Lizardbreath, meet Charter Cities

“lack of consent can tell you there’s a problem, but the presence of consent doesn’t, by itself, give rise to any kind of presumption that an employment or other relationship is not a serious problem.”

Well said. People will “consent” to almost anything if the alternative is starving to death in a ditch.

Well said. People will “consent” to almost anything if the alternative is starving to death in a ditch.

But…but…they could always go and raise vegetables for barter in Galt’s Gulch right?

I worry about the coherence of the sort of stance that simultaneously exalts the intrinsic virtues of democracy while denigrating the value of consent and choice. If democratic forms of decision making are so great — and if they are so not merely for instrumental reasons — then it must be because the decisions that people opt for under democracy are worthy of respect, at least in the aggregate. And this respect presumably has to follow from the mere fact that these are the decisions that people opt for, not because (e.g.) they are necessarily rationally informed or whatever, because they often won’t be.

Sure, you can complain that the consent displayed by those who prefer to live in charter cities is undermined by its being chosen from a lousy set of alternatives. But isn’t this true for the set of alternatives most people face in the democratic arena? (Maybe you can inflate your notion of democracy so far that this isn’t a problem; but then the relevant choice isn’t between charter cities and democracy, suitably perfected, but between charter cities and a real-life democracy. And we know what real-life democracies look like in the sort of places where charter cities are being mooted.)

People will consent to take jobs knowing that they’re likely to get hurt—the workers’ knowledge and consent does not mean that it’s all right to leave the safety guards off the machine tools.

Whilst I am loath to bring this conversation back round to sex work, this issue of worker’s consent has been very relevant recently in the p*rn industry. In California, a new law has been proposed requiring all participants/performers to use condoms. One the the biggest, and stupidest, arguments against the law has been that the workers themselves are against it.

There’s the sex work equivalent of leaving the safety shields off the machine tools right there.

Also, when it comes to sex and consent, approaches can change depending on which model of “consent” you use. The likes of me (ie feminists) are campaigning for the concept of “enthusiastic consent” as being the benchmark, rather than the “lack of no/struggle/resistance” model that currently prevails – ie you have to actually want to do the deed, rather than just be unwilling/unable to say no.

Relevant I think to the “fuck me or you’re fired” scenario, as well as the unpaid internship (without educational or charitable motivation) scenario described above also perhaps?

I think this is an interesting parallel, but I would actually draw the comparison slightly differently than I think is being implied.

First, I think you need a much more substantive concept of consent to understand either situation. In the case of labor, people in inherently bad negotiating positions, or who are chronically misinformed are making decisions they would not like to have to make. I’m not going to flesh out the concept fully here, but I think you could imagine a definition of consent that takes into account what people would agree to if they had access to a dignified life through other means that would exclude a lot of the disagreeable cases that have been discussed. Such a definition could provide a springboard for whether people should be allowed to choose sex work if they really have other decent alternatives and genuinely don’t mind the work, enjoy it, or just prefer the greater income it provides (in this theoretical alternative reality).

Regarding charter cities, you have technical democracy, and then you have meaningful representation in the government. A democracy can be corrupt and poorly represent the interests of it’s citizens (you don’t even need to be a developing country for this to be possible), and you can pretty clearly see that some societies at a certain level of development don’t really have access to meaningful democratic institutions. It’s not really clear to me how charter cities could actually serve this purpose, but you can imagine them being a stand-in in such cases. The parallel here is that you need a more substantive concept of democracy than just getting to vote in national elections to really define a set of political institutions that have actual value compared to whatever alternatives are available. Charter cities might not pass the bar of being better than the quasi-democratic alternatives available, but I think, in principle, they could be defended if they could be shown to actually work as advertised.

@Dan — there’s nothing incoherent about it. The problem with consenting to live in a charter city (or consenting to take an unpaid internship, or consenting to take a job in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, or consenting to give up protections against harrassment in the sex workplace), and the difference between those choices and democratic choice, isn’t the lousiness of the product selection, it’s the power imbalance. You can argue that the actually existing democracies in the places the charter cities are being proposed present equally unfair choices, but while might be a good argument about the state of democracy in those places, it’s a long, long way from there to a good argument for why one ought to be able to implement a benevolent and effective technocratic dictatorship in those same places. (Even assuming you’d first answered the general case against the benevolence and effectiveness of technocracy, viz. for instance here and here.) Nor do either “choice” or “blah blah markets” answer the question of how the super-regime that’s supposed to keep charter cities honest — freedom of migration etc. — is supposed to be created, administered, and itself kept honest.

