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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781944934262 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Thornapple Press |
| Publication date: | 10/27/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Sex and Love When You Hate Yourself and Don't Have Your Shit Together
JoEllen Notte
In my early twenties, young, searching for love, and with an undiagnosed mental illness, I heard the same words of "wisdom" over and over again: "You can't love someone else until you love yourself." Feeling like I was being asked to do the impossible, I spent a lot of time wondering what one needed to do to convince the world they loved themselves when actually doing it was unimaginable.
In my late twenties, my finally diagnosed but horribly managed depression coincided with a misdiagnosed, mistreated injury. The only thing everyone in my life at the time seemed to agree on was that I was so lucky to have my husband. I was living somewhere I didn't want to live for this man; I was constantly dragging my miserable, hurting self through everything for this man, while committing over and over again to "just try harder" — when I knew I was doing all I could just to keep breathing — for this man. I was dying inside, but wow was I lucky to have someone who would put up with me.
Years later, I'm dating online and very specifically looking for no commitments, no long-term relationships — I'm not asking for anything from anyone. My mentions of books like Opening Up and The Ethical Slut bring all the poly boys to the yard, but frequently, my honesty about my mental health history sends them running, turning to yell over their shoulder the now cliché polyamory mantra "You have to get yourself together first before you can really 'do' non-monogamy!" I look around and notice how many nonmonogamous women I know are concealing their mental health issues and facing struggles on their own in the quest to be the mythic "cool poly girl." I see a lot of women taking a lot of shit with a pasted-on serene smile because they want everyone to know they got themselves together and are now "safe" to be nonmonogamous.
These examples from my own complicated history with both love and mental illness serve to illustrate problematic issues that exist on a larger scale. We, as a society, consistently tell people with mental illnesses that they are not eligible for love.
In our culture, we believe many things about the mentally ill: they are out of control, they need care, they don't have sex, and they are dangerous, but one of the most pervasive and dangerous beliefs is that they are incompetent. Additionally, people struggling with mental illness receive constant reminders that they do not deserve love/acceptance/sexual attention as they are, that they are less than, too much trouble, emotional time bombs who are too broken to give back what they take. As such, they need to try their hardest to act like they are "well" for everyone else's benefit, be damn grateful to be loved despite their brokenness, and not press their luck by needing too much. Working from these beliefs, we end up with situations like I've described above: people who happen to have a mental illness feeling sentenced to loneliness because they have a brain that doesn't let them love themselves first, "broken and lucky" mentally ill people who feel damaged and so lucky that anyone would be with them that they dare not question it, or the buzz kill mentally ill people who might "ruin people's fun" with their needs and thus feel it necessary to hide them. In all of these scenarios we see one common theme: the partner dealing with mental illness is set up to accept a lot of crap they wouldn't be expected to otherwise. All of these situations can lead that partner to surrender their right to true, enthusiastic, genuine, fully embodied consent.
Many people don't love themselves. They can't. They won't ever. Simply telling them they have to do that before they can have the love of anyone else not only is cruel, but can backfire dramatically. Knowing that self-love is the "golden ticket" to the world of love, sex, acceptance, and everything else we're told comes with it can lead to the sort of over-the-top, "I LOVE myself!" play acting that makes one extremely malleable and susceptible to the demands of others dressed up as sex and body positivity. Because after all, why wouldn't they want to do ALL the things if they LOVE themselves, LOVE their body? Right?! Acting out self-love doesn't leave much room for weighing real wants and needs, only for doing what looks like what the character that's been created — the one who LOVES themself so much! — would do.
The "broken and lucky" dynamic, which can be common in relationships where one partner does a lot of caretaking of the other, consistently sends the message that the mentally ill partner is "broken," that they are damaged goods, that they are "less than," and, as such, extremely "lucky" to have a partner at all. Once it's been established that the mere presence of the partner is a gift, every act of caretaking gets added to the relationship balance sheet, and the mentally ill partner is so far in the hole they could never get out. The balance of power in the relationship is completely out of whack, and here is where consent becomes problematic. This dynamic leaves no room for equitable negotiation; it's not a relationship of equals. One partner has all the power and the other — the mentally ill partner — is relying on them, is convinced they need them, and often feels they "owe" their partner so much that they have lost their right to differing opinions, desires, and needs.
