Most of the article, I can understand and get behind.
But the middle part (about sex) just completely loses me.
It’s complex and confusing enough that I don’t know if there’s just one way of interpreting what he’s saying. I think he means something like: saying sexual harassment is wrong because women don’t want to be sexually harassed is problematic because some women do have sexual fantasies about being harassed. So, we should not understand sexual harassments wrongness in those terms. He doesn’t say in what terms we ought to define harassment though, so that’s probably where the confusion lies. He’s only criticizing not offering an alternative.
I dont think he’s talking about sexual harassment, I think the subject is about courtship where a man is pursuing a woman. He’s saying the liberal feminist emphasis on consent as either a yes or no places places pressure on women to make a decision when often the real answer is ‘I dont know.’
This is to the advantage of men with bad intentions imo. not neccesarily violent intentions, but in a context where women are told they must be clear about yes/no after a few dates, it’s fairly easy for a man to put on an act where he pretends to have the same life goals and values as the woman he’s pursuing only to show her his real personality 3 months into a relationship.
Okay, that makes a kind of sense. But like, just because some women sometimes have fantasies about sexual harassment doesn’t mean we diminish them or their seriousness for everyone else? Like, isn’t part of the appeal of such kinks is their taboo nature, meaning we already agree that they are, in a sense, wrong? I just don’t know what Zizek wants to say here…
Nah, he’s saying that modern progressive women are expected to “know what they want” the same way men do and that conflicts with how women generally experience sexuality.