“And do we really want to ban all statistically dangerous jobs because employees cannot resist the enticement of money, glamour, and excitement and, therefore, cannot truly, properly consent? Alpine guide? Formula-one driver? Linebacker? Should they be outlawed? After all, even with ‘best practice’ safety precautions, these jobs will remain high risk, and they are clearly not essential —society doesn’t need this work to be done by anybody.”

Yes because driving a race car and “choosing” to work in a coal mine with a poor safety record are exactly the same thing.

I must say, mw’s approach (here and in the previous thread) is convincing. Provide a decent standard of living for everybody, and then let them do whatever they want. Those who are greedy enough to allow themselves to be exploited, that is their business. Maybe this is how libertarianism can be made to work.

An intellectual version of the liberal fascism thesis, where liberalism hasn’t been about advancing democracy historically, but, instead, has been about advancing technocracy and domination by business corporations?

Just because liberalism and democracy have been associated historically doesn’t mean you can’t have anti-liberal democracy or anti-democratic liberalism. You may not have to wait for charter cities for political realization of the latter, either — just look at the efforts to create “charter nations” in Greece, Italy, etc. (Cue Davies to tell us that letting the ECB unilaterally insist on privatization of public services and labor law liberalization is no problem, since bankers only ever want what’s best for everyone.)

JW Mason @ 20
anti-liberal democracy or anti-democratic liberalism

I can manage to imagine an anti-liberal “democracy”, perhaps (authoritarianism legitimated by plebiscite or an apartheid regime with democracy for the in-group?), but an anti-democratic “liberalism” requires a re-definition of “liberal”. That’s why, I suppose, we have the old term, “classical liberal” and the more recent “neo-liberal” — to distinguish those views from the liberal liberalism, of pluralism, toleration, and progressive democratic reform by institution-building (constitutions and the rule of law, directed by principles of equity).

The bankers’ coup d’etat in Greece, Italy (or the U.S. — see 13 Bankers) is anti-liberal, if “liberal” is given any meaning consistent with its historical usage, to nominate not just pro-democratic political institutions, but also the insistence on policy-making in a general and/or public interest, founded in personal, human experience. A liberal’s instinct is to want to help the unemployed, not “bail out” abstractions or powerful and corrupt institutions.

I’d concede that our current crop of liberals are a singularly weak-minded lot — an easily stampeded herd, who can’t seem to wrap their brains around the idea that a failed financial system should be destroyed, not “bailed out” endlessly. Liberal stupidity, yes; liberal fascism, though, remains an oxymoron.

@3 Actually the concept sounds very much like the ‘treaty ports’ of the early twentieth century. Since these ‘charter cities’ are established without the aid of warships it’s all good.

Engels at 21: I think we’re finally getting somewhere…

I admit that was my initial reaction to LizardBreath’s thoughts: it’s good that you just figured this out! You’re right!

[ JWM]liberalism and democracy have been associated historically

[engels] Lions and antelopes have been associated ecologically…

Constitutional, elected parliaments, with control of taxes and appropriations, and expanded electorates, were centerpieces of the liberal agenda from the 18th century through to the present. These desiderata are key to defining liberalism; they are not mere coincident.

That’s not to deny that liberals, in practice, usually represent bourgeois interests and classes, and, in their political struggles, have often kissed up, and kicked down, displaying an ambivalence about the fortunes of the unwashed masses, and a willingness to throw them under the train of limited reform. Putting aside the realpolitik considerations, and focusing solely on conceptual issues, I think liberalism as a political philosophy has never quite reconciled itself to the uses of authority and hierarchy, or the necessity of persistent social conflict — in this, they are hardly alone. (See Plume)

Wonks Anonymous, I don’t really care what things are called. However, to highlight the difference: if you could start from guaranteeing a decent, by contemporary standards, minimum income (as opposed to promising it in unspecified future years that never come), along with universal medical care, free education, and all that, wouldn’t that make it so much more difficult to exploit people?

