I love an unlikely pairing. One of my favorite things is when two seemingly unrelated, utterly different books that I’m reading end up connecting in unexpected ways. Last week, I wrote a little bit about Girlhood, by Melissa Febos, and about some of my frustrations with it, and as the day went on, I realized that the other book I had just finished, Against Better Judgment: Irrational Action and Literary Invention in the Long Eighteenth Century, by Thomas Salem Manganaro, was lighting up some of the things that I was wrestling with in Girlhood, and my brain has been humming happily ever since.
Against Better Judgment is a great book; an extremely pleasurable deep dive into one of my favorite philosophical problems, which it taught me the name for: akrasia. Akrasia is acting against your best judgment — doing a thing even though you know it’s not the right thing to do. Not just, doing a thing that you know is immoral, but something more complex than that — doing a thing seemingly against your own will. Like, I tell myself that I want to go see this movie, because it looks really good and I love supporting my local arthouse cinema, and it’s related to something I’m teaching, and it’s just a great thing to do for a variety of reasons, but then it’s time to go and I…don’t, I surf the internet instead. You are probably thinking, Kasia, you were probably just tired! Or, You clearly didn’t want to see the movie that much! Or, The addictive properties of social media are to blame! But no, I insist, I wasn’t tired, and I did want to see the movie, and I am perfectly capable of getting off of social media thankyouverymuch. I just didn’t do it. I can’t explain why.
Manganaro takes us through just how difficult it is to accept that fundamental irrationality. We tend, instead, to resort to various forms of explanation or justification. We seek out underlying causes, or we shift to assigning moral blame. He argues, further, that the eighteenth century is where this problem emerges with particular force, and where we see various narrative techniques develop to try to represent it, which is all very compelling, but I’m not going to go into that part now — get yourself a copy of the book. The point is, his lucid account of the issue made me realize that part of what’s going on in Girlhood is that Febos is struggling with the narrative problems that akrasia poses.
Over and over she tells us that she does all kinds of things that are unpleasant and harmful and that she, on some level, does not want to do, and yet, she does them. “We all know the allure of the reluctant lover. But what of our own divided hearts? My ambivalence tormented and compelled me,” (91) she writes, describing how she refused to confide in her mother, though she wanted to, and it hurt her not to. She writes about her own behavior as self-destructive, and though she makes mention of addiction, compulsion, and other familiar models of accounting for the hijacking of the will, she is careful, I think, not to defer to them — to claim some responsibility, and agency.
The most vivid example of this, and the one that the text circles back to repeatedly, is the matter of unwanted sexual contact. She certainly places some burden of responsibility on the various men and boys involved, but she also seems determined to understand her own role, and especially, her lack of refusal. The first essay in the book is about her relationship, at the age of 11, with a boy who tormented her. “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think you could take it,” he tells her. “It’s not because I don’t like you. I do.” (22) He pursues her, obliquely, then directly, and, as she puts it, she lets him. When they have an encounter — what words do we have for such an event? — in the woods, she says, “I let him. It was a thing I had done many times before, or let be done to me. This time it filled me with a terrible sadness.” (23) In another essay, describing another encounter, and then many encounters, similarly unpleasant, she says
“They told us to say no to so many things in school, but never how. My father insisted that boys were not to be trusted under any circumstances. My parents encouraged me to respect my body, to protect it. But what did that mean? For better or for worse, I’ve rarely been capable of summoning respect simply because I was told to. Sometimes the things I did felt like a kind of protection.” (40-41).
You see here, this effort to try to understand how these things happened. There is some gesture towards causal explanation — they never told us how to say no — but still, there is a fundamental problem of will at work; the lack of will to resist. How to account for it?
