Don't Worship Words

Clarissa

March 1

Aside from "rights", the words that we have to start stepping away from are consent, choice, and freedom.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with these words per se. But we have turned them into idols. No other consideration is allowed or even occurs when something is claimed to be a result of "a freely consented choice that is everybody's right."

None of these things are absolutes because nobody can even define them. What's a free choice? What is it free of? Self-awareness is extremely rare. Today I think I freely consented and tomorrow I feel differently. Who's to say what's more freely chosen, yesterday's enthusiasm or today's repentance?

We had the whole #MeToo quagmire because first they consented, and then they un-consented, or they consented to one part but not the other, and we are sitting there, parsing who chose what at which point. As Juan Manuel de Prada correctly said, we are so stuck on "free choice" that we aren't even asking why people are leading these weird, miserable lifestyles at all. The whole set-up is wrong. Remember the Mattress Girl who consented to anal sex with a random dude because she thought this activity, which she clearly didn't enjoy, was going to get her a boyfriend? She un-consented and destroyed his life when he refused to provide the payment she expected for this unpleasant act. There's so much wrong here, aside from how anybody expressed consent. Why can't she openly say she wants a boyfriend? Why is he finagling an unwanted sex act out of a clearly desperate young woman? Why are they both using sex as a substitute for every other form of communication?

The deification of consent has already given us transed grade-schoolers and is leading us straight to the legalization of pedophilia. This is not to say we should abolish consent. It simply shouldn't be the only category of analysis.

Social media are filled with stories of adult detransers who are sharing absolute horrors about the mutilation inflicted on them. And every time, there's a chorus of, "but you wanted this. You chose this. You consented. So what's the problem?" There's a 30yo man who has his penis cut off. This is a terrible tragedy. He's devastated. But people are chirping on and on about how he chose it himself as if they weren't choosing the most bizarre things themselves during COVID out of artificially stoked anxiety and politically induced ignorance.

Humans are not hyper-rational creatures who are always calculating the most optimal choices. We aren't robots. We are emotional, fallible, easily led astray, often confused. Life is a lot more complicated than a series of calculated free choices.