So, perhaps at that point a lot of regulations designed to prevent extreme exploitation of desperate people would become unnecessary. You know, since there aren’t any desperate people anymore.

The charter cities concept does not necessarily sound like a colony. However, it sounds enough like other paternalism-driven models of interacting with / exploiting unskilled labour to be highly suspect and have plenty of ‘splaining to do. (Forgive me if this repeats anything already mentioned up thread; I scanned the thread a bit hastily.)

The overall proposal is that these unskilled workers should move to and be dependent for the necessities of life on an infrastructure build by “private firms” (likely to be subsidiaries of multinational corporations), paying rents set for the benefits of such investors and so on. In order for this arrangement to actually yield benefits for the workers in terms of safety, stability and access to health care, it would need to be a lot more heavily-regulated by whomever the “guarantor” is than the libertarian-oriented proposals would actually be willing to stomach.

Quite ironically, the charter cities proponents compare their idea to China’s Special Economic Zones to boost its credibility. Yet the Special Economic Zones were built in a context of socialist legislation and ideas that would clearly be anathema to the charter cities movement; there has been, for example, a fair bit o subsidized housing in Shenzhen, a practice the charter cities proponents categorically reject. One reason China’s SEZs have worked — well enough at any rate for the charter cities movement to want to borrow their prestige — is that they have a powerful and effective government actor backing them; another is that they represent an attempt to make room for localized experiments in legislation and democracy that have put them on the leading edge of modern Chinese society and made them genuinely more attractive places to live than the alternatives.

To the extent that this is not true — that a “charter city” would be established on the margins of a desperately poor country with limited resources, and/or where “guarantors” were weak and disorganized in practical terms, or the role of guarantor was spread out among numerous contentious foreign governments, and/or the project was subject to some of the crazier likely libertopian impulses (“Thou shalt have no subsidized housing” is already there in the proposal; “Hey! Let’s privatize the cops!” is far from implausible either)… the more any of that is true, the less likely it is that the charter city will in fact be able to deliver on the promise of better rules and a better standard of living. Then the idea begins to sound variously like a proposal for a chaotic colonial concession territory, or essentially like a larger-scale version of the 19th-century America “company town,” a model which collapsed in large part because it gave rise to horrible abuses of workers. And here’s where the insufficiency of consent comes in: there is no guarantee that people who have moved into this kind of situation will be voluntarily permitted or practically empowered to leave it again, particularly not if they wind up in debt to the company or companies running the city.

It sounds to me like those are all issues that would need to be worked out before one could really talk about what the charter city concept means for liberal-or-libertarian-or-whatever commitment to democracy.

I think I also recall Paul Romer (or someone associated with him saying) that they plan to ultimately make their charter cities democratic, but believe they have to lay the foundation for that in some initial period in the absence of elections. Something similar is said after many military coups, but on the other hand recent coups have often resulted in a brief period before a handoff to elected leaders.

I think I also recall both Rousseau and Marx saying something very similar, respectively about the lawgiver and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The likes of me (ie feminists) are campaigning for the concept of “enthusiastic consent” as being the benchmark

I fear you’ve just criminalised most of over-30s middle England…

there’s something wrong with quid pro quo harassment even where the victim consents

Setting aside for the moment any concern about whether consent in those circumstances is real, giving special benefits to employees who sleep with the boss discriminates against everyone who doesn’t sleep with the boss.

And: it just seems a great deal more “feminist” to me to work for a society where women can trust their *words* to be taken at face value, as men’s are, rather than construct yet another set of implicit behavioral expectations on which to condition their hope of being taken seriously.

Most modern libertarians are not “against” democracy; it nice if you have it (and it works well with safeguards) but it is also OK if you don’t have it but have a consent-based non-democratic governance regime with good rules and the possibility of exit.

I am not sure this makes sense at all. How does one ascertain consent without some sort of vote? Or is “consent” here just “sign on the line and be sure to read the TOS” and if you don’t like something, you’re free to leave”?

I’ve heard that Walt Disney wanted to found a community in connection with Disneyland East in which each resident would be a stockholder with as many votes in the local government as he had shares. Supposedly, the corporation lawyers put an end to that dream, and Walt’s heirs were more interested in making reliable profits than in founding capitalist utopias.

