Thinking Can Be Dangerous

Shorter Megan McArdle: For centuries, middle-class women didn't have to tell men "no" to sex because society punished people who had sex outside of marriage and therefore women did not have sex and men did not rape, except for a very few psychopaths. Rape culture is based on the inability of men to figure out if a woman really does want sex and lack of respect for women who do have sex.

I don't think she thinks this stuff through very carefully.

Nor should feminists be eager to help women avoid the burden of deciding, and then stating their opinion in the strongest possible terms. "No" and "I don't want to" are great tools for women to master. For centuries, society protected nice middle-class women from having to use them by deciding what we wanted, and punishing anyone who wanted anything else. Now that those rules are gone, some feminists are essentially advocating handing the burden of deciding what we want over to ... men, who are supposed to guess whether we are offering "affirmative consent," and be punished if they guess wrong.

The affirmative consent rules are, in my opinion, completely unworkable as either a social or a legal norm. But even worse than that, they give back the power we fought so hard to win: the power to make our own decisions, and then to reap the rewards, or suffer the consequences, of what we decide. "No means no" is a good enough rule.  It is not good enough to defeat every psychopath who is willing to use drugs or a man's superior strength to take what is not offered freely, but it is certainly good enough to defeat a "rape culture" that says women don't really know what they want, or deserve to have their desires respected.

If feminists hadn't gotten their women's lib panties in a bunch they would have been protected by society and wouldn't be raped so often.