The Complicatedness of "Yes"

I've just (almost, really, only a page or two left) finished reading a chapter in 'Best Sex Writing 200' by Thomas Macaulay Millar - 'Toward a Performance Model of Sex'. It's awe inspiring to me, and raises deep questions about the nature of consent.

That aside, it also leads me to think more clearly about my own foibles around yes and no and "getting any". I've been troubled by this for a long time, maybe most of my life. It's not that I was somehow "raised a feminist" (hardly). Nor was it that I had some epiphany or early gf encounter that led me to the well. Rather, it seems to be a somehow acquired (gradually) process wherein I cannot accept the idea that I can "ask" without playing in to the awfulness of getting a "yes" through a subtle form of coercion, that the women I ask are somehow accommodating my interest. That repulses me. It repulses me primarily b/c I don't think *anyone* should be in the position of having to yield if they are not fully cogent of, fully accepting in themselves of, and fully in touch with, their *own* inner desires. Since I have realized how difficult it is for anyone - myself included - to be deeply in touch with those things, it more or less becomes an intractable problem: how can I possibly *expect* "yes" from another within whom the nascent seeds of any desire are still unfurling? Is it even possible to partake of something as intimate as the dance of sex with another person without risking that loss in one side or the other that capitulates need and desire to that of the other person? I dont yet have the answers to these questions. I just know that right now they are deeply disturbing to me. It feels as though I am somehow "taking away" from the other when I ask and get "yes".

"No", at the same time, is a different facet, harsh, painful, unyielding. True, I've heard "no" described as a way of being positive, of being good somehow and letting the other person know they have a certain freedom. All well and good, but it belies the deeper problem.

Enter Millar's commodity model of sex. We are steeped in a commodity culture. Everything we see, hear, touch, do, sleep, breath, feel, eat, say or do is built on this commodity model. Millar paints a picture of sex as performance using music as the central idea: a musician may elect to *collaborate* with other musicians, and in so requesting ("Would you like to collaborate on this piece?") moves far away from the commodity model. Looking at it in reverse, I imagine what it might be like if one musician asks another "So, how much to get you to play this piece with me?". Sad. If all musical rendering by more than a soloist were constructed this way, we'd all be the poorer. I doubt Lennon asked McCartney this on the threshold of "I am the Walrus". It seems unlikely that deeply felt music emerges from a simple cash transaction: "Will that be Visa or Mastercard?".

What emerges for me here is a different way of approaching my own terror around this. Instead of "would you like to fuck?" (seriously, I've never once actually asked that question but it serves the point here), I could instead ask "I would love the chance to collaborate with you in a sharing of the senses", leaving open ALL the possibilities that such enjoinments might allow. It leaves open all the choices, including "no" (which, interestingly now seems to be come something like "That kind of collaboration isn't possible for me now. I may get back to you if that changes. Thank you for asking me"). "Yes" now becomes an invitation to possibility, and no longer is rooted in "what's it worth to ya?".

Of course, this leaves wide open the larger problem of informing others - potential partners included - of this rather dramatic shift in perspective. After all, since 99% of the western industrialized world (and a distressingly high percentage, growing daily, of the lesser-industrialized world) is steeped in commodity exchange, how are we to cope with a shift in linguistic sensibility that draws not from an actual change in the language used, but rather the subtle shades of the same words which now must be taken on a totally different level? It's easy to take a step toward changing our *own* approach from "Fuck me now" to "Would you care to dance", but that presumes that, along with the conveyance of an inner desire to do *something*, the "other" to whom we are addressing our interest can both pick up (npi), reinterpret, and respond in kind to our beseechments. That's asking and expecting a lot. I would fully expect a lot of weird looks if I simply did this, sans warnings.

One place to begin is education. Certainly, there's a way to this in a shared group setting. That will help, but it's a small step.

I suppose the other obvious place to begin is in direct contact with existing partners with whom I enjoy this kind of sharing. Trying out this model shift, asking to collaborate instead of begging to fuck is an interesting variation on the usual paths to getting together. Certainly the element of surprise here won't, at least I don't think it will, suffer any risk to the existing bonds. The strength of what I have is not predicated on a secure channel of unvarying communication between us.

A side note might be in order here (though this is a book length possibility). Communications among H. sapiens is abysmally bad. For a species that somehow prides ourselves on the model of verbal communication, we are piss poor at it: warring, fighting, bitching, complaining, never getting the message through of what is really wanted or needed. It's appalling, really, when you think about. It's also miraculous, when you think about that, that we have survived as long as we have, despite the instruments fashioned to ensure the efficacy of our mutual destruction. Anyway....

Finally, the last place to test the waters, as it were, might be in ordinary, everyday life. A shift of our habitus. I think of work: what would changes there look like? How often is what I am called upon to do - and the number of face to face transactions (see? there it is - commodity) I actually do these days - something that can be quantified or boiled down to "what's it worth to ya?" or similar linguistic tropes? I imagine what it might be like to effect a transaction in the supermarket, blithely ignoring the non-transactional part (that's the part where I take the food and give them money) of the exchange with the cashier and try and supplant the usual "I'm here to buy shit" with something more along the lines of "how can I collaborate with you [the cashier] to fulfill this process?". Complicated.

So, yes, "yes" is devilishly complicated. Getting there, at any level, anywhere, is a complex and bedeviled series of (mis)steps. It's pre-damaged by an almost innate INability to communicate. "No" is easy. It's very harshness can be a measure of strength. I recall - albeit vaguely - that book of maybe a decade ago, "Getting to Yes", something all about business and how to get to an agreement that both parties like. I haven't seen it in a while. IT leads me to wonder how we got where we are now, and why asking another to share a deeper part of who we are is sadly relegated to "Fuck me for a dollar" and not "share with me some part of you that you love, and I will give it back".