The Worst Outcome of G20 Policing

As awful as it has been for those whose lives have been turned upside down, the worst outcome of the deplorable, authoritarian policing at last year's G20 summit in Toronto was not the targeting of a few dozen militants plus some random people for (often pre-emptive) arrest and heavy duty charges. Yes, from where I sit and without knowing the ins and outs of every case, it appears to be a mix of malicious and opportunistic targeting -- targeting, that is, of a mix of people who are effective and vocal organizers with a particular tactical orientation plus some people who are not those things but who are vulnerable to the kinds of charges they wanted to lay. I'm not aware of any in this group who are even alleged to have done harm to any human being, though I may be mistaken in this. And it seems to be based on investing immense effort and resources in portraying that subset of the targeted people who actually are a threat to established power in a long-term sense because of their skills, their ideas, and their determination, as a very different kind of threat, a kind of threat which they are not -- as a threat to ordinary people, as a threat to life, as a kind of free-form demonized something with a black hoodie and a circled A emblazoned on their foreheads. You don't have to agree politically with the targeted folks on every point -- I don't necessarily, and they don't always agree with each other either -- to appreciate that they have been ill-used by the cops and the courts.

But that's not the worst outcome of the policing.

As shocking as it must have been for those who found themselves swept up in a whirlwind of oppressive blue, the worst outcome of the policing at the G20 summit was not the hundreds of uninvolved or passively involved or just observing or sitting quietly people who were arrested, generally for nothing in particular, some of whom were treated with physical harshness, and many of whom were detained under deplorable conditions. The sketchy nature of the arrests even by the system's own oppressive rules is shown by how many of them have had their charges dropped, or were detained without charge to begin with, and it is good that people are indignant about this. It is a little wearying that a certain segment of the liberal indignation at the policing has, with little broader analysis, focused so heavily on the experiences of privileged people whose bodies are read as innocent by default and who can legitimately claim to have been 'uninvolved,' but the fact is they should be mad and we should support them.

But that's not the worst outcome of the policing.

If the crescendo to which this piece is building were not so awful, the treatment of those who were detained would certainly be the worst outcome of the policing -- not just sleep deprivation, inadequate conditions, denial of counsel and phone calls, and insufficient food and water, but rape threats, threats of assault, and sexual harassment of women and queer people. I can hear the right-wing uncles of the world harumphing about "allegations" and "unsubstantiated" and "a jail is not a hotel," but I have seen enough police behaviour in the context of protests and have heard enough about everyday police treatment of people who are poor, of colour, gender non-conforming, sex workers, or otherwise vulnerable to know that the substance of the descriptions in the piece linked above rings true, true, true. Rape threats? Sexual harassment? I believe it, and it disgusts me.

But even that, I think, is not the worst outcome of the policing, if only because the scale of what is the worst is so vast.


The Worst

The whole world continues to reel from the crisis that hit in 2008. After averting a total collapse by giving away huge amounts of money to people and organizations that are already rich and powerful, the governments of the rich countries have been taking their previously dominant political orientation, called "neoliberalism," and putting it on steroids. They have engaged in slashing to an unprecedented degree any expenditures which go to benefit ordinary people, often at the same time as cutting the taxes paid by the rich and corporations, turning as much as they can from being administered for the common good to being run for some rich person's private profit, and further slashing rules and regulations which put limits on the dangerous and nasty things that corporations can do to make a buck. Last year's G20 meeting in Toronto was, in fact, precisely about the world's most powerful states arriving at a (more or less) united front in implementing this kind of "age of austerity". They are attacking ordinary people who have the good fortune to have unionized, public sector jobs. They are attacking the services that ordinary people pay for through taxes and that ordinary people depend on to live -- health care, welfare, disability supports, public pensions, programs to fight poverty, education. They are attacking us, causing us pain, in order to benefit a few.

In Canada, though a pre-crisis neoliberal agenda had been pursued avidly by Liberal and Conservative governments alike since at least 1995, the newly amped-up version so aggressively implemented the world over has been much less visible. This is due to a number of quirks in the local political situation, not the least of which being that precarious minority governments ruled the country since 2004. However, less than a month ago, the most right-wing Prime Minister since the Second World War won a majority government, so that reprieve is over. If you don't believe me, then see what Tony Clement, the new government's Minister of Slashing and Burning, has to say about it. Lurk around Canadian lefty news and analysis sites and look over their content from the last month or two and you'll find plenty of sound analysis pointing towards similar things, with additional attention to the likelihood that the socially conservative Harper will continue his practice of specifically targeting women, queer people, and indigenous people for attack.

