As long as it’s not the drug police, Rush, amiright?
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Meh. I never get that… @JemmieDuffs likes to call me Yankboy and American only gets used when she is upset at something. Her other sarcastic term is Upper Mexicans.
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I agree with what you are saying, for the most part. But I don’t see it as clarifying many of the questions of my prior post. Not that it needs to, since the topic here is more about consent generally.
I can appreciate that perspective, but I acknowledge that it could also simply reflect self-serving biases. Humans attempts to negotiate fair treatment of humans still has apparently resulted in an extinction event, and possibly collapse of the ecologies even humans themselves depend upon. So there is also an argument that can be made that human morality has been a failure in its shortsightedness, and insistence upon the ideal of separating human and non-human life. If being moral requires belief in human superiority, then it is a self-perpetuating problem.
The presupposes that consent is only privileged with regards to sexuality. And furthermore that sexual relationships have distinct characteristics from other kinds of consent. What good does the consent of a sheep to avoid sex do if it cannot consent to being property in the first place, or being eaten? For better or worse, making non-humans property completely obviates most forms of consent. There is also here an artificial and arbitrary distinction between sexuality and mating. Again, why is consent irrelevant to forcibly mating non-humans? Because I can argue that inseminating it with a turkey baster was not pleasurable for me, and hence not sexual? That’s inconsistent, because consent or rape are never defined in terms of the aggressor’s degree of enjoyment, it’s supposedly to protect the victim.
Here’s a real-world comparison. I met a kid who was about 12 years old at the time, who was proud of the Polish rabbits he was breeding. He was looking for certain traits, pairing off rabbits to mate. Not unusual experience for a kid on a farm. But if he was watching humans mate, suddenly it would be “a crime”, and the kid supposedly “a victim”, somehow suddenly suffering damages which did not exist in the other scenario. It just seems to me that despite how hot people get about this, there is really no cogent argument to explain the difference. The best I hear is that somehow non-humans do not actually have sex, because we can’t prove that they know what sex is, despite witnessing them do it. That humans have sexuality while others merely “mate” in a non-sexual way. I think that explanation is contrived and unconvincing, but it also undermines consent because if they are incapable of having “sexuality” then they are never in a true sexual relationship with a human, but presumably think they are mating.
Perhaps a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of my little mind!
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Credit to James Nicoll.
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And we go five, six, seven to the eight
“No means no” is never up for debate
And the lack of a “no” isn’t the same as a “yes”
And a “yes” isn’t the same as an “oh my god, yes”
Oddly enough, STD does an amazingly good job of explaining the concepts there.
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I’ve seen the idea come up a lot in general SF/F fandom, but there’s a lot of crossover between the communities. Of course you can always generalize from uplifts to artificially created beings, or even aliens with a different mental model than humans. I recall an interesting, and somewhat raucous discussion over the idea of decerebrated clones as sexual partners. No one was actually advocating this, of course, but trying to establish rather or not consent would be an issue was … well, difficult. (One noted issue: this situation differs considerably from a person that is brain dead due to injury, as they were a fully sapient being at an earlier point, but the clones would never have even developed into such. Essentially, they’re not even as sapient as an ordinary animal.)
For someone like me where explicit consent is a very important factor in my relationships, it was both a fascinating discussion and something of a personal squick at the same time. I couldn’t completely reject the idea within my personal framework, but I couldn’t condone it either.
As a Canadian, getting offended at American being used to describe people from the USA strikes me as someone who wants to be offended. It’s totally unambiguous in (almost) any company, it’s not “stealing” anyone’s identity, and there’s no good substitute.
I suspect (and dearly hope) that your sample group was loaded high in those suffering from offensensitivity. After all, the Canadian identity is best expressed in a feeling of smug, but silent (very important!) superiority over our neighbours to the south, not in lecturing them.
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That seems very likely. It’s also likely they were 13 year olds who had just gone through a civics class. This happened in a Twitch chat.
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You spent time conversing with overly earnest 13-year olds?
You are a better man than I.
(“better person”? The phrase needs work.)
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Eh, I’m a man, it’s public knowledge.
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Yes, we all know, you can put your penis away now.
*Please, please, please take this the joke it was intended to be.
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english was started by a norman soldier trying to chat up a welsh barmaid in a saxon pub.
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While “Uncle Sam” is a well-known personification of the United States not as many people are familiar with the female personification named “Columbia”. I think we here in the States should call ourselves Columbians…oh, wait, that might cause some confusion.
Oh well. Maybe we could go with Uncle Sam and call ourselves Samsonites. That name doesn’t carry any baggage.
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You win my Internet for the day.
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