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Following up on "Soft No"
Nov. 14th, 2022 04:26 pmThis weekend I attended an event with a lot of art and parties in a hotel. A few hundred people I know were there, among hundreds more strangers. Over the course of the weekend I asked many people if they wanted to do various things, ranging from get lunch together to explore an art room to play with rope to share a bed. I got plenty of “yes, let’s do it”, and we did the thing and that was great. I got some “yes, at this specific future time”, and most of those led to doing the thing, which was also great. I got some “no”, although significantly less than I got “yes”, and I feel good about that ratio as well. That leaves the final category, the one plenty of you are tired of hearing me post about, but the one that bothers me the most and handling differently would possibly improve my life the most.
I got at least a dozen “maybe later” or “maybe tomorrow”, mostly to more intimate requests (rope, cuddle, sleepover). No, I didn’t ask anyone about sex. No, I wasn’t asking random people inappropriate things. These were people I had spent an hour or more talking to at the moment in question, and had known for months to years prior.
For at least most of those responses, I was 95% confident or better that they actually did want to do the thing, and that asking again an hour or day later would have led to a genuinely enthusiastic interaction. As frequent readers of my posts can probably predict, I didn’t ask again. My social circles contain dangerously many people who advocate a standard of enthusiastic consent where “maybe later” is a “soft no”, a “soft no” is a “no", and asking again after a “no” is a consent violation. Most of those people are hypocrites, not practicing what they preach, and not holding their friends or most strangers to those standards, but occasionally still applying them to strangers or people they don’t like. This is becoming an intolerable aspect of my social interactions, and I’m preparing to make drastic changes. I’m hoping this last(?) plea for insight will draw any novel insights before I make some decisions.
I would very much like to hear from some of the people who advocate this model of consent. Especially if you follow it, but also if you don’t and can explain why. I’m also open to feedback from other people, but I could do without more of the “just don’t listen to those people, their opinion doesn’t matter” that litter my posts on this subject. Their opinion does matter, when they control my access to people and spaces that I enjoy, when people I know and love trust their problematic conclusions on the subject of consent without question, or when those conclusions spread through games of telephone to otherwise damage my reputation and ruin my life.
I got at least a dozen “maybe later” or “maybe tomorrow”, mostly to more intimate requests (rope, cuddle, sleepover). No, I didn’t ask anyone about sex. No, I wasn’t asking random people inappropriate things. These were people I had spent an hour or more talking to at the moment in question, and had known for months to years prior.
For at least most of those responses, I was 95% confident or better that they actually did want to do the thing, and that asking again an hour or day later would have led to a genuinely enthusiastic interaction. As frequent readers of my posts can probably predict, I didn’t ask again. My social circles contain dangerously many people who advocate a standard of enthusiastic consent where “maybe later” is a “soft no”, a “soft no” is a “no", and asking again after a “no” is a consent violation. Most of those people are hypocrites, not practicing what they preach, and not holding their friends or most strangers to those standards, but occasionally still applying them to strangers or people they don’t like. This is becoming an intolerable aspect of my social interactions, and I’m preparing to make drastic changes. I’m hoping this last(?) plea for insight will draw any novel insights before I make some decisions.
I would very much like to hear from some of the people who advocate this model of consent. Especially if you follow it, but also if you don’t and can explain why. I’m also open to feedback from other people, but I could do without more of the “just don’t listen to those people, their opinion doesn’t matter” that litter my posts on this subject. Their opinion does matter, when they control my access to people and spaces that I enjoy, when people I know and love trust their problematic conclusions on the subject of consent without question, or when those conclusions spread through games of telephone to otherwise damage my reputation and ruin my life.