> As Catharine Mackinnon, the progenitor of the school of feminism from which this movement proceeds, once put it, "Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated."
Maybe she's not a "modern feminist". But that's the sense I get from TFA about current policies.
This is less far-fetched than it may seem at first. Many people on HN would agree with the proposition that an arbitration clause in an employment contract with a big company is only theoretically consensual. The concept of "wage slavery" is widely accepted on HN as well. The basis of these ideas is that people may "consent" to something but that is not the same thing as welcoming the thing. In the sexual context, few people would disagree that, for example, someone cannot "consent" to sex with a prison guard or an arresting police officer. What about economic or social coercion? What does consent mean in cultures where women have no way to support themselves or any social standing outside a relationship with a man?
This is injecting your own message into what was written. MacKinnion wrote that, "Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated". Feelings of violation can manifest after sex, and it is an assumption on your part that this does not fall into scope of what MacKinnon considers sex. MacKinnon wrote that she considers it rape "whenever" women feel violated, so at face value this encompasses feelings of violation that manifest after the fact.
MacKinnon writes right after that quote:
> I think it's fairly common, and is increasingly known to be common, for men to seek sexual access to women in ways that we find coercive and unwanted. On those occasions the amount and kind of force are only matters of degree. The problem is that rapes do not tend to be reported or prosecuted or sanctioned based on the force that was used; not based on how coercive it was and not based on how violated the woman feels; instead they are based on how intimate she is with the person who did it. This is why most women think we won't be believed in reporting the most common rapes, that is, rapes by people we know.
I get what you say about "coercive circumstances that existed at the time of the act." However, the following paragraph isn't at all reassuring. I mean, there may well be circumstances that pressure someone into having sex. But if their sexual partner isn't personally responsible for those circumstances, why should they suffer?
As to “responsibility” it’s not an easy concept either. People who don’t create the coercive circumstances often knowingly take advantage of them. I’d point out that when McKinnon wrote the quote, it was still legally impossible in some states to rape your wife. (Marriage was essentially considered irrevocable consent.) Even today, social dynamics are geared toward what male expectations—sex on demand with no strings attached. Any given man many not create this framework, but they live within it and take advantage of it. (Although that’s slowly changing. They did an investigation at my kid’s school into widespread sex between male teachers and high school students in the 1970s and 1980s. At the time it was “bad” but tolerated. Today we would call it rape. The liberalism of the sexual revolution, which as Dworkin points out accrued largely to the benefit of men, is being recalibrated and that’s a good thing.)
But if the women profiled in TFA are credible, things have gone too far on college campuses.