In the U.K., in France, in Greece, in Spain, even in Wisconsin in the good ol' U.S. of A., ordinary people have been on the streets and taking actions of all different sorts to oppose these attacks. Even the uprisings in the Arab world, though they are responding to local conditions with rather a different trajectory as well, are also connected to this nascent global wave of struggle -- and, in many important ways, lead it.

In 1995, when Ontario Premier Mike Harris began to shift the small steps made by the preceding NDP government towards neoliberalism and turned them into huge strides, hundreds of thousands of people in Ontario acted in response. It didn't stop Harris and it didn't stop his agenda, but it was impressive, and I would bet that when the archives are declassified decades from now historians will find that this action by ordinary people set limits on what the Tory thugs thought they could get away with. A lot has changed since then, including the larger attacks on political mobilizations in North America under the banner of the "War on Terror" and the erosion for other reasons of the coalitions that grew in the 1980s, thrived through the anti-Harris campaigns, and energized the local manifestations of the global justice movement. But I think a big reason behind the G20 policing was to make extra sure that nothing like what happened back then puts obstacles in the way of Harper's attacks on ordinary people.

The worst thing you can do to someone who is being attacked, violated, oppressed, abused, is to convince them that they can't do anything about it and they shouldn't even try. That is often a key element both of interpersonal abuse and of more obviously social instances of violently enforced power-over. And as much as the policing at the G20 had lots of other purposes as well -- making Harper look like a Big Man and a Tough Guy who can preserve order (and deliver the goods to elites when called upon); legitimizing the transfer of massive resources to police and security services; intervening in electoral politics at the local and federal levels in the Toronto area; and probably others -- one central reason for how it went down was a form of deliberate public pedagogy.

The worst thing about the policing at the G20 summit was that it delivered both a symbolic and a material message to keep us passive and inert precisely in anticipation of this moment when a majority Harper government could begin amping up its attacks on ordinary people. The messages were "protesters are dangerous" and "protest is risky." The brutality then was to encourage as many people as possible now to stay home. Elites want us to mistrust the people who are saying, "We can do something about this if we do it together." They want us to look at the billy clubs and the tear gas and the sexual harassment and the rape threats and all the rest of the nastiness from the cops and say, "Yeah, this Harper stuff sucks, but I don't want that to happen to me."


What We Can Do

Well, for one thing, we can take heart in the fact that at least some people will resist anyway, even if we can't see it and even if it takes different forms than we might want. It's inevitable.

But even so, while I think the G20 debacle may have stiffened the resolve of a radical few, it also was successful (from the standpoint of state relations) in creating additional barriers that will make it harder for many people who are not already active but who are going to bear the brunt of the coming attacks from finding ways to give their individual impulse to resist a collective and confrontational expression. Of course it isn't acting on its own, either, but as part of a fifteen or twenty year arc in which dissent has been increasingly criminalized and those seeking justice and liberation increasingly dealt with via the so-called justice system. It also exists in tight relation with an environment shaped by state-manipulated fears of terror and enhanced power given to the national security state since 9/11. And, seriously, given what went down at the G20 -- even what actually happened, as opposed to the distorted media narrative that dominates the public mind -- who can blame people for being wary?

There is no magic answer. We didn't create this particular constellation of obstacles so we can't just make them disappear. However, I think there are ways that we don't do ourselves any favours, and we could make some better choices at navigating these circumstances.

Certainly one element is, as I've argued before, that we have to focus on the hard, slow work of making movements legible as a more plausible path towards change in the minds of North Americans. The steps listed in that link are also relevant here. However, I can also think of two other things that people doing movement-oriented social change work could do.

The first is that we need to place a higher priority on connecting with people outside of the political bubbles we inhabit. This means more on-the-ground organizing that is basebuilding in its orientation. And it means thinking things through politically in ways that are genuinely responsive to the concerns of those not in our immediate orbit, even sometimes when that means making choices we don't really like. I think, in a way, doing political work in a small city like Sudbury makes the importance of this more visible than for those who do it in Vancouver, Montreal, or Toronto. Not that any groups that I'm involved with at the moment do a good job of actually following this advice -- far from it. But in the big cities, it isn't that hard for people who identify as radicals to construct a personal and political environment that gives the impression that we have much more relevance to and potential connection with most people than we actually do, whereas out here in the boonies our isolation is starkly clear simply because there are so few of us.

