badgerbag

This paper, Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal(link to a pdf) is about conversational analysis and patterns of refusal, explaining how people commonly understand the many ways to say "no", brilliantly applied to anti-rape education. It's worth reading this entire paper and thinking about the politics of the advice we give (and maybe follow.) I am still a fan of practicing the direct "no", yet this makes so much sense! There have got to be some studies of whether the direct "no" is used more by people with higher amounts of privilege (which I think is the case.) Who is comfortable saying "no" to whom, more directly, more often, without palliatives or explanation? that's the only bit left out of this paper and I bet there have been plenty of studies about that very thing. There are also clearly lots of cultural differences in how people are supposed to ask or implicitly ask.... or avoid asking questions directly that might make the other person have to directly refuse. Food for thought.

Here is a quote from a bit near the end, where they have the heart of the article.

In the present study, CA has made clear that there are normatively understood ways of doing refusals which are generally understood to be refusals, and consequently we believe that there is no reason why feminists concerned about sexual coercion should respond to men’s allegations of their ‘ambiguity’ by taking upon ourselves the task of inventing new ways of doing refusals. As feminists, we have allowed men (disingenuously claiming not to understand normative conversational conventions) to set the agenda, such that we have accepted the need to educate women to produce refusals which men cannot claim to have ‘misunderstood’. This, in turn, has led only to an escalation of men’s claims to have ‘misunderstood’, to be ‘misunderstood’, and, in general, to be ‘ignorant’ about women’s (allegedly different and special) ways of communicating. Men’s self-interested capacity for ‘misunderstanding’ will always outstrip women’s earnest attempts to clarify and explain.