How is “if you can’t afford to remove yourself and dependents from the situation entirely, we’ll take that as implied consent to anything that suits us” any different from what workers everywhere have now? Someone upthread asked where the meta-bargain takes place, superficially a deep question but with a distressingly easy and unvarying answer: at the intersection of Child’s Stomach and Boss’s Wallet. Always.

Can someone outline the libertarian argument against armed robbery to me? This isn’t snark, I seriously would like to understand how they approach it. After all, if I hold a gun to your head and demand your money, I’m not imposing force, but offering you a choice. You have two options: a) hand over some fraction (call it alpha) of the money in your wallet, or b) face the very real risk that I will send a bullet through your brain at high speed and either kill you or cause you serious physical damage.

You freely chose to risk having this choice offered to you when you walked down the street where I was waiting with a gun. Government can’t force certain interactions to take place, or not take place on a street, and when you walk down the street you implicitly consent to all kinds of unstated interactions. Someone could ask you the time, for example, or for directions, and in both cases you would give out this information without any compensation in return. So why don’t you implicitly consent to being offered the money-vs-life choice when you walk down my street? And how can a non-tyrannical government restrict that consent, for example by locking me up if I approach you with the money-vs-life offer?
I seriously think that a libertarianism that does not account for the fact that some interactions – armed robbery, sexual harrassment – are ipso facto subject to state sanction is unworkable as a social philosophy. But, as I said, I’d be interested in hearing counter-arguments.

Basilisc #48 – easy. They’d say “We’re not anarcho capitalists, there’ll be a state tasked only with law and order and defence of the state and that would deal with your robber”.
Or else “The robber would know that your insurance would cover having them tracked down and tortured to death so wouldn’t bother in the first place.”

I think that any libertarian who understands public choice theory is against (representative) democracy, because they understand that democratic systems necessarily and systematically undermine both social and economic freedoms.

I used to have the freedom to swing my fist where and how I chose, until a democratic system constrained me to stop where other people’s noses began. Damn meddling democratic systems!

To return to the OP: How different would the status (in any respect) of someone living in a charter city be than of my Indian colleagues? (Who live in the US, but are not citizens, can’t vote, and so forth, but can go back to India.)

I just realised of course that my last comment may have taken us a complete circle back to one possible reality of a “charter city”.

If you actually wanted a municipal government that “worked”, I think your model might be close to George Washington Plunkett’s Tammany Hall New York, or the elder Daley’s Chicago: highly organized systems for delivering social services and public goods infrastructure development. Of course, such cities extract rents from business, and horrify the goo-goos with their “corrupt” democracy . . .

Katherine, the scare quotes were for your “feminism,” not feminism as such. But rock on with your sex-positive self. I’m sure the twelve year olds with “juicy” printed on the back of their hot pants will grow up to thank you for your brave counter-cultural advocacy of the sexual “yes.”

Bruce, doesn’t Boss Tweed and Richard Daley’s implicit argument go something like this: Because it’s easier to come by than noble birth, and more effective than a single, measly vote, money is the most efficient — and most underrated — tool of democracy? (I seem to remember that Boss Tweed was quite explicit about the benefits of bribery, although he put it somewhat less delicately than I’ve tried to here.)

Well, that’s new: reading women out of feminism. On the Internet, of all places.

Maggie, maybe just try to troll one thread at a time?

ajay, maybe try having the stones to say something with actual content?

ajay, no, I want to find out more about how opposing a reactionary form is itself reactionary, and I bet Maggie is just the person to explain it.

That’s a use of “reactionary” that correlates uncomfortably well with the question of whether sex actually ends up happening or not. I honestly thought this had been resolved by 1971 or so.

I resent that. I (and others) have been delivering highly specific, personally tailored snark.

Barry, I have been. The scary thing is I suspect ajay has too.

Maggie, I have to say I don’t understand. The whole point of “enthusiastic consent” is to raise the bar for guys to find out if the women they are with actually wants to have sex with them. The whole point is to not make it acceptable to think that someone wants to have sex with you because of what they wear or how nice their eyes are. I don’t understand how this system could generate lots of false positives, short of lots of women saying they want to have sex with the guy when they don’t actually want to, though they would still be in trouble in the old system. As for increased false negatives, well that’s not really a problem if you ask me, you can always try again at a later date.