In a way, Lesley Wood's brave reflection on the G20 organizing made a similar point. I'm paraphrasing and speaking more bluntly than the article does, and it has been awhile since I read it so I may be losing some nuance, but it seemed to me that Wood -- a core organizer in the anti-G20 work in Toronto -- was wrestling with the fact that though the organizers had the language of mobilizing oppressed communities, a desire to do so, an analysis of past summit protests that pointed towards doing so, and a solid analysis of how the G20 will indeed have a huge impact on many already-oppressed communities in the city, in many ways this desire and good language ended up creating an exaggerated sense among organizers of the extent to which they were actually doing it. Which doesn't mean that some groups and individuals involved in those protests don't do awesome work on a regular basis that involves grassroots, basebuilding mobilization. But I think, overall, the activities didn't match the rhetoric. (I encountered at least one instance in the lead-up to the G20 protests in which that solid work that has happened on an ongoing basis by a couple of groups was rhetorically used in a way that distracted attention from where that kind of work wasn't happening.) Anyway, I don't raise this to bash the organizers, who made valiant efforts in really tough conditions, but to draw attention to the fact that far too many of us, including myself and the things I'm involved with, don't do enough to connect with and orient ourselves to those who aren't in our political orbits.

The other suggestion I have may appear to be a bit more obscure, but I think it is still important. Right now, I would argue that the idealized person at the centre of our movements -- an ideal which flows from and organizes our practices in important ways -- is a barrier to dealing with the post-G20 environment, and we need to cultivate a different imaginative centre for our movements. (I'm speaking specifically of the white-dominated, movement-oriented left. Mileage may vary for other corners of resistance.) There are a couple of aspects to this. One problem is that in some spaces, the imaginative centre valorizes certain lifestyle choices that have nothing directly to do with struggle, and this can really alienate people who don't share those same lifestyle choices. The point isn't "don't do those things;" the point is don't smugly elevate them beyond their deserved status as one set of reasonable choices among many.

However, I think a broader problem is that many of our groups and spaces, even those not oriented around a particular subcultural niche, default to valorizing people who can take lots of risks and people who can devote unhealthy amounts of time to movement-building. Now, I would say that people who can do those things have very valuable contributions to make to movements, though I might recommend that they be careful and judicious in how they do so in the name of staying healthy and sustainable. But I think having those ideals at the centre can end up excluding the vast majority of people who can't do those things. The centrality of these two characteristics is a manifestation of what I have seen called "the cult of the militant." This imaginative centre gives us a very narrow and distorted view of what it means to act, and I think that gets in the way of solid strategic thinking. Moreover, it elevates those attributes that the criminalization of dissent has succeeded in demonizing in much of the public mind. If we approach people in ways that communicate that this is the essence of working for social change, of resistance, of struggle, then a lot of people who might otherwise join their moments of everyday resistance with ours will say, "No thanks!"

In contrast, I think we need to put a different figure at the centre of our movements, and we need to valorize some different characteristics. I'm not completely sure what those should be, but I have a sense that what we need to put at the centre is a certain dignified, persistent defiance. It contains a certain caring openness to ordinary people and an implacable refusal to accept power-over and oppression. Its vision encompasses not only the big protest, the land occupation, the direct action, but also the importance of survival, of everyday acts of resistance, of resisting through defiant application of caring and reproductive labour, of nurturing ourselves, of listening, of choosing our moments carefully. This is not quietism. This is putting at the imaginative centre of our movements an ideal that can nurture and connect the many moments and modes of resistance that many militants claim in words that they support but that many, in practice, treat as subordinate or inferior. It is a vision clearly different from middle-class left dabbling or liberal wiffle-waffling but one that is rooted in life and the living of it, that is capable of sustaining the networks we need to win in the long term, rather than the idea that experts and specialists (even if they are movement variants thereof) will save us.

We can't, though our actions, completely counter the ways in which harsh policing and all of the associated real risks and paralyzing cultural engineering discourage at least some people from particiapting in movements, but we can be strategic in how we respond.

Petition: Feminist Demand Let Justice Be Done

Just received word of this international petition that was written "to unite people in support of the alleged rape victim of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former director of the International Monetary Fund."

Please read it and sign it:

Feminists Demand Freedom from Sexual Assault and Harassment

We agree:

Rape is always about power and domination; it is sexualized violence.

Rape and sexual harassment of women are pervasive at all strata of society and in all corners of the globe. Women will never be fully free and able to enjoy equality with men until this ends. As feminists, we see the arrest of former International Monetary Fund director Dominique Strauss-Kahn on sexual assault charges as an opportunity to increase public awareness and as a wake-up call to renew action against sexual violence, not only in the US where his arrest occurred and in France, where media and many public figures are portraying him as the victim, but around the world.

We join French feminists in saying that just as Strauss-Kahn is innocent until proven guilty, his accuser must also be respected and believed to be credible unless proven false. We commend her employer, Sofitel, and the action of the NYC Police for taking her complaint seriously. We call for feminists around the world to join with her union (New York Hotel and Motel Trades Council Local 6) in collecting funds for legal and daily expenses, as her work is now curbed and life circumstances vastly altered. Contributions can be sent to Judson Memorial Church (attention Women's Fund) 55 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012-1018.

