Like, if I said the word “nuance,” it was as if I was being a rape apologist. And I felt really confused by that, because these don’t feel like conversations that can be, to me, solved by the extremes of black and white. My little brother was in college at that time, and he came home being like, “I’m really trying to get this right, but they’ve given us so many seminars, and they’ve said that if a woman is drinking, you shouldn’t make a move on her. But we are drinking all the time, and so everyone is drunk always. And so I don’t understand how to reconcile these two rules. How do I make this work?” And for me, I was like, it is so much about your intentions, and it’s very hard to put a very blanket rule on things.
You are smart enough to know if a woman is consenting or not, and we can really speak about what it looks like to have active consent. But instead, people were being given these very blanket rules that were not nuanced, and I feel like it has created a lot of confusion.
Joseph: Maybe just because I went to school for this — communication — I think, obviously, consent, so on and so forth, but I think we can’t assume intentions, necessarily, because I think intentions change depending upon geographic location, age, all sorts of demographic things, right?
Like, if I’m walking and I give a head nod to another man and he’s Black, we have an understanding of what that means. If I do it to a white guy, he’s like, “What the hell are you doing?” I communicate what I’m thinking. Again, I’m not going to infantilize some of these men, but I’m also not going to infantilize women.
Like, even as we’re sitting here across from each other, from the beginning of the conversation, I originally said to you, “I think you should go first.” And you can tell me, “I don’t think I should go first.”
