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ialdabaoth comments on Changing Systems is Different than Running Controlled Experiments - Don’t Choose How to Run Your Country That Way! - Less Wrong
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Luckily, there's actually a culture striving towards this. My favorite framing of the desired behavior is "Enthusiastic consent".
Reinforcing the idea that consent should be enthusiastic - and that enthusiastic consent is desirable and sexy - will go a long way towards quickly shifting the system.
I'm going to talk in gender-normative terms now, since a good deal of the problem exists within those gender-normative spaces.
For men, "enthusiastic consent" isn't merely a behavioral shift; it's a values shift. It's the recognition that they actually kinda WANT enthusiastic consent from their potential partners. A lot of the current language still carries so-called "slut-shaming" baggage - "I kinda like a girl who's a whore in bed", etc. - so there's work that needs to be done to either find better terms, or 're-claim' the terms that are being used. But I think the principle is there and rooted deeply enough in the current culture that it shouldn't be too difficult to get men behind the idea that a girl who is blatantly "into it" is a preferable partner to a girl who is unsure, ambivalent, or even directly hostile to the idea.
For women, "enthusiastic consent" seems much more like a simple behavioral shift than like a values shift, but I may be mistaken there due to a lack of personal perspective. Any values shift that occurs, it seems to me, would be one towards self-esteem and away from seeing themselves as a prize to be competed for and won, and seeing men as merely competitors for the prize of their affection.
Aha, no; I was mistaken - I think it is a values shift on both sides. And I think the deeper value shift that would need to occur on the woman's side is to stop treating pick-up technique as a tool in the intragender competition for status. Adopting 'enthusiastic consent' means abandoning the idea that a woman's worth is based on the quality of man she can acquire, and treating the negotiation of sexual encounters as desirable for their own sake instead of merely as a signal. Luckily, culture is already shifting in that direction rather rapidly, so there isn't nearly as much work to be done there as with men.
Maybe the whole thing could be framed in marketing terms - women's liberation could be framed as much more appealing to the sort of men who typically denigrate it, if the idea of freer, easier, and more enthusiastic sexual encounters was added as a deal-sweetener. There would still be some hold-outs among men who "prefer to be the pursuer", of course, but those hold-outs will narrow as the underbelly of those processes get exposed via contrast with their alternatives.
What about those of us who aren't interested in doing "enthusiasm". Are we perpetually banned from the ability to consent to sex?
The concept of "enthusiastic consent" seems to me to devalue the importance of consent by itself. I want my "yes" to mean "yes", I don't want to have to shout "Yes, oh god yippee yes!". Why can't the former be respected and accepted by itself, without the need for "enthusiasm"?
This is more or less one of the way the PUA/Game crowd model women's behavior except that as they will tell you it is not in fact declining.
You seriously think that what is likely a deeply embedded aspect of human nature can be changed with a little marketing?
Hmm ... consider the change in popular perceptions of homosexuality over the past fifty to seventy-five years. Or, for that matter, women's economic role.
Things that people have in the past thought are "human nature" (or, more broadly, matters of "natural" and "unnatural") turn out to be quite socially malleable over just a few generations.
We shouldn't expect ourselves to be all that unusual in the course of human history; therefore, we should conclude that things that seem to us to be "human nature" — especially ones that inspire controversy and defensiveness — are likely to turn out to be socially malleable, too.
I don't see who this is at all analogous. What's the perceived embedded aspect of human nature you claim changed in your example?
There once was a popular perception that homosexuality was against human nature.
Quaint, ain't it?
There are two ways to ways to interpret the italicized statement:
1) most humans do not want to engage in homosexual behavior.
2) people who want to engage in homosexual behavior are "deviant" and likely to exhibit other "deviant" behaviors.
Note that neither of these versions were falsified by "the change in popular perceptions of homosexuality over the past fifty to seventy-five years".
There are lots of other ways to interpret it! Forget not the words of the saints, that whenever you think there are two ways something could be, you should look for at least five ways. I'll name one, and let you think of the other two:
3. People who exhibit homosexual behavior do so out of a choice to rebel self-destructively against what would be good for them.
(This is a somewhat secularized version of what I take to be the Catholic Church's position on that particular matter.)
However, I think you mistook my point, which was a sort of self-sampling argument and not an argument about that particular topic. We shouldn't take our own perceptions of what's normal or natural very seriously on topics where we observe that there has been a lot of wibbly-wobbly change in perceptions of what's normal or natural ... because those topics are unusually likely to be ones where we've come to believe an unlikely local myth of normality or naturalness.
Which hasn't been falsified either.
So are you claiming there are many societies out there where women don't treat the dating game partially as a competition intragender status? Or is your idea of "avoiding self-sampling" limited to looking at the past 50 years of western culture and extrapolating?
... I'd be VERY interested to hear the rationale behind voting this comment down.
Taboo: "Enthusiastic consent". Once you've done that you might want to ask: How likely is it for there to be a misunderstanding about whether something constituted "enthusiastic consent" or not? How easy would it be for a woman who did give "enthusiastic consent" to deny having done so after the fact because she doesn't what the stigma of having cheated on her boyfriend/having slept with a low status guy/etc.?
Pretty unlikely. Being self-consciously dishonest is unpleasant and worth avoiding. People like to think of themselves as being good and honest. Most social dishonesty is less conscious and explicit than that, and hinges on maintaining ambiguity and deniability to oneself as well as to others.
However, we're disproportionately likely to hear of situations like that, because of narrative bias: that sort of thing, while rare, creates dramatic stories which people are unusually likely to repeat to each other and get each other emotionally involved in. Moreover, since we acquire a lot of our beliefs about society from fiction, if we haven't done careful sociological research, our models of social behavior are likely to be riven with narrative bias: ideas that tell us that the social world acts like movies, dramas, sitcoms, and soap operas much more than it actually does.
(Put another way: People have to be pretty honest much of the time, otherwise we wouldn't have a society that made any kind of sense. But good fiction about social interactions is more engaging if it's got as many levels of deceit as our little brains can handle. Since we acquire a lot of our model of society — especially parts of society that we're not personally familiar with — from fiction, we're likely to think of them as being more dramatic and deceptive than they really are.)
It seems to me that it would be a very curious theory of human sexual interaction which modeled women as scheming Machiavellian agents and men as disarmingly forthright chumps.
Precisely, and retroactively rationalizing that you did not give "enthusiastic consent" strikes me as a decent example of such ambiguity.
Somewhat ironic given the original meaning of "enthusiastic": possessed by a god.
Whereas I think the way that I and ialdabaoth are using the idea of "enthusiastic consent", it is (in part) about being unambiguous. So I think we are using terms differently here.
I'm curious if you have a substantive response to the rest of that comment, by the way.
The problem is that you haven't actually defined standards for "enthusiastic consent" and near as I can tell neither have any of the other people arguing for it. It's not enough to simply assert that something should be unambiguous. Since the property of being unambiguous is itself ambiguous.
As for your accusations of narrative bias, the same could be said about the existence of this supposed "rape culture".