Agency, coercion, consent and shades of grey

I realised, as I wrote about prostitution yesterday, that I didn't have the words I needed to say what I was trying to say. I was making too few words do too much work. In particular I found it very difficult communicate what I meant about coercion and non-consent.

I don't think you can have shades of consent. I think there are different kinds of coercion and really like Biting Beever's post on the continuum between rape and sex . But I think even the tiniest bit of coercion makes sex non-consensual (I'm sure if I knew more about chemistry I'd have the perfect metaphor, some solution that as soon as it gets drop of anything else in it isn't that solution anymore? I don't know - but you get the picture). I'm really uncomfortable talking about degrees of non-consent, because it quickly becomes a case of people judging which women's experiences were worse.

But yesterday I wasn't talking about women's experience. I wasn't arguing that all women experience prostitution as coercive, I was analysing prostitution on a structural level. I should have made that distinction more clear. When you're talking structurally, rather than individually, it becomes much easier to talks about types of coercion, and levels of choice.

You can't give meaningful consent to anything, unless you can also say no. This is a pretty basic, and important feminist idea. I also think it's a continuum, the less people are able to say now the less they can meaningfully say yes. To give a trivial example in Form Two everyone in my sister's class got mini-skirts. My sister was not a mini-skirt girl, and she held out for a while. But, eventually she gave in and bought a mini-skirt and felt shit about herself for doing so. I'm sure there were girls in her class who loved the mini-skirts, who liked feeling cool and grown-up. But on a structural level I think it's important to analyse the pressure they were under to buy mini-skirts and if my sister couldn't say 'no' to a mini-skirt, then could anyone else say 'yes'?

To me, this isn't an argument about 'false consciousness'. I'm not saying that individual women are wrong to wear make-up, or to feel like they make a free choice to wear make-up. I'm saying when you take a step-up from that individual level it is possible to say structurally that a group of people are experiencing coercion to do a certain thing, even the members of that group who actually want to do that thing.

The vast majoirty of people don't have enough money to live on unless they work (or get some kind of government support). This means that a structural analysis of most monetary transactions would reveal that there is some level of coercion going on. As I said in my last post that doesn't mean that we can't like the things that we do for money - I love my job - but my individual feelings about my job doesn't change the fact that structurally people like me need jobs. If my job was terrible, if my boss was a bully (not that that ever happens in the union movment :cough:), my ability to leave would be severely limited by my need to eat. The same goes for prostitution, our need for money means that it is always coerced sex.

When it comes to the things we do for money most people have a choice about what work they do (and some people have far more choice than others). That's where our agency comes in - the fact that there is coercion present doesn't mean we have no free-will, just that the choices we can make are severely limited.