Hayley Phelan: "How Does Submissive Sex Work In The Age Of #Me Too?"

This is reasonable.

   But look: 

   First, it's not about "Me Too." It's about "affirmative consent" = "'Yes' means yes." As I've noted before, "yes means yes" isn't the right name for it. It's, rather:  No 'yes' means no. The main component of "affirmative consent" theory is: 

If John and Jane are having sex, John must explicitly ask for and explicitly receive permission to proceed at every moment.

   No one has ever done this in the entire history of sex. In fact, it's impossible. No matter how frequently John asks, there will always and inevitably be a window during which he has not secured explicit consent. And that's where the rape happens. Every time.

   Of course usually the advocates of the "affirmative consent" theory say that permission must only be secured at every point of escalation...but that isn't true. It's no defense to say "we'd been doing x for awhile at that point." If you fail to "secure assent" with respect to continuing to do x, advocates of affirmative consent will classify you as a rapist.
[I once asked Johnny Quest what she'd do if I started asking for consent during sex at every point, every time. Without hesitating, she said "Break up with you." Oh yeah. She's crazy about me.]

   But anyway: 

   Though I think Phelan's piece is pretty reasonable, it's probably wasted effort, because there's a clear answer to the question in her title: there is no place for any non-zero degree of dominance or submission in sex according to the affirmative consent theory. It's patently obvious that, by the principles (such as they are) of political correctness and progressivier parts of progressivism, any nonzero degree of either dominance or submission is "rape culture." Period.

   The only way I see for PC/feminism/progressivism to try to weasel out of this is to invoke their generic power differential move: that is: it's ok if women do it (because something something power something). But without resorting to that move (which, of course, they do quite freely...so...whatever) I don't see any way around it. In fact, I don't that even that all-purpose double-standard will work...but I'm getting bored.

   Contemporary feminism / PC / progressivism is a mass of incoherence and contradiction...so trying to make sense of it is fruitless. I mean, if you can insist that Caitlyn Jenner is a woman but Rachel Dolezal isn't black, then you can just about say anything. Any contradiction can be wormed out of at any time because the far-left world-view is so nonsensical that it can't really function to guide reasoning. It mere functions as a mass of raw rhetorical materials from which to fashion ad hoc criticisms of whatever strikes them as bad this week. They're not constrained by logic. They can slap together an objection to whatever it is that they whimsically / impressionistically decide is bad. And they can exempt virtually identical cases from criticism. So asking questions like Phelan's is a fool's game: why ask about the consequences of an incoherent theory? Everything follows from it and nothing does. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? One? A googleplex? Aleph-null? Any answer is as good as any other. The only way to make any sense out of it is to scrap the whole framework and start over with something that makes at least a bit of sense.