"You have to get yourself together first" has become a polyamory mantra of sorts, and it's bullshit — ableist bullshit at that. What people are actually saying when they say this is "I got into this to have lots of fun sexy times, and your reality might get in the way of that, so please just be cool and sexy all the time." Allow me to be perfectly clear about this: one of the cruelest things you can do is to tell someone that they are ineligible for love because of mental illness. Yet this is something that happens all the time. In a discussion about this idea, upon hearing that I believed people who were dealing with mental illness should not face constant messaging that they aren't allowed to pursue relationships, an acquaintance launched into a vehement argument for the right of communities to exclude people who may be "toxic." Simply hearing the idea that mentally ill people should get love too made this person feel like he had to protect his community from the invading mentally ill masses. As he argued this point, all I could think was how people in this man's community must feel like they could not step out of line, have problems, or be less than fun.
The upshot is that the circumstances the folks living with mental illness navigate in order to feel worthy of love often require them to act "as if." As if they were healthy, as if their needs were being met, as if they were okay with things that they may not be okay with. There is a pressure to lessen the impact of your disorder on others, to shrink it down, and by extension to shrink yourself down. The less you that shows up, the less voice you have, and the less control you have over your circumstances. To the outside world you may look like a consenting partner, but when you only feel safe voicing one-quarter of your feelings, what is filling in that other three-quarters? Whose voice is that? Are you really giving your own consent, or are you simply giving the answer you know someone else wants to hear? The answer that causes the least trouble?
Going with the flow is not consent. Trying to be unobtrusive is not consent. Being afraid to bother anyone with your problems is not consent. Not wanting to cause drama is not consent. Not wanting to be a buzz kill is not consent. Not wanting your luck to run out with the awesome partner who is with you in spite of your mental illness is not consent. Not wanting the hot partner you've just met to think you're high maintenance is not consent. Hiding yourself to make someone else's life easier is not consent.
Yet we, in ways both implicit and explicit, ask the mentally ill to do these things all the time. The message is sent that certain people — cool, easygoing, fun people who don't cause trouble — are lovable, and that not fitting those criteria is inherently problematic, so those who don't should do something about it. Cover up that illness, don't let it show, and if it's too late, if we've seen it, have the good grace to be sufficiently grateful for any bones tossed your way, and then remember that you are on notice, on borrowed time, because you are lucky, and luck runs out, luck can be pressed, and you probably shouldn't press yours.
If we want to say "yes means yes" and make it mean more than "no means no," we need to go beyond the words to the lives that are shaping them. Someone who feels indebted to their partner, lucky to have them, in danger of losing them is not delivering the same yes they would to an equal. Someone who feels like it's not safe to show their true self, that they need to repress, hide, or stifle themselves lest they be cast out for being dramatic, may not say yes for the same reasons they would were they living out loud.
We can start to change this dynamic by changing the way we look at mental illness and the mentally ill. First off, understand that given the choice most mentally ill people would not be living with a mental illness. Working from that understanding, decouple people from their illness — your partner and their illness are not one; they are more like an ongoing wrestling match. Two entities locked together but separate. This new understanding allows you to see how you can enter the right to join your partner's team rather than stand off against your partner and their depression. Now you are working together. Rather than becoming your partner's adversary whom they have to protect themselves from or caretaker whom they are indebted to, you are their equal with whom they can negotiate. We need to stop infantilizing and desexualizing the mentally ill and start relating to them as competent people capable of making their own choices. This allows everyone to be open, honest, and communicative. People dealing with illness can enter relationships being truthful about it, and partners can join them as allies.
Genuine, enthusiastic consent is for everyone, and the pursuit of sex, love, and acceptance aren't limited to the healthy, but for too long, society has supported the idea that the mentally ill are unlovable. Let each other be where you are, love each other right there, tell each other it's okay to be where you are, and love each other even when you don't love yourselves.
