Self-serving bias much, Jessica Valenti? Also some game theory.

[maradydd]

I need to start keeping a timeline or something (UPDATE, 19/12/2014: Slate did it for me! Thank you, Slate), because I figured at some point the cogs in the 24-hour outrage cycle would notice that some of us have cottoned on to their business model, and now Jessica Valenti has. Obviously the Grauniad, bastion of even-temperedness that it has ever

Comments

[lilmissnever]

Editors have added a correction to the bottom of the column:

"This article was amended on 26 June 2014. An earlier version of this article paraphrased David Bernstein as writing: "the only women who give explicit consent for sex are prostitutes". He wrote: "There is one type of sexual relationship that, as I understand it, involves primarily explicit consent - the relationship between a prostitute and her (or his) clients, with exact sexual services to be provided determined by explicit agreement in advance." We are happy to clarify."

[docstrange]

LOVELY, so their "correction" is a snarkily presented, out-of-context quote that buries the meaning of "primarily" to make it sound like that is a qualifier of the type of consent, rather than the frequency of that type of consent.

What he wrote:

The vast, vast majority of “sexual contact or behavior” is initiated with only *implicit consent.* [UPDATE: There is one type of sexual relationship that, as I understand it, involves primarily explicit consent--the relationship between a prostitute and her (or his) clients, with exact sexual services to be provided determined by explicit agreement in advance.] The DOJ website definition makes almost every adult in the U.S. (men AND women)-and that likely includes you, dear reader-a perpetrator of sexual assault. Just leaning over to give your date (or your spouse) a kiss without asking first and receiving a yes comes within stated definition of sexual assault, regardless of how many times you’ve done it before without objection.As Meredith says, this is a law professor talking about the

[whswhs]

If you're the sort of person who thrives on group approval, a moral panic can be a rousing good time, at least if you identify strongly with the side doing the panicking or the side being panicked against. If that's not your idea of a good time, though, too bad. . . .This is the kind of thing that makes you one of my very favorite bloggers. It's intelligent, and it looks at human behavior from far enough outside the current in-group/out-group clashes to allow detached analysis. You have the rare gift of reading what someone actually wrote and not what you think a person would write who belonged to whichever predefined viewpoint you assigned them to

[maradydd]

I understand where they're coming from at a visceral level that I can actually articulate: they want to eliminate ambiguity when it comes to consent. That is a noble goal! Eliminating ambiguity in all kinds of communication is pretty much the thing I live for. But, as you say, there are many styles of communication, and translating between them can be incredibly difficult. (Sometimes pathologically so, which is why "nonverbal learning disorder" is a diagnosis.) And I completely agree that trying to coerce people into what is essentially speaking a non-native language is exactly the opposite of embracing diversity.

[whswhs]

Eliminating ambiguity in communication has value for many purposes, and it's one of the things I do professionally as a copy editor, since most of my clients are academic authors and publishers. But it's not the summum bonum, for several reasons:

° You can't eliminate all of it, and eliminating those last increments may have a cost far out of proportion to the benefit.

° There are types of communication that are enhanced by ambiguity; it's a valuable resource in poetry, for example.

° There are types of communication that would not even be possible if ambiguity were eliminated. Puns depend on a temporary ambiguity that is resolved in an unexpected direction; flirtation seems often to involve an ambiguity that is never resolved, or at least not explicitly.

[maradydd]

I overspoke, and you duly corrected me. Just this morning after some punning around with thequux and our host, I blurted out, "I like ambiguity when it's funny and not when it's scary!"

More later, as I have some time-sensitive errands to run.

ETA: Whether both the sender and receiver of a message recognise the ambiguity in an ambiguous thing is important here. For instance, this has to do with when someone doesn't get a joke, especially a pun. I am pretty crap at flirting, but certainly the times I find it most enjoyable are when I know I'm flirting, I know the other person is flirting, the other person knows I'm flirting, the other person knows I know they're flirting, and I know all these things.

[whswhs]

Oh, certainly, and that was really hard for me to learn.