Brouhaha ha

I’ve been reading – on a number of different blogs – about two media debacles this weekend.

One is Amazon Fail. To summarize if you’ve missed it: Amazon has a policy to strip the sales rankings of “adult” media to make it less searchable – in case any children are shopping on Amazon (you know, with their credit cards) and might accidentally come across something that an adult would have to explain to them. Except, the only media being stripped (hah!) is that which deals with gay and/or female sexuality in a positive light. Some pro-woman and pro-gay books will not even show up if you search for their titles word for word, unless the title is also available on Kindle. (Hm.)
Theories are many and varied: Is Amazon really right-washing its search criteria? Is it running automatic software that strips texts that have received the most complaints? This post has a theory of third party involvement. What interests me most about that last theory is the concept of creating chaos for “lolz” – as in, pitting groups with opposite ideologies against each other is hee-larious! See how funny it is when people care deeply about things and make noise about it?
No big deal for me to move my internet shopping elsewhere, but since I do find some of my best deals in Amazon’s Marketplace, I’m very interested to know who is swinging the banbat, and for what motive.

The other brouhaha is over the new Seth Rogen vehicle, Observe and Report. It looks waste of celluloid all around, but naturally the scene that saddens/enrages/exhausts-from-repetitive-bullshit the blogs I read is the rape scene played for laughs. In sum: the protagonist takes his crush out to dinner, where she gets blackout drunk from tequila and drugs; then he takes her home and has sex in her. At some point, noticing that his date appears to have passed out on the vomit-stained pillow, the character asks if she is okay. She says something* like “Who told you to stop, motherfucker?”
Rogen’s comment: “When we’re having sex and she’s unconscious like you can literally feel the audience thinking, like, how the fuck are they going to make this okay? Like, what can possibly be said or done that I’m not going to walk out of the movie theater in the next thirty seconds? . . . And then she says, like, the one thing that makes it all okay.”

Let’s call this The One Thing That Makes It Okay FAIL. (Alternately, Definition of Sex Fail.) There are two things that make this assumption epically unsustainable. (1) The speaker of The One Thing That Makes It Okay is not a real woman. She’s a fantasy. She is, in fact, one of those mythological Unrapeable Women: she’s not classy and she’s promiscuous; her horror at being flashed at the mall is played for laughs (hasn’t she seen a few, haha?). But just in case that wasn’t enough, the writer(s) saw fit to place the One Thing That Makes It Okay in her mouth – consent! She just lies there, and she participates enough to make it legal! Fantastical!
(2) Except, not. To view this scene as not-rape, or even the notorious “gray rape”, you must suscribe to the deeply problematic belief that the difference between sex and rape is the word “no.” That is, if you do not say No, then you’ve consented by default. This kind of thinking is what allows a lot of rape to happen in the first place (c.f. Rogen’s character plowing away at an unconscious woman); it’s what allows society to condemn women who get very drunk (of their own volition or not), because they’ve lost their ability to say the magic word. On the other hand, if you think about sex as a healthy, positive, and mutual activity, then you’re not likely to be soothed by this deathbed-confession consent from a mumbling drunk. Consent is not the absence of “no” but the presence of “yes” – words and signs from the beginning that both partners are eager and interested. The One Thing That Would Have Made It Okay is if positive consent were present from the beginning. It was not, and a mumbled one-liner from a vomiting woman cannot retroactively make this scene not-rape.

All of this is dealt with clearly and movingly in a recent essay collection entitled Yes Means Yes: Visions of female sexual power and a world without rape. I’d Email the writers and actors of Observe and Report a recommendation to this book, but it is one of the titles that you can no longer search for on Amazon.

Funny.

*Can’t be arsed to watch the trailer again. It’s shit.