Why is now the time for 'She Wants It'?
I've been thinking about consent for a really long time
and about this very same question:
This is a huge piece of information, especially for women
and girls who are starting to recognize that
Through writing this, did you have any personal realizations about consent?
These experiences
with men where—and, you know, so many women I know have them—which were:
"I kind of want to. I'm not quite sure. I'm thinking,
like, should—Oh! It's in. Oh, God, it's in. Ok, we're doing it. I guess we're doing it.
Ok. Well, if I say no right now, then he might reveal himself to be an awful person
by not letting me say no. So I'm just gonna go with it."
And, for me, that is a symptom of living in patriarchy.
How do we start having these conversations at, like, a micro level?
Once I identified as queer, I noticed that queer people
and non-binary people and trans people will have the kinds of conversations
before you have sex that really allow people to give consent to certain
ways of having sex.
Queer people, kind of, you know, name those for one another.
How can we, as queer people, be there for heterosexual
people and, kind of, explain to them how to have this nuance when talking about these subjects?
You know, what's so interesting and probably really confusing for a lot of straight men is
I think what they think is that what people are trying to do right now is
And so, people are saying stuff like, "You know, it's so awful that
this guy, this boss, took advantage of his secretary."
And then, a couple pages later in 'Cosmo' magazine,
"Here's how to spice up things with your husband: Play boss and secretary."
And so, people are confused. Like,
And I think the key here and the thing that nobody's talking about is, like, when you're playing
with the power dynamic by naming it first, it's consent.
But if you're the boss and it's your secretary,
You need to actually have the conversation about the fact that you like to use power in sex, rather than just
overpower somebody and see what happens.
How do you do it if you're just like, "Well, I don't know.
I've just, kind of, been taught this way my whole life."
It starts with, like, these thought exercises. You know, for me, being non-binary has started
with these thought exercises. How would I enter the room differently if I was a man?
How would I treat this person differently if they were a woman?
For me, whenever I encounter non-binary people who are living in that space between male
and female, where they're actively attempting to not be gendered as one
or the other, it really feels like a, kind of, lifted experience to me of just, like,
without the things you put atop.
How do you want to change how society perceives femme people, non-binary people, trans people, queer people?
I think it's so simple.
I think there can be tons of masculinity,
Just don't associate it with a male body.
People can be super femme,
Don't expect a female body.
The expectation that you're going to see that somebody assigned
at birth a certain gender is going to
participate in presenting that gender their whole lives, I think, is an unnecessary expectation.