We also share French feminist indignation at the deliberate and opportunistic confusion of seduction and sexual violence, from Strauss-Kahn's declaration that he "loves women," to the journalists and politicians who rally behind this "Great Seducer." It is outrageous that the allegation of attempted rape during the course of a housekeeper's work day raises issues about any woman's life story and sexual history. And portraying powerful Strauss-Kahn as "too civilized" to commit a violent crime plays upon colonial and racist stereotypes vis-à-vis an African immigrant woman.

We adamantly oppose all harassment, sexual violence and rape, and we know that when there is a large discrepancy between the power, the wealth and racial hierarchy of the parties involved, justice is even harder to come by. All rapists and harassers believe they are entitled, and often when they are part of the power elite they assume that influence will outweigh the legal protection and freedom from coercion all women should enjoy. Feminists around the world demand that justice be done.

Women of all countries, unite!

This statement was initiated by the following feminists:

Bettina Aptheker, CA, U.S.
Lori Askeland, OH, U.S.
Eleanor J. Bader, NY, U.S.
Rosalyn Baxandall, NY, U.S.
Halina Bendkowski, Berlin, Germany
Saliha Boussédra, Toulouse, France
Eileen Boris, CA, U.S.
Ariel Dougherty, NM, U.S.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, CA, U.S.
Judith Ezekiel, Toulouse, France
Francisca de Haan, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Myrna Hill, CA, U.S.
Merle Hoffman, NY, U.S.
Barrie Karp, NY, U.S.
Bea Kreloff, NY, U.S.
Tobe Levin von Gleichen, Frankfurt, Germany
Ilana Lowy, Paris France
Fran Luck, NY, U.S.
Claire G. Moses, VA, U.S.
Marge Piercy, MA, U.S.
Fanette Pollack, NY, U.S.
Marilyn Porter, Newfoundland, Canada
Deborah Rosenfelt, MD, US
Kathryn Scarbrough, NJ, U.S.
Donna Schaper, NY, U.S.
Lise Vogel, NY, U.S.
Suzanna Walters, IN, U.S.
Naomi Weisstein, NY, U.S.
Barbara Winslow, NY, U.S.
Laura X, CA, U.S.

Also signed by
Carol Hanisch, NY, U.S.
Jane Barry, PA, U.S.
Nancy Krieger, MA, U.S.
Vicki Nichols, VA, U.S.
Mary Carlson, CA, U.S.
Shailja Patel, Nairobi, Kenya
Elaine Shinbrot, NJ, U.S.
Barbara Rylko-Bauer, MI, U.S.
Amanda Frisken, NY, U.S.
Dabney Evans, GA, U.S.
Trude Bennett, NC, U.S.
Amy Kessleman , NY, U.S.
Therese McGinn, NY, U.S.
Carolina Neiva Viancello, Brussels, Belgium
Comfort Momoh, London, UK
Naana Otoo-Otortoy, London, UK
Abebah Tekleab, Stockholm, Sweden
Khady Koita, Tervuren, Belgium
Ambara Hashi Nur, Aarhus, Denmark
Etenesh Hadis, Vienna, Austria
Batulo Essek, Helsinki, Finland
Julie Kakiese, Brussels, Belgium
Fana Habteab, Uppsala, Sweden
Maretta Short, NJ, USA
Martha Vicinus, MA, USA
Rosalind Petchesky, NY, U.S.
Lauri Andress, TX, U.S
Susan Reverby, MA, U.S.
Leslie Dubbin, CA, U.S.
Ellen Ross, NY, U.S.
Temma Kaplan, NY, U.S.
Troy Shinbrot, NJ, U.S.
Roberta Salper, MA, U.S.
Stephanie Gilmore, DE, U.S.
Susan Brownmiller, NY, U.S.
Laura Anker, NY, U.S.
Kathleen Slaon, CT, U.S.
Chris Coombe, MI, US
Abby Lippman, Quebec, Canada
Linda Stein, NY, U.S.
Rosemary Szegda, NJ, U.S.
Estelle Regolsky, MA, U.S.
Brigitte Bramie, Paris France
Guylène Deasy, NC, U.S.
Monique Dental, Paris, France.
Alice Ngyone Endamne, CA, U.S.
Jules Falquet, Paris, France
Suzy Rojtman, Paris, France
Maya Surduts, Paris, France.
Anne-Marie Viossat, Paris, France
Rebecca Whisnant, OH, US
Bronwyn Winter, Sydney Australia
Estelle B. Freedman, CA, U.S.
Anne-Emanuelle Birn, Ontario, Canada
Juliet Ash, London, England
Barbara Garson, NY, U.S.
Laura Flanders, NY, U.S.
Marilyn Zivian, CA, U.S.
Nísia Trindade Lima, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
Heather Booth, Washington, DC, U.S.
Eve Ensler, Paris, France
Leila J. Rupp, CA, U.S.
Kathryn Kish Sklar, NY, U.S.
Joan Ditzion, MA, U.S.
Sonia Fuentes, FL, U.S.
Chandra L. Ford, CA, U.S.
Aida Hurtado, CA, U.S.
Alison Williams, NJ, U.S.
Elizabeth Pleck, IL, U.S.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin CA, U.S.
Leslie J. Reagan, IL, U.S.
Leisa D. Meyer, VA, U.S.
Katha Pollitt, NY, U.S.
Yanar Mohammed, Baghdad, Iraq
Sonia Jaffe Robbins, NY, U.S.
Alia Shinbrough, NJ, U.S.
JoAnn Jaffe, Saskatchewan, CA
Dee Appleby, SC, U.S.
William Scarbrough III, SC, U.S.
Teresa Scarbrough, CA, U.S.
Patricia Rackowski, Boston, MA
Nalini Visvanathan, Washington, DC
Barbara M. Sow, Dakar Senegal
Beth E. Rivin, Seattle, Washington, USA
Ana María Carrillo Farga, Mexico
Alison Katz, Geneva, Switzerland
Megan McLaughlin, IL, U.S.
Fatou Sow, Dakar Senegal
Dula F. Pacquiao, NJ, U.S.
Inti Maria Tidball-Binz, Bs As, Argentina
Emily May, NY, U.S.
Evelyn Torton Beck, Washington, DC USA
Dana Rabin, IL, U.S.
Sarah E. Huertas, San Juan, Puerto Rico
Jesse Lemisch, NY, U.S.
Joséphine Soumah, France
Claire Bond Potter, CT U.S.
Carina Ray, NJ, U.S.
Deborah Rossum, IA, U.S.
Maria E. Cotera, MI, U.S.
Barbara Molony, CA, U.S.
Kristy Rawson, MI, U.S.
Antoinette Burton, IL, U.S.
Mary Nolan, NY, U.S.
Ruth Rosen, CA, U.S.
Julie Laut, IL, U.S.
Erik McDuffie, IL, U.S.
Yxta Maya Murray, CA, U.S.
Jo Salas, NY, U.S.
Barbara Leon, CA, U.S.
Edwina Barvosa, CA, U.S.
Maureen H. Williams, CA, U,S,
Bob Weil, CA, U.S.
Anica Leon-Weil, CA, U.S.
Finn Mackay, Bristol, England

