TL:DR nuance, personal accounts as a victim, and a call for better consent education, better communication of misunderstandings in all aspects of life, and a shift towards an attitude of restorative justice

I get that, and yeah I’m a woman who has been violated in such ways. Once by someone who I had slept with many times, but we were drifting apart as I met my wife and it was easier to have sex than to have the uncomfortable conversation I would’ve had to have had I given and held a firm no. That and a far less ambiguous incident between them and a friend of mine were both tied to their lack of emotional regulation from BPD. I definitely don’t think that person should face consequences for anything they’ve done to me, even if I would probably advise my younger self not to get involved with them in the first place, and absolutely to have the fight instead of the sex.

I also have another incident with a woman (who also had BPD) who kept negotiating away every no I gave, especially the ones that contained reasons (turns out it’s really hard to say “your face and personality are both very unattractive to me”). That one was much more obvious and serious to the point that by the time I was able to break away I was having nightmares of her. It was absolutely a form of violation and had we been in college together or something I would have deserved protection from having to interact with her, even if I personally don’t know if I think she should be arrested for it.

Things like these are within the blurry part of the bad side of the line, and in many ways can be contrasted to the “fully enthusiastic and everyone is fully intoxicated” sex which is potentially in the blurry part of the good side of the line though if I am a firm believer in one’s right to get down while drunk/high. Sex is a messy topic and it often involves people being young and not displaying great judgment and having big feelings. Hell, I’ve even had sex where there was pain and regret through no fault of anyone.

I think we do need to be teaching that this all is messy, but we also need to be teaching how to ask for consent in a way that’s appropriate as well as teaching everyone the confidence to say no even if it means being a buzzkill or ruining someone’s mood or whatever else. I was taught abstinence only sex ed, and that didn’t prepare me for the “hey, I’m having a great time doing x, but you seem to be reaching for y, but I’m not up for it right now” type conversation or for people trying to pressure me because I keep blunting my "no"s to avoid hurting their feelings, especially with weaponized self depreciation. And with this some basic emotional regulation techniques would be good to teach people.

But yeah I get that young people are often bad at seeing the fact that communication that had seemed clear to everyone resulted in a miscommunication and I find that in all aspects of life that’s something we culturally need to work on being better about noticing when it becomes visible and starting a non-judgemental conversation to clear things up.

And all this with the fact that some people are going to keep going right up to the line, some people are going to not care about acting in good faith. Some people will pretend to be naive.

A carcereal attitude will assume all naivete malicious, and all grey areas blacker than the night. It will see my first story and aim to punish rather than to solve the problem. I think when we talk about consent we can easily fall into a carceral mindset. Especially when society encourages us to think that way about sex crimes and yet clearly is more concerned with using that attitude to reinforce existing hierarchies than to pursue justice or help victims.

This carceral mindset also leads to underreporting because most people don’t want to respond to what felt like a single minor violation with what feels like disproportionate force. This can be especially true when the violator is marginalized in a way that’s associated with disproportionate response or presumption of guilt in sexual violation (racialized people and transfeminized people especially) or when the appropriate response feels like it should be mental health based (the first person who hurt me just needed to continue DBT, the second probably should be kept away from society until she can get far enough along in some form of BPD treatment, but treatment is needed). And that’s to say nothing of when the victim is marginalized in a way where they’re presumed sexually aggressive against the violator.

I’m a believer in an attitude of restorative justice. First do right by the victim in proportion to the severity, then try to work to help the other party not do anything like it again. When approached naively it can very easily fail to the aforementioned malicious people, but when we prevent our communities from overly relying on any one person and we remain aware of the reality that some people aren’t acting in good faith we can create systems that strive to find a balance and actually minimize harm and maximize happiness. And I’ve seen at the very least the beginnings of something like that in a kink community and I hope it works and spreads.

Sorry about the rambling. I’m tired as hell from the weekend and had some thoughts which snowballed.