Normatively understood ways of refusing
Celia Kitzinger & Hannah Frith, Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal, Discourse & Society, vol. 10 p. 293 (1999):
This article has argued that young women find it difficult to say ‘no’ to sex at least partly because saying immediate clear and direct ‘no’s (to anything) is not a normal conversational activity. Young women who do not use the word ‘no’, but who refuse sex with delays, prefaces, palliatives and accounts are using conversational patterns which are normatively recognized as refusals in everyday life. For men to claim that they do not ‘understand’ such refusals to be refusals (because, for example, they do not include the word ‘no’) is to lay claim to an astounding and implausible ignorance of normative conversational patterns. We have suggested that the insistence of date rape prevention (and other refusal skills) educators on the importance of saying ‘no’ is counter-productive in that it demands that women engage in conversationally abnormal actions which breach conventional social etiquette, and in that it allows rapists to persist with the claim that if a woman has not actually said ‘NO’ (in the right tone of voice, with the right body language, at the right time) then she hasn’t refused to have sex with him.
Our analysis in this article supports the belief that the root of the problem is not that men do not understand sexual refusals, but that they do not like them. . . . The problem of sexual coercion cannot be fixed by changing the way women talk.
. . . [T]here are normatively understood ways of doing refusals which are generally understood to be refusals, and consequently we believe that there is no reason why feminists concerned about sexual coercion should respond to men’s allegations of their ‘ambiguity’ by taking upon ourselves the task of inventing new ways of doing refusals. As feminists, we have allowed men (disingenuously claiming not to understand normative conversational conventions) to set the agenda, such that we have accepted the need to educate women to produce refusals which men cannot claim to have ‘misunderstood’. This, in turn, has led only to an escalation of men’s claims to have ‘misunderstood’, to be ‘misunderstood’, and, in general, to be ‘ignorant’ about women’s (allegedly different and special) ways of communicating. Men’s selfinterested capacity for ‘misunderstanding’ will always outstrip women’s earnest attempts to clarify and explain.
It’s embarrassing how much I needed to read this. In my own (highly privileged) life, it’s been hard for me to learn to say no to many requests-and I worry about being polite enough!
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
This article has argued that young women find it difficult to say ‘no’ to sex at least partly because saying immediate clear and direct ‘no’s (to anything) is not a normal conversational activity. Young women who do not use the word ‘no’, but who refuse sex with delays, prefaces, palliatives and accounts are using conversational patterns which are normatively recognized as refusals in everyday life. For men to claim that they do not ‘understand’ such refusals to be refusals (because, for example, they do not include the word ‘no’) is to lay claim to an astounding and implausible ignorance of normative conversational patterns. We have suggested that the insistence of date rape prevention (and other refusal skills) educators on the importance of saying ‘no’ is counter-productive in that it demands that women engage in conversationally abnormal actions which breach conventional social etiquette, and in that it allows rapists to persist with the claim that if a woman has not actually said ‘NO’ (in the right tone of voice, with the right body language, at the right time) then she hasn’t refused to have sex with him.
Our analysis in this article supports the belief that the root of the problem is not that men do not understand sexual refusals, but that they do not like them. . . . The problem of sexual coercion cannot be fixed by changing the way women talk.
. . . [T]here are normatively understood ways of doing refusals which are generally understood to be refusals, and consequently we believe that there is no reason why feminists concerned about sexual coercion should respond to men’s allegations of their ‘ambiguity’ by taking upon ourselves the task of inventing new ways of doing refusals. As feminists, we have allowed men (disingenuously claiming not to understand normative conversational conventions) to set the agenda, such that we have accepted the need to educate women to produce refusals which men cannot claim to have ‘misunderstood’. This, in turn, has led only to an escalation of men’s claims to have ‘misunderstood’, to be ‘misunderstood’, and, in general, to be ‘ignorant’ about women’s (allegedly different and special) ways of communicating. Men’s selfinterested capacity for ‘misunderstanding’ will always outstrip women’s earnest attempts to clarify and explain.
It’s embarrassing how much I needed to read this. In my own (highly privileged) life, it’s been hard for me to learn to say no to many requests-and I worry about being polite enough!
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.