Really I guess the only victims are women who are into having sex with guys who aren’t sure if she really wants to, “baby, do me like your worried I might hate you in the morning”.

The whole point of “enthusiastic consent” is to raise the bar for guys to find out if the women they are with actually wants to have sex with them.

I believe a note from psychoanalyst should be required. No less than 5 sessions, to be sure.

I thought this thread was about charter cities and hegemony.

I want to find out more about how opposing a reactionary form is itself reactionary

No, wait let’s discuss the Divine Right of Kings! No, the Arian Heresy! Phlogiston! These old ideas must be vigorously opposed in order to progress!

Or austerity economics and The Treasury View. Or Communist Calculation. We’ll spend thousands of pages and man-hours combating zombie ideologies and kill them once and for all.

83: I think the (humorous and self-deprecating) implication was that he automatically suspects that anyone who wants to sleep with him must be completely off her head.

No, he was serious.

…oh. I really should’ve caught on to that, sorry.

Anyway, uh, going back around to the OP: it feels to me like, in a pretty wide variety of circumstances, it makes more sense to define and selectively legitimate coercion rather than consent.

After all, what are we really afraid of? We fear getting coerced (subjected to duress, incarceration, etc), and we fear suffering we can’t escape (being trapped in desperate circumstances). If we go about defining just governance by addressing limitations on coercion and the alleviation or prevention of various forms of suffering, can’t we mostly avoid bringing up the notion of consent? And even the notion of liberty?

The important consent stuff could get swept up implicitly in the limitations on coercion, and the important liberty stuff could get swept up in the limitations on suffering. (It took me a while to realize this is the right assignment. I kept wanting to assign liberty to coercion, because, common sense, right? Not really, the cases where liberty is impeded — e.g. trapped poor and indebted forever — are problems because of the suffering involved, and more importantly, they aren’t directly the result of isolated acts of coercion. Alleviation of suffering would have to address comfort as well as liberty, and would have to encompass more than social mobility and welfare.)

Along a different track, what happens if we categorically replace all instances of ‘consent’ with ‘enthusiastic consent’? The most immediate problem that springs to mind is the existence of petulant assholes among us, people who refuse to enthusiastically consent to something reasonable, like walking all the way across a crosswalk instead of loitering in the road in the way of cars whose turn it is to go.

Of course, at least a third of the U.S. voting population do not enthusiastically consent to their current President, and that’s been true for decades. Even if we replace enthusiastically with some weaker adjective, this remains a problem. We actually expect people to put up with a hell of a lot of coercion, or at least, a hell of a lot of meaningful and imposing constraints. People don’t actually get all that much, relative to what they have to accept. (And it’s not directly proportional to the size of the population.) I feel like sweeping all of this up under ‘consent’ just hides it and lets us comfortably believe that we’re not proposing that grand an imposition on each individual, and that protest from those individuals would be a priori unreasonable. I guess maybe the goal is to construct a model of society in which protest from any of its constituent individuals would be a priori unreasonable. That seems like a pretty awful and misguided goal, though.

The requirement to obtain a note from psychoanalyst has an advantage of actually working, in that situation.

Not really, but this follow-up was revealing. I think I can see where either you are misguided or you are being an obtuse asshole (hard to say which at this point, though I’m not feeling very hopeful).

Ok, anyway. To clarify: The “only yes means yes” principle is not meant to be a legal definition of sexual assault. It is (only) meant to be a principle of behavior that one ought to live up to, in order to be a moral person. As a moral principle, it’s not subject to standards of proof, or reasonable doubt, or whatever legalese — we’re not prosecuting people for failing to meet this standard, we’re just proposing that this standard represents what a person ought to do (or “ought to try to do to the best of their ability” if you prefer) in order to be a ‘good’ person.

It’s about as fuzzy as most moral principles. Like most moral principles, you could probably come up with various wild and weird specific cases where the principle leads to wrongdoing. And, like most moral principles, you could probably describe various ordinary circumstances in a fiendishly clever way so that a self-evidently acceptable case seems to violate the principle. (Here’s a quite ordinary example: my life partner propositioned me, and when I declined, offered to do something I liked in return, at which point I accepted. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic, per se, but I felt comfortable and didn’t mind in the slightest. I personally prefer the idea of ‘comfortable consent’ as a middle ground between technical consent and enthusiastic consent, but that idea probably only applies to longer-term relationships.)