To sign it, click here.

Review: Yes Means Yes!

[Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, editors. Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008.]

The very simple way of reconceptualizing sexual consent at the heart of this book provides a useful tool for efforts that seek to challenge sexual assault and to sexually empower women (and the rest of us). It also provides a possible lens through which we might, with suitable other ingredients, understand aspects of gender and sexual oppressions across a wide range of scales and including much of their intersectional complexity. The collection includes individual pieces that examine slices of this reality with great insight and power. Yet I can't help but feel that the collection as a whole does not do enough to challenge the oppressive mainstream of North American progressive political culture and to push readers, particularly relatively privileged readers, to deal with that complexity, those larger questions of social relations, and our own privilege as central rather than as add-ons.

The book's core idea is that of enthusiastic consent -- that the baseline for sexual activity or any other sort of intimate interaction is not just the absence of assertive objection, but the presence of explicitly expressed interest and desire: "Yes means yes." It's a simple idea but the advantages of using this phrase to organize our understanding of consent are many. Adopting it as expected practice in negotiating sexual encounters not only does the work of "no means no" in indicating that consent is the most basic of baselines, but it goes further and says that all of us have a right to active desire, to affirmative want, to enthusiasm. Technical consent -- the "yes" after badgering or implicit threats of break-up or just to avoid an argument -- may pass the "no means no" standard but they do not pass "yes means yes." It makes it clearer, too, that the onus in an instance of sexual assault is never on the victim for not saying "no" loudly enough or clearly enough, or for dressing a certain way, or for being racialized, or for being gender non-conforming, or for being a sex worker -- if the "yes" is not clear and enthusiastic and unmistakable, then nothing should be happening. This provides an even stronger place than the "no means no" standard (which it assumes and includes) from which to cut through the misogynist (and often racist) rhetoric that so often springs up whenever a sexual assault occurs. The approach can usefully be taken up by individuals as they go out into the world and navigate partnerships, by sex educators and parents as they support youth who are figuring things out, by communities as they set standards for conduct, by institutions as they enforce rules, and by writers and commentators as we make meaning from the world.