CHAPTER 2
The Legal Framework of Consent Is Worthless
AV Flox
I keep hearing people say that consent is complicated. I don't think that it is. What is complicated isn't the idea of consent, but the framework we use to approach discussions about it and to understand our responsibility toward one another within.
Currently, when we talk about consent, what we're actually talking about is permission to engage in an activity, viewed as a legally binding contract. This legal framework results in static solutions, such as apps that require individuals who plan to have sex to sign an agreement that shows all parties are willing to have sex, for example. The problem with contracts such as these is that they ignore that things can happen during the course of an activity that change the willingness of a participant to continue, and that written agreements by their very nature may, in fact, create a vector of coercion for participants.
In addition, the legal framework of consent fails to account for the fact that people may enter into a situation where sex is possible without having decided that sex is an option they are going to take. We do this every time we go on a first date, and yet because we think of consent within a legal framework, we often end up seeing victims of sexual assault and coercion being reprimanded for dressing a certain way or accepting to go to certain places with an assailant prior to a rape. Many feminists have undertaken the work of educating the public to understand that what we wear or where we agree to meet isn't an invitation for sex, but because so many continue to operate from a legal framework, progress in this arena has been difficult. After all, under the legal framework of consent, when we agree to enter a situation where sex is possible, we are seen to be extending de facto consent to the possibility of sex.
Within a legal framework, our best option for avoiding consent violations is to stay home until we know with absolute certainty that we want to engage in sexual activity. This is fundamentally broken, and nowhere is this brokenness more obvious than in our many attempts to make it work somehow.
In 2014, California governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 967 into law, changing the definition of consent on college campuses that receive State funding. The "yes means yes" law, as it has come to be known, spells out that for consent to exist, it is no longer necessary for any party involved in sexual activity to say no if they do not wish to participate. Under this law, all parties must give explicit, ongoing consent.
"Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent," reads the addition to the California Education Code under Section 67386. "Affirmative consent must be ongoing throughout a sexual activity and can be revoked at any time. The existence of a dating relationship between the persons involved, or the fact of past sexual relations between them, should never by itself be assumed to be an indicator of consent."
Though considered a victory by its proponents, a number of students took issue with the law, on the grounds that consent is often granted nonverbally.
In a column reflecting on the application of the new law, attorney Hans Bader additionally warned that a State intrusion into relationships by means of forcing discussions of consent prior to and during sexual activity may violate students' constitutional privacy rights, under the Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which struck down Texas's sodomy law, and federal appeals court decisions like Wilson v. Taylor (1984), which ruled that dating relationships are protected against unwarranted State meddling.
But there is another avenue where affirmative consent fails. Sometimes, while we may readily agree to engage in sexual situations, we may nevertheless experience harm during these situations that changes how we feel about what happened. Sometimes, these harms are things we're not immediately aware of, but which can and do still have a serious impact on our well-being.
For example, imagine I am with a person who has enthusiastically consented to a kinky session in which he has agreed to being tied up and beaten. During the beating, I employ a tool he likes that I am not familiar with, and the lack of technical knowledge about the tool causes me to strike in locations one should not, such as the less fleshy parts of his body where organs and bones are exposed. I am technically doing what we have agreed to, and despite the misses, the overall sensation may be sufficiently pleasant for him to choose not to end the session in that moment. However, once he is out of that sensory space and better able to reflect on what happened, it is possible that he will find the resulting damage impossible to overcome. Unfortunately, because he initially expressed enthusiasm for putting himself in that situation — perhaps even asking explicitly that I use a tool I was unfamiliar with and harbored reservations about using on him — he may feel as though he has no right to tell me he experienced a negative outcome, and if he seeks support, he may find that people's reaction is to question why he agreed to a beating in the first place, or with someone who didn't know what she was doing.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Ask"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Kitty Stryker.
Excerpted by permission of Thorntree Press, LLC.
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