What is your suggestion?

Since a comprehensive suggestion would just restate the principle, let me give a couple specific examples. Don’t push people to say yes to sex with you. Don’t trick people into having sex with you. Don’t propose sex when someone is too intoxicated or drugged to think clearly (unless you’ve discussed it in advance when the person was reasonably sober and clear-headed, or something like that). Don’t beg people to have sex with you. Don’t have sex with someone who hasn’t expressed clear interest in having sex with you while clear-minded. Stuff like that.

Contra Maggie, I think the yes means yes meme is probably a good one for the feminist movement to pick up. I don’t really see the pathway where it will lead to more 12 year olds wearing juicy sweatpants since society has always been pretty much hell-bent on sexualizing women’s bodies regardless of what concessions feminists have gotten on the concept of consent.

But I think it is a dumb idea to extend to other agreements. The problem with rape is not that women have a bad negotiating position. The problem is that some men have the bad habit of ignoring what the women have actually agreed to. This is different from economic agreements were workers legitimately agree to coercive contracts because they don’t have better alternatives. Enthusiasm does not do a very good job of excluding coercion for these cases. There are some rapes that happen this way, but I think there are fewer of them these days or at least they are not the biggest part of the problem that I am aware of, noting that coercing someone into ‘agreement’ through physical force is not the kind of coercion we are talking about.

what happens if we categorically replace all instances of ‘consent’ with ‘enthusiastic consent’? The most immediate problem that springs to mind is the existence of petulant assholes among us, people who refuse to enthusiastically consent to something reasonable

Well, that’s one possible problem. The other possible problem, tho, is that all the people who’ve always had to eat shit, now have to eat shit and say they like it.

JW Mason:
The thing is that the situation in which consent becomes relevant w/r/t sex is pretty much always one-on-one negotiation and on the spur of the moment (possible cultural differences aside, where going alone to a man’s room may or may not be considered implicit “consent” all by itself, for example), where in the general employment case things are generally agreed to in advance. That’s why I suggested quid pro quo sex is more like asking an employee to violate a regulation, just this once, than like asking an employee to regularly get the highest price possible regardless of how much the thing sold is worth (which someone might not consent to, and not take the job, or might not enthusiastically consent to, and do it anyway, but which isn’t really a surprise to anybody).

Except at the extremes, defining what is coercion in matters of sex and what isn’t seems to be an eye-of-the-beholder matter. Don’t all courtship rituals in fact include a recognized need for strenuous, if not to say desperate attempts at persuasion? And aren’t the reasons well-known? On the one hand, we’re plagued at times by needs our rational selves are never fully in control of, and on the other, we fear surrendering even a small part of our self-determination to someone who, for all practical purposes, was a stranger before he or she became a suitor.

A chancy game, this, and if you don’t enjoy playing it, it’s easy enough to feel that you’re being assaulted rather than courted. In the culture I was born into, having a Molly Bloom come into your life precisely when you need one is a blessing that most heterosexual men (I can’t speak for gay men or women) experience rarely, if at all. Sometimes, I would say, we have to risk being something of an asshole. Should garden variety assholery become a matter of law, we’re very likely to become confused and discouraged.

No doubt some women, maybe even a majority, think that we damned well ought to be discouraged, given the disgustingly absurd level of our general presumption. In the light of experiences that feminists have shared with me, I can’t really argue the point, but I do wonder what the rules will wind up being when — and if — our differences are fully worked through.

…although come to think of it your point is actually that I was the one proposing the conflation mistake, which is correct. The answer to my “what happens” question is “an awful lot of awful things” — we shouldn’t replace ‘consent’ with ‘enthusiastic consent’ in statements about how individuals should be required to act in society, for exactly the reasons you stated — it’ll just put people who have needed to pretend to consent in a position where they need to pretend to enthusiastically consent. More generally, social principles need presume the relatively powerful will be acting in bad faith in their relations with the relatively powerless.

…well, I’m glad at least I asked about the swap as a question, instead of proposing it outright. It did seem like a naive and dangerous fix.