The shifted stance contained in, or at least implied by, "yes means yes" also affirms that the "yes" matters -- that understanding, expressing, and consensually acting on desire is a positive good which we should encourage and celebrate. At the most basic level this might be seen as an admonition against "slut shaming", but its subversive potential is much broader. Organizing an understanding of consent around each woman's (and each person of other genders') "yes" puts their desire, their standpoint, their agency, the importance of their ability to act to create the sexual lives that they want, at the centre in a way that "no means no" does not. It says not only, "You have a right not to be raped," but also, "You have a right to individually and collectively exert power in shaping your field of sexual and relational possibility." The concern is not just imposition (that is, violation of "no") but also constraint of agency and possibility (of "yes"). Both matter. It's about affirming the importance of a creative, self-determining power in the realm of sexuality.

Starting from the wholepersonhood and right to individual and collective agency of those experiencing gender and sexual oppression can provide a starting point for very powerful, very radical analysis of the world. That is, a "yes means yes" stance can do that but is far from guaranteed to do so. It can also lead to politics that are very individualistic and very centred on the experiences of people with privilege. I'll get back to that danger in a bit.

Me

"Yes means yes," understood both as practice and as starting point for building an analysis of the world, cuts across a great many issues in my own life -- more than I have the space or the inclination to discuss here, certainly. (Though note, to maximize the clarity in what I say below, none of this involves having been a survivor or a perpetrator of sexual assault.)

One way in which the issues raised by this book touch my life is through the social enforcement of silence, shame, and hiding when it comes to sexuality. "Yes means yes" is both premised on and itself aims to foster contexts in which we can embrace desire and talk about it joyfully -- you can't say "yes" with conviction unless you've had a chance to figure out what you really want, and you are unlikely to be able to achieve it unless you can talk about it. The kinds of social regulation and punishment that create silence and shame are very much barriers to realizing "yes means yes" as a widespread practice. Not only do struggles with such things continue to be a journey when it comes to my own sexual and relationship practices (despite my gender privilege and other sorts of privilege), it also means that there is probably no other facet of life in which I have a more distorted ratio between large amounts of energy spent in politically inflected thinking and reading versus fairly sparse levels of publically presented writing. I raise this not only because I resent feeling unable to write about something so important. I also raise it to illustrate that, though it is experienced very differently depending on other ways in which our experiences are shaped by social relations, the tendency to surveil, regulate, and punish sexuality is widely experienced as a way in which gender and sexual oppressions are propagated and a mechanism by which a great many of us, even those of us who are privileged, are damaged. (It is also a way in which many of us, particularly many of us who are privileged, inflict damage on others, consciously or not.) These diverse experiences which have common origins in terms of how they are socially produced are potential sites for affinity and solidarity, if taken up in the right ways.

The other point I want to draw from the intersection of "yes means yes" and my own experience is an initial recognition of the immensity of what will be required to get us from where we are today to all of the implications of "yes means yes" becoming reality. This is both disheartening but also, if truly understood, a recognition of the utility of "yes means yes" as a starting point -- one of many that are possible -- towards something important and powerful.

In saying this, I'm thinking back to my teenage years. This was a phase or two of my life before I recognized that sexual and relationship practices could be done counter to dominant norms, let alone before I began to see a small subset of such practices as having anything to do with me. I had a very heterosexist and sexist understanding of sexuality -- queer sexual and relationship practices were, as I said, not something I could really conceive of at the time, and my understanding of sex was something done to disinterested women by bad men. This understanding was a product of material circumstances and not just intellectual error. In my family of origin, absence, silence, and a kind of passive tension, all of which I found powerfully shaming, were my main learnings about sexuality. In high school, there was one female peer whom I remember expressing desire in an open and honest way, but she was by far an outlier, and I heard nothing of the sort from any others. This was, of course, due to the sexist ways in which young women's sexualities are regulated and punished -- I'm sure most of them felt desire, and many acted on it, but only that one felt able to express it and own it in any non-intimate context I was aware of. When it came to guys, the "good" Christian boys didn't own their desires either or they treated them as something "bad" and controlling and subordinating those feelings (at least publically) as making them "good" people. The only guys who did express any sort of sexual interest openly and honestly were also guys who were frequently disrespectful towards women, not to mention jerks towards other guys (often including me). All of this reinforced my sexist understanding of sexuality -- sexist, and severely stunted in terms of my sense of what sexuality could mean.

Given this context, it is probably not surprising that at that stage of my life the idea of enthusiastic consent would've been completely unthinkable. Part of how this worked for me is related to things I have already said: I had heaps of shame about any and all manifestations of sexuality and absolutely no skills for talking about it, and a sexist understanding of sexuality that didn't even really recognize that the young women around me ever felt desire, or that young men weren't bad for feeling it. There was very little room for overlap between all of that and an ideal of enthusiastic consent.

