2 April

Humans are ultimately desiring creatures. Everything we think, feel and do is I think caused by either a desire, or a belief. A belief is a temporarily fixed desire. It's for this reason that the current debates about sexual harassment and assault to me are sailing in the wrong direction. For example, two-thirds of women when surveyed have regular fantasies about being forced to have sex. NOT because they want to be raped, but (research shows) because the desire of these women is to be forced into sex, at least in their fantasies, for one or more of the following reasons: 1) women are often taught to feel shame about having sexual desires, and so fantasising about being forced to do it removes the guilt of being sexual 2) being overwhelmingly desired by a dominant man paradoxically gives a woman power over that man, it gives her agency in their interaction 3) sometimes women confident in their sexuality just love the roleplay of these fantasies. We already know men's fantasies are often about the same dominant behaviour, often reinforced through porn. But statistics show women also watch a lot of porn, and prefer watching women being dominated too. So there's peculiar shared territory here. The tricky thing with desire is that it constantly escapes all attempts to classify and control it. 'Consent' can as well be consent to test the waters, to flirt and to be flirted with. To leave a lot of that wide open, that's always been part of the thrill of life. I suspect sexual harassment and assault isn't really about consent - the people who commit that sort of violence are likely to, even if they're asked not to. It's about power, and how that power gets abused.