William Timberman: Without trying to gloss over any of the other complications, I do think that there’s a fairly clear line between “fuck me or you’re fired” and anything that might sensibly be called courtship. The boss saying “fuck me or you’re fired” is specifically choosing to use power to get the sex he wants without regard for the subordinate’s wishes or feelings at all – it’s about abolishing courtship thanks to the ability to coerce compliance.

William Timberman, the problem with that argument is that its based on a women as gate keeper model. Furthermore, though enthusiastic consent those reduce the chance of you getting sex (false negative) it also reduces the chance of the person you have sex with getting sex they dont want. From a utilitarian standpoint you might get less happiness but you also generate less unhappiness with your not really all that interested partner, so in fact, you not getting laid would generate a net positive happiness.

Well, that’s one possible problem. The other possible problem, tho, is that all the people who’ve always had to eat shit, now have to eat shit and say they like it.

I think the issue here is the shit eating part, not the saying they like it part. Also i cant help but wonder about the association of shit eating and sex. Im not sure if its a particular kink or particularly english.

Prohibiting sex between a subordinate (woman) and superior (male) because the woman is incapable of making considered decisions due to her wishing to substitute her manager’s will for her own is one thing, and takes care of quid pro quo and abuses of power.

But what about hypothetical workplace rules where women are assigned for sexual purposes to designated non-managerial males? (And what if such sex is compulsory for the women? Can any workplace really make such kinds of sex compulsory for me? Or will they be able to pick and choose which women will be permitted to meet all their “work” obligations?)

107: funny you should ask…

Yarrow, since I’m pretty sure we don’t come from different planets, maybe I just wasn’t as successful in my attempts at irony as I’d hoped. Anyway, on a planet where male peacocks have those fan things, and silver-backed gorillas thump their chests for no apparent reason, I’m glad to hear that starting from mutuality is as easy to manage as you say. Maybe I’m not as evolved as I ought to be, or maybe human society has just moved on. I am, after all, too old to be as much concerned about starting things as I used to be.

I think the “enthusiastic consent” rule is probably a good one for high school and college students, and perhaps even for twenty-somethings in the early stages of a relationship, but for mature people in established relationships, it strikes me as undesirable. It doesn’t leave a lot of room for emotional subtlety, does it? Let alone if I had to be enthusiastic about sex, mr. etv13 and I would hardly ever have any. There’s a lot of space between enthusiasm and unwillingness.

I think the yes means yes meme is probably a good one for the feminist movement to pick up.

I haven’t read the whole thread properly yet, but I just need to respond to this. The “yes means yes” meme is not something the feminist movement needs to pick up, one we started

Please see, for a more full exposition, the book “Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape” by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti.

Romer: “The concept {of charter cities} allows for cross-national government partnerships that facilitate the transfer of working systems of rules to greenfield locations.”

The phrase, “working systems of rules”, strikes me as questionable. Elsewhere (sorry, I don’t have a quote) I have seen Romer claim that he and others know what rules work. Then why not, like other utopians, go and form your own community somewhere? If you really know what works, that should be no problem. Surely you could find a few thousand followers to consent to that, and consent eagerly.

OC, we can think of any society as a working system of rules, so that is a pretty low bar. But I suppose that Romer thinks that he knows what works better and has made more specific claims. Still, at best, does he have more than a set of plausible hypotheses?

Bianca: “But what about hypothetical workplace rules where women are assigned for sexual purposes to designated non-managerial males? (And what if such sex is compulsory for the women? Can any workplace really make such kinds of sex compulsory for me? Or will they be able to pick and choose which women will be permitted to meet all their “work” obligations?)”

Biance, what the frikking frack f*ck?

Let me third Katherine’s statement a while back that this (multi-post) thread is creepy.

Billikin @ 117

Yours is a better way of putting it, I agree — when you aren’t in a quizzical mood, anyway. And the bounds of the metaphorical definitely are confusing to the young and experienced, who unfortunately include a lot of the middle-aged. DSK springs to mind as an example of someone who, in other matters at least, is anything but unsophisticated. Makes you wonder, does it not?

Are the towns in Michigan with have “special managers” defacto charter cities? Then of course they didn’t give consent so maybe it is governmental rape.