingly asking me to marry them, in front of their wives, and wouldn’t let go until I was red in the face, yet smiling - with embarrassment. If I had said knock it off, or f**k off, I would have been considered exceptionally rude. The old man was only having harmless fun. Fun his wife would never be permitted with another man. But my hand was grabbed against my will, my body fixed by his attention. Everyone in the room would be smiling and laughing, at him being a fool, and me for being physically helpless.
I have spent the last five years trying to reduce the number of girls in Egypt who have their ge****ls mutilated by local midwives and barbers. Imagine pinning down a girl, prying apart her legs, exposing her genitalia to everyone in the room, pulling at her cl****is and slicing it off. Imagine a man pinning her down, while another cuts off her cl****is with barber’s scissors. Imagine after her screams and cries and anguish she is warned to never, ever let a man who is not her husband touch her down there, or she’ll be dishonored and possibly killed. A girl/woman must police her body when it suits her family/culture/society, but expect it to be violated when it suits them as well.
I was never cut. But I was bullied by my father, mother and younger brother. And on a couple of occasions I was hit by them. The one time that still blows my mind is when I was 16 years old, at the back of the house, hanging laundry. It was Sunday - always laundry day, for me and never my brother or father. I would collect all the clothes, sheets and towels and one cycle after another hang them to dry. That one Sunday, Christian, a boy who lived across the street came over to hang out with my brother. I don’t remember where my brother was, but Christian hung out with me sitting on a bench by the wall telling me jokes, waiting for my brother to come home. Probably my brother’s age, at 13 Christian was funny, and I laughed hard at his jokes. Too hard, so my mother called me into the laundry room. She screamed at me before raising her right hand and slapping me. Hard.
When I returned to the family home a little over a year ago my mother and I had an argument about I can’t remember what. I brought up that day and I told her how angry I was that I was standing out in the heat hanging everyone’s laundry and I did nothing but laugh and she slapped me. “No,” she told me. Christian touched me, and she slapped me because “you didn’t defend yourself and stop it.” Days after I had a memory of Christian coming close and trying to tickle me. I can’t tell you if it was repressed or now imagined. But I can tell you my mother has no idea that when she slapped me across my face she smashed my boundaries and crumbled my ability to stand up for myself and say no when it really mattered. Her message was clear - she could do what she wanted to my body and I could not say no. The irony of her using violence against my body because she believed someone else violated it. Speak up/be quiet. Stand up for yourself/lie down and be our doormat. Don’t consent/consent.
There is no marital r**e in Islam, Judaism or Christianity. Unless s*x is harmful or violent, a woman must consent to her husband. In Judaism and Islam a husband cannot force his wife to have s*x if she is menstruating, cannot so****ze her, and in Islam cannot ask for s*x during fasting hours in Ramadan. But once the sun sets, “Your wives are as a tilth unto you” (qur’an 2:223) so sow your seed fellas, because she can’t say no. And if she does, you can unilaterally divorce her on the spot and toss that body to the curb, or take a second (or third or fourth) younger, hotter wife, or warn her, as my father once warned me, that a husband will just go and have s*x with someone else. My father, of all people, warned me: if I wanted fidelity, I had to consent. You're married, he owns you. Like a pr******te, you can’t be r***d.
Do they realize how women’s bodies are being served up to service men’s needs but at the same time we are supposed to have full agency and speak up with a fervent NO when we don’t want to be touched? Do they realize the mind f**k this is and how our brains are being wired to stamp out our instincts and confuse us so we sublimate our needs and desires so we stay safe, hold onto relationships and don’t upset people? The way our bodies are treated messes with our psyches and compromises our real and enthusiastic consent.
I now unconsent. I withdraw my consent retroactively. I’m going back in time and revisiting every expectation and aggression and saying no, I won’t pick up your s**t because you have a dick. You have hands too, do it yourself. My body wasn’t made to work so yours could chill. I won’t cover my body because you think my bare flesh will unleash a social chaos. I won’t let you grab my hand and hold my attention because otherwise I’m not being fun and I’m being rude. F**k you. My body is not for your entertainment. I will not have s*x with you because you’re mad at me and you think it’s the only thing that will make things better. I will tell everyone if you lay a hand on me, and I will laugh and click my heels and own my body out loud. It’s mine. Don’t f**king touch it.
