Response to “Not-Assault” by Ace Theist

Original post: On experiences that seem too ‘inconsequential’ to qualify as assault, and the ‘grey’ areas of qualifying as assault.

I think the difference you’re looking for is that we think of assault as traumatic, while you seem not to think of this incident as such. There’s also other variables at play–assault is often institutional violence, but the “joke” wasn’t. There was no power structure at play there; it wasn’t relying on that social structure. It stood completely outside that. This is something that could still have happened without rape culture in place. But, because it does look like any other incident of rape culture, it easily fits inside that and so we don’t pay attention to things like this. We don’t have language for this because it seems no different from what usually happens.

It might also be that there’s no need to call it anything else but assault. Theft is called theft no matter if it’s the pennies on your coffee table or if it’s billions from a bank hack. There’s legal distinctions, of course, but socially we don’t pay much attention to that. We let the situation give context for how serious it is. Same for car crashes; fatal to fender bender, they’re all called a crash.  More serious incidents are not diminished for being called by the same words as those immediately forgotten.

For sexual crimes though, I think we’re attached to thinking of those as exclusively serious because the world does not take them seriously. Thus, any sex crime must be serious, must be traumatic, in order to qualify as assault. We don’t have that mindset with anything else like this. It’s our warped view of rape and assault as “not bad” that forces us to insist that *all* incidents of them must be grievous.

But I hesitate to say let’s treat the word as we do all others, because people go on as they have and discount the damage rape can cause. By refusing, though, we are throwing out just how often this happens, just how bad our society is, and we are ignoring so many people who aren’t “good victims”–traumatized enough–purely for a political gambit. Since people already dismiss rape as inconsequential, I don’t see the harm in treating the word as we do all others. We shouldn’t deny obvious experiences for the sake of politics.

ARCsexual: Averse, Repulsed, Conflicted

Sex aversion and repulsion are not widely known topics. They’re generally rolled up with frigid and prude, as negative traits of people who try to insert themselves into the lives of everyone around them. To be averse is no different from any other orientation. It’s no different from disliking basketball—people simply don’t go to games, don’t play. There’s no movement to ban the sport. It’s personal conduct. At most an averse friend won’t want to hear every dripping detail of your sexploits, they may not want to watch explicit shows with you—the same as someone who isn’t interested in your sports obsession.