Home > Work > Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention
1 " For me to give someone a firm and enthusiastic yes or no is to presume the person I am saying yes or no to is my equal, or at least someone I feel equal to saying yes or no to, as though they are a partner, a friend, someone with whom I am on the same footing. It presumes I am in possession of some power in the situation. It presumes the other person sees me as an equal, or something like a peer, and is waiting to see if they are going to get a yes or no before proceeding with whatever they'd like to happen next. It presumes the other person can see me at all, or cares to; that they have respect for me as though we are both the same. "
― Donna Freitas , Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention
2 " There is a liminal space created between the powerful person and the person who is the target of unwanted attention, a liminal space between outright yes and outright no -- not a maybe-yes or maybe-no -- but more of a hovering, a being caught and not knowing where else to go or how to move without making things much worse. So you stay put. You hold the person off as best you can without causing them to retaliate too terribly, and because you know they can retaliate if they want to, that they have the power to do this, that they could decide to ruin you for displeasing them or rejecting them too forcefully. "
3 " All around the country, at universities far and wide, at workplaces of all sizes and types, at companies that boast of doing good and making the world a better place, there are file cabinets full of the bloody tongues of women. Some are young and tender, others more weathered and battered, but all of them taken from us by people in business-casual attire, in suits and sensible skirts, walking up to us as though what they are about to do is perfectly legitimate, perfectly reasonable, even as they take the long, curving knives from behind their backs, raising them up to strike our faces and our necks. Acting as though this is just business as usual while they disfigure us, and we stand there, letting them, because this seems like our only option. "
4 " There is a liminal space created between the powerful person and the person who is the target of unwanted attention, a liminal space between outright yes and outright no. That space is not a compromise—not a maybe-yes or maybe-no—but more of a hovering, a being caught and not knowing where else to go or how to move without making things much worse. So you stay put. You hold the person off as best you can without causing them to retaliate too terribly, and because you know they can retaliate if they want to, that they have the power to do this, that they could decide to ruin you for displeasing them or rejecting them too forcefully. On the outside you continue to exist as though nothing is wrong, you perpetuate everything as though it is normal. You maintain the status quo with the abuser and with everyone around the abuser. Yet inside you are at war, you are shrinking, you are wishing you could die rather than continue much longer as though everything were fine. You become exhausted with the responsibility of making a situation okay that is not at all okay. "
5 " I am a survivor, but I also am, and always will be, a victim. I can't speak for others who share this dual identity, but I can say for myself that, while I wish to be the proud person who exclusively occupies the title of survivor, I still claim the territory of the shivering, cowering victim. "
6 " We cannot sanitize every comment, every come-on, every gesture in our efforts to stamp out harassment and assault. We cannot sanitize all of our spaces, we cannot make them irrefutably safe from words and acts and behaviors. We are humans, and our emotions and desires make us into complicated creatures. Sometimes we are nervous and awkward. We misjudge and we make mistakes and we dream of things that will not happen, of people we want to be with who will not want to be with us. We muster our courage and go for someone who seems unattainable to see if, by some miracle, it turns out they like us back, and this is not a crime.But we can certainly do a better job of teaching people how to understand romantic feelings, how to read signals, how to back off when someone says no, how not to keep pursuing someone when they have rejected us, about what is appropriate and what is inappropriate in certain contexts, in professional and educational circumstances. We must become better thinkers—critical thinkers—about this aspect of our lives, better communicators on every level with respect to consent and non-consent. We may not want consent to be present-at-hand forever, but we should not want consent to go back to being invisible, so invisible that we don’t notice its function, that we don’t care or refuse to care or even see when it has been ignored, disregarded, when this disregard has caused someone else to suffer, to become traumatized, when it has changed her life forever. "
7 " But is there such a thing as trauma without shame? Isn’t shame an integral part of what causes an event or series of events to become a trauma? "