However, early on in reading this book, I realized there was another element at play as well. Part of what was going on inside of me in those years was a bizarre conviction that explicitly asking for some sort of sexual interaction was a guaranteed way to hear "no." Yes, partly that was about my shame and my sexist understanding of sexuality. But partly it was because that is what my automatic and immediate reaction would have been -- in 100% of contexts earlier in that period, and almost 100% of contexts later, if someone had directly asked me if I wanted X or Y, the absolute imperative for me would've been to say no, even if that was a lie. Because desire was "bad," as I understood it, the absolute most important thing to do was to completely deny and hide any desire, even if explicitly asked in an interested and affirming way by someone who wanted to do something about it. (I still struggle with a moderated version of this impulse today.) So I was someone who absolutely understood the importance of "no means no" but someone for whom explicit communication about desire -- that is, "yes means yes" -- was unthinkable. I can recognize, looking back, that there were a number of instances in which I felt desire quite keenly and in response I neither touched uninvited nor broached the subject aloud but rather was present in ways that I hoped made it more likely that "something might happen," seemingly without an agent, and no doubt all the while oozing equal amounts of awkward desire and awful, burning shame. Which is super dysfunctional and, I fear, might have come across as creepy in one or two cases.

All of which is to lead into the point that this stuff is deeply enmeshed in the social circumstances which produce us and gets lodged deeply in our bodies. The introduction of enthusiastic consent in my sex-ed classrooms would've done very little to change any of this. Probably it would've been good for me to hear but I seriously doubt it would've changed much. I mean, sex-ed was something I experienced between -- well, I can't remember if it started in Grade 5 or Grade 7, and it lasted until Grade 9, because I didn't take phys-ed after I no longer had to. All three of the people I learned school-based sex-ed from were white men ranging in age from their 40s to their 60s, whose main qualification for teaching young people about sexuality seemed to be that they were already teaching us about sports. I remember that the first one in particular excelled at making us feel bad about ourselves whatever we were learning about, and that was just as true when it came to learning about sexuality. And even if they were all great, adding in a little bit about enthusiastic consent would've been only a very marginal shift in the overall context in which we were all figuring this stuff out.

This argues against one possible way in which "yes means yes" could be understood -- a shallow way that involves tinkering with a few surface things and calling the problem solved. That wouldn't have made "yes means yes" realizable for me, and I'm someone, as a middle-class white guy, with relatively plentiful social space for exerting agency in all sorts of ways. I can only imagine how inadequate it would be for lots of other people. So while I think there is value in educators teaching it and individuals taking it up and applying it as an expectation in their relationships, without much greater social transformation, it will never be broadly realized as an ideal. Even speaking just of my privileged self, there would need to have been significant shifts in sexual and gender regulation, especially masculinity, for me to have fully realized "yes means yes" in, say, my late teens. Thankfully, there are some indications that the book as a whole recognizes these larger implications of fully embracing what "yes means yes" might offer, and certainly individual essays do, but I don't think the book does enough with that recognition.

Limitations

When we take up knew knowledge, we always go through a process of putting it into relation with our existing knowledge and experience as we figure out what to do with it. Because this is an active process that differs across different individuals and groups, authors cannot control how their work gets taken up in any absolute way. However, it is our job to try and understand and anticipate this process as best we can, not only because it can lead to us improving our craft, but because it is an important step in taking political responsibility for what we write. Our experiences of power and oppression play into these processes in important ways.

I always get the feeling that I'm on the right track when it comes to understanding the world when I find something that can be used to make sense of things at the level of the individual but can also be expanded outwards across a range of scales to make sense of the social world. I feel like the "yes means yes" shift in understanding consent is one of those things, or at least it can be. The way that I have read it into my existing knowledge means that it puts the focus on everyday/everynight experience in a way that emphasizes the centrality of people -- whole people -- and our agency, and that seeks to understand barriers to exercising that agency in individual and collective ways. It provides an entry point from which we can start a journey to understand our own experiences, how they are socially connected to the experiences of other people, and the social relations that produce us and organize so many lives into violence and oppression, sexual or otherwise.

I get the sense too that some of the essays in the collection come from a place of seeing "yes means yes" as part of expansive, radical political projects. Kimberly Springer's "Queering Black Female Heterosexuality" takes certain insights from queer struggles and applies them to challenging the ways in which white supremacy and patriarchy shape the lives of straight Black women. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha's account of being a radical queer woman of colour navigating a history of incest -- one of the most powerful pieces in the book, I thought -- is an awing illustration of the ways in which a "yes means yes" orientation can relate both to individuals challenging their own trauma and exploring their desires with movements for collective liberation. Miriam Zoila Perez's essay "When Sexual Autonomy Isn't Enough: Sexual Violence Against Immigrant Women in the United States" draws some of the connections between borders and sexual violence against women. These and other essays are great, and they provide important insights for beginning to construct a radical politics beginning from "yes means yes."

