1. once upon a time i was at an authentic relating event where some of the women became upset at a man there - let's call him raul - for (affectionately) touching people without asking for explicit verbal consent first. the "worst" thing he did was pat a woman on the leg
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the local culture there was big on verbal consent for touch. i, on the other hand, said quite clearly when we discussed this that i loved it when raul touched *me* without asking first; he gave me hugs and stuff and it made me feel really warm and loved in a brotherly way
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the women (not the woman he touched, other women) were not happy about this, they were filled with righteous indignation, at one point it got so bad raul was packing up to leave the event early and he was very sad
then we had one last conversation about it as a group
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raul said he came from a more affectionate culture, and when he patted the woman on the leg she was dealing with difficult feelings (about me, as it happens) and he was trying to offer her support wrt that; he felt sad that this positive intent on his part was being missed
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i don't have clear memories of what happened next but iirc some of the women explained more about sexual harassment and assault etc. and at some point raul settled on "okay, i think i get it, i will ask consent before touching the *women*"
then two men spoke up
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one of them insisted that no, consent wasn't something that was just important when interacting with women, it was important for everyone, including men
i don't remember what raul said in response but basically he didn't understand
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the second man, who will forever be a hero to me for this moment, told a (brief) story about a time he had been nonconsensually touched in a sexual way by a man
raul's face changed. you could see it click for him right there. "oh. oh shit"
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this was the second time we were talking about this as a group, and we needed to talk about it this long in order to actually understand what was happening
raul was not acting out of malice. he *genuinely did not understand*, and what helped him understand was *a story*
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authentic relating people talk about "getting someone's world"; understanding what a person's experience is like, what it's like to be them
an abstract claim about consent didn't help raul get anyone's world here. but a story did. and through watching that we got raul's world
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raul came to understand, at the story level, at least a little bit, what it was like to be a person who cared about consent for touch; and in seeing that understanding dawn on raul we came to understand what it was like to be him not understanding that
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watching this whole situation play out gave me a great deal of hope for humanity. i got to watch a misunderstanding resolve itself in real time and turn into an opportunity for everyone involved to understand each other better
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now, does this story have any direct relevance to the Current Subject of Discourse? i have no idea, because nobody's shared concrete details publicly that i know of. that's what happens when you talk about generalities instead of specifics
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i don’t remember the details but it was something along the lines of he paid her way through school and then she cheated on him
this kind of shit is happening all the time. people get mad about generalities when they’re actually heartbroken about specifics
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part 2 here
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2. brent, the guy who ran the mini-cult i was in inside the rationalists, got kicked out of the rationality community, but it wasn't because of the cult. it was because a sexual assault accusation was levied against him anonymously in a medium post
twitter.com/micro_solid/st
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