I regularly teach Kristen Roupenian’s short story, “Cat Person,” because, among other things, it is a vivid illustration of a moment where a woman goes along with a sexual encounter that she doesn’t want to be having, and even tries to make herself enjoy it. My students, trained in affirmative consent, are quick to note that she is not repeatedly queried as to whether she wants to proceed, which is true, and some suggest that she feels unable to refuse because he might not allow her to (something Febos also discusses — the seemingly paradoxical but unfortunately very rational notion that it is preferable to verbally consent to something you don’t want then to refuse and be forced), but I think the story is careful to specify that this is not the case, and that to describe what is at work here in a much more fine-grained and mundane way:
Looking at him like that, so awkwardly bent, his belly thick and soft and covered with hair, Margot recoiled. But the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon. It wasn’t that she was scared he would try to force her to do something against her will but that insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back. (Cat Person)
This is something like a causal explanation — the social pressure, the desire not to appear capricious, is the stronger motivating factor. And this is the kind of causal explanation that many accounts of unwanted sexual contact defer to, that of women’s socialization — Febos lands in a similar place in her essay on cuddle parties. “‘No,’ I said, and my mouth involuntarily stretched into a smile, as if I needed to soften the refusal. My face grew hot, and I found myself blinking quickly. Was it really so hard for me to give an anticipated no?” (102) Later, when she is cuddling with someone she doesn’t want to cuddle with: “I wondered how long I needed to remain in this position to avoid seeming rude.” (103). When we talk about rape culture, this is part of what we mean — all of the myriad ways in which women are conditioned to passively accept a man’s touch (and the many ways in which men are socialized to see women’s bodies as available for their desire). It is important to teach women to say no, to practice saying no, to become comfortable saying no.
But there’s more to it than that I always assign the first chapter of Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again after “Cat Person,” because it so clearly illuminates why the idea of affirmative consent is not a sufficient protection against unwanted sexual contact, and how it actually puts a lot of pressure on people to know what they want and clearly state it. Part of the insistence on shifting to a notion of affirmative consent is to attempt to create more opportunities to say no, and to acknowledge that the lack of no does not mean yes. Febos notes her own refusal to refer to her experiences as assault, or rape — “I knew women who had experienced sexual trauma, and what I had experienced did not compare to what they had survived ” (112) — and cites an essay by Jessica Valenti about a similar phenomenon. This is one facet of the problem. But another is that it is not always clear, what you want, and what you don’t. Desire, Katherine Angel argues, is much murkier than notions of affirmative consent suggest — fluctuating, uncertain, responsive. A crucial point here is that sex can be bad even when it is consensual (and that is a political problem; read the book for more on that); a curious phenomenon I’ve observed in my classes is that many of my students have no way of understanding bad sex as being anything other than non-consensual. There is a notion that if both people are willing and excited, sex will be good! Would that it were so!
And this point bring us back to the problem of akrasia. Namely, how it shows up in the form of participating in something that you don’t really want to engage in, and aren’t enjoying. Let me be very clear: there are very good reasons that lead us to seek out causal explanations for unwanted sexual contact, or narrativize them in moral ways. I want to be very explicit about that! And in some cases, the causal and moral aspects are quite central and it is urgently important to state them explicitly.
But I think that it might also be helpful to recognize that sometimes, things aren’t so clear, and that the illusion of a causal narrative always being available can have unexpectedly negative effects — to tell young women that they are socialized into passivity can make them feel fatalistic and reinforce that passivity. To suggest to them that they can and should know what they want and state it clearly can make them feel ashamed or guilty when they don’t know. And because there is already so much shame surrounding sex, there’s an unfortunate way that a negative experience can only be comprehended as a violation, and a trauma, which is further compounded by a feeling of having been responsible for it by not refusing.
I guess what I’m getting at is that sometimes, we have sexual encounters that we don’t particularly want, but that we have semi-willingly participated in. And all of the ways of explaining why we have done so will tend to reinforce our feeling of exploitation or abuse, to cohere into a form of abjection. And I want there to be another way to describe it. More varieties of narrative about bad sex! Not that all those other ways of telling these stories, with their causal or moral features, are wrong — all too often, they are right. And I do recognize that probably, we simply cannot make room, at the moment, for akrasia as an intellectual resource in understanding some forms of bad sex because we are still so far from holding people who cause sexual harm responsible. As I think about that more, it makes me want to delete everything I’ve written…
So I will conclude on a much more narrow and specific note, which is that I realize, now, that part of what gives Girlhood its particular energy is that Febos often doesn’t actually understand why she did, or does, the things she does, and that she instinctively resists many of the causal explanations or moral judgments that would typically attach to stories like hers. It makes me want to go back and re-read her book and consider more carefully how akrasia shapes the narrative; what techniques emerge to represent it. I’d love to write that essay someday…
But for now, perhaps this post can also serve as a ringing endorsement for Thomas Salem Manganaro’s terrific book, as a case-study in how it inspires all kinds of further thinking!
Kasia Reads 