Shikha Dalmia wrote some things about affirmative consent laws. I agree with some of it, some of it I am troubled by. Jezebel and Erin Gloria Ryan responded, in contrast, by sex-shaming her for the crime of having a different opinion about a controversial law. I don’t have any right to dictate what it means to be a feminist. But it’s shameful to attack another woman’s sex life thanks to a political disagreement. Ryan knows nothing about Shiksa Dalmia, knows nothing about her sex life and how satisfying it is, and clearly barely read her piece before writing her response to it. I don’t care what the situation is. I don’t care who you write for. I don’t care how you identify yourself politically. It’s not alright to shame someone else about their sex life. Ever.
Can you imagine if I read a piece by Ryan and wrote an essay in which my sole “argument” was “This chick needs to get laid”? Can you imagine the response? If I said “boy, Erin Gloria Ryan writes like someone who has shitty sex!” I would rightfully be pilloried, because that behavior is not acceptable. And the thing about it is that Ryan will never, ever even think it over. She won’t for a second say to herself, “hey, maybe shaming another woman and making broad assumptions about her sex life isn’t the most feminist thing I’ve ever done in my life!” Because Jezebel’s whole deal is never, ever engaging in self-criticism.
There’s lots and lots I could say about the piece. Ryan simply makes up things that Dalmia believes out of whole cloth, inventing arguments that seem to exist only in Ryan’s imagination. She seems to think “the fuck?” is an argument. And Ryan demonstrates the incoherence of her own position. She’s advocating for a massive change to the legal definition of consent, but then mocks Dalmia for thinking that it’ll actually be enforced. She writes:
the piece’s most ridiculous aspect is the assumption that following every sex act, thanks to this law, authorities will sweep in and subject both parties (but mostly the man) to an exhaustive cross examination on consent as the pair of lovebirds towel their bodily fluids off of each other in a panic.
Hey, seriously. You guys. Admitting that a law won’t be enforced is not an argument for making it a law. In fact, it’s the opposite.
But none of that really matters. Mocking a woman’s sex life because you don’t like her politics is wrong. Shaming another woman because you don’t like her politics is not alright. It’s reactionary by its nature.Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig wrote about how women who explore political ideas outside of the mainstream feminist space are disciplined:
unorthodox views can, especially for women in left academic feminism, result in precisely that form of discipline: withdrawal of community, overwhelming assassination of character, a very sudden onslaught of negative feedback and demands for apology. It strikes me that this method of disciplining members is another symptom of the problem Amber gets at in her article: the community is not so concerned with what is true or false as with who is good and who is bad.
Congratulations, Jezebel. You’re the latest to discipline a woman for having an opinion, and you’ve used sex-shaming as a tool to do it. I bet you’re very proud.
Update: It occurs to me that Ryan repeatedly saying “the fuck?” and thinking that constitutes a rebuttal is a perfect example of We Are All Already Decided. Thinking that expressing incredulity at someone else’s opinion is enough to dismiss it can only happen when you’re so steeped in an echo chamber that you forget there’s a world of people out there who don’t agree with you.