However, despite the presence of these essays, I think there are lots of people who will take up the content of Yes Means Yes in rather a different way. I think that lots of the people who read it will have politics that are in the progressive mainstream and the feminist mainstream in North America. These things are often accompanied by a liberal-democratic understanding of how the social world works, which tends to make it harder to see how things actually happen socially. And they often treat struggles against colonization and white supremacy and capital (and, in the case of non-feminist progressives, patriarchy) as peripheral, and often result in political spaces that are far from friendly to indigenous people, people of colour, poor people, gender non-conforming people, and others. It's not that there is necessarily active resistance to acknowledging that, say, borders are central to how sexual violence is organized into the lives of some women, but that knowledge tends to be kept peripheral, just as the struggles that are grounded in that knowledge are also treated as peripheral by many mainstream progressives/feminists. There is a whole internet full of material out there to learn about this maintenance of centre and periphery in mainstream progressive/feminist politics in North America, so I won't go into it further. (Also, this is not to deny that similar dynamics related to power and privilege play out in more ostensibly radical milieus too -- they certainly do.)

I think that the way this collection has been put together does try to respond to this reality. It does, after all, include voices and politics that challenge such privileged, normative politics. You can be sure that you can find many a collection out there that is narrower. But I'm not sure this on its own is enough.

So, for instance, a left-liberal man taking up this book from a place of passive resistance to feminist politics would be hard pressed to finish it and set it down again without feeling like he has been challenged around questions of gender oppression and resistance. Gender oppression is integral to the politics of the book, at its centre, and not a single essay fails to relate to it in one way or another. Yet the other ways in which barriers to realizing "yes means yes" are put together for a great many women are not presented nearly as insistently or centrally, meaning that passive resistance by progressives or liberal feminists to transformative politics along those axes are challenged much less decisively by the book.

The thing is, I suspect that many, and perhaps the majority of readers coming to this book will have a liberal-democratic framework for understanding the social world and politics that already treats struggles of people who are colonized, racialized, gender non-conforming, and/or poor as in some senses peripheral. I think the positive outcome of the breadth of voices and analyses included in the book is that there will be entry points for readers with a wide range of experiences of privilege and oppression to get something useful from the "yes means yes" analysis and see it as something that speaks to their reality. Inclusion also provides at least an opportunity for those of us with privilege to encounter material that we otherwise wouldn't. The problem is, in doing this through the mechanism of including diverse voices but not directly challenging privileged readers around their complicity in the violence experienced by poor women and women of colour and indigenous women, it probably means -- and, yes, this is speculation based on my own experiences of political work and writing -- that the majority of middle-class, white readers will take it up in ways that treat the connection of "yes means yes" to struggles against racism, prisons, borders, militarism, and capital as peripheral. And so I think there is a real danger of "yes means yes" being taken up in ways that are pretty individualistic and that, in practice, are about relatively privileged people recovering their agency when it comes to desire at a personal level but not taking up the politics necessary for the kind of social transformation that will let all of us, as individuals and as collectives, have power to control our own lives, sexuality included. Politics that start from questions of desire can then easily become complicit with neoliberalism, with indulgent privilege, and with white supremacy.

I mean, of course we all need to start from our own trauma, and of course there is nothing wrong with paying attention to that which directly prevents us from a life rich in desire, pleasure, and connection. But the space for middle-class white North Americans, including yours truly, to do exactly that is currently premised on immeasurably worse experiences, including the imposition of sexual violence and massive sexual (and many other) constraints on agency organized into the lives of millions of women (and men) around the world. The way this book is put together doesn't make it as difficult as it could for a lot of privileged readers to take it up in ways that refuse to see that a world in which "yes means yes" is truly realized means a commitment to visions and struggles far beyond the commonsense in mainstream progressive spaces, including mainstream feminist spaces. I recognize that challenging this tendency to not see is not an easy thing to do, and a real answer must come from movements rather than any single text, but I think this book could do a lot more in this regard. But, of course, that might mean fewer people who would be challenged by such politics would read the book and therefore fewer people would get access to its important insights -- as I've observed in another review, the tension between getting the politics as solid as you can and reaching as many people as possible can be a difficult one to navigate.

I definitely recommend that you read this book. I definitely recommend taking up "yes means yes" as a personal practice and requirement, and as one useful place from which to deal with the inevitably misogynist (and often racist) narratives that arise around sexuality and sexual assault. However, I challenge all of us (definitely including me!) to take it up in ways that derive from it the personal benefits that it contains without allowing ourselves to lose sight of the true magnitude and breadth of the struggles necessary to make it an achievable standard for all of us.

[For a list of all book reviews on this site, click here.]