Disconnect

Women get enormous social pressure to not ask for sex, not know what they want, etc. Rape fantasies by women are fairly common, seemingly an expression of "I want sex but can't ask."

A central issue of rape culture is that women have trouble figuring out if they were raped or not. They ask themselves did they want it. They say "I know I need to drink less." after being plied with alcohol until falling down drunk, not recognizing it was date rape.

I think one of the ways women navigate this morass successfully is they agree to the relationship and then leave it up to him to initiate sex per se once she's agreed "We're lovers." That seems like one of the least worst answers for women in a world with no good answers. 

I saw a question once on Metafilter and it was a woman saying something like she's into BDSM and her boyfriend is not. He's a gentle guy and adamantly refuses to be rough in bed.

Her complaint boiled down to "I want him to be the BDSM top and he won't do as I say." She seemed to be not noticing her demand for style over substance with a man telling her "I'm in charge and I don't mistreat my women."

The two above patterns are pretty common and women don't know how to advertise it safely because actual rapists use any excuse to tell themselves "She actually wants me to take her." 

Consent is the detail that definition of rape hinges upon and there's enormous work still to be done to establish a means for women to both know their own mind and find some socially acceptable way to speak it. 

I seem to know my own mind better than average but other people still give me no socially acceptable means to speak it. In my experience, no matter what a man says, he doesn't really want me to initiate. 

Maybe I'm just stupid but I can't figure out how to navigate that. And I find the whole thing baffling because socially people perceive me as hyper aggressive. 

On Cyburbia, people seemed to imagine I strode around in black leather with a cat-o-nine-tails hanging out my back pocket in case I ran across someone I wanted to domme. When I joined the moderating staff and was invited to the moderator only channel, they were shocked to learn that's a public personae -- whatever that is -- and I don't talk the same way in a small group of a few people. They didn't know how to relate to this quieter, shyer me.

That's a large part of why when it finally occurred to me six weeks after joining Hacker News that Mz might get misinterpreted as a feminist handle I didn't bother to change my typoed handle. People imagine I'm some super aggressive strident feminist no matter what I do. I figured those assumptions were coming no matter what I called myself. 

I was a good student in school. I learned to do school presentations. That's a public personae.

My college French teacher once had a question on a test that I answered with talking about how nervous I get during tests. She was surprised and told me "You seem so calm all the time."

I can explain it in astrological terms. I have an Aries Rising Sign, so my public appearance is fiery. I have a Gemini Sun Sign and I'm very chatty. Much of the rest of my chart is Earth and Water signs.

That quieter side gets missed and I don't know why people miss it. I took eighteen months off from Hacker News to assure Jack I wouldn't intentionally hurt him and would go to some trouble to not unintentionallyhurt him. 

Yet most of the time, my silence goes unheard, though there is the occasional exception. And at sixty years of age, having done a ton of therapy to sort my baggage etc etc, planet earth still seems unwilling to give me a socially acceptable way to initiate while simultaneously demanding it and I wish the other 8 billion people would get their act together already.