Wednesday, December 7, 2022 // The Statement — 4
Let’s talk date parties, pseudo-consent
and transactional sex
“He tried to kiss me like
eight times,” my friend said
as she casually took a sip from
her iced coffee — her mascara
from the night
before
smudged
un-
der her eyes.
“He did
what?” I
asked.
“I kept telling him it
wouldn’t be a good idea, but he
was so drunk he just kept lean-
ing in. It was crazy,” she chuck-
led uncomfortably, as if remem-
bering an off-color joke.
Our group of friends sat
around the living room, dishev-
eled and numbingly hungover.
When we each took our turn in
the sacred “morning debrief,” I
was appalled at the stories com-
ing from each one of my girl
friends after the fraternity date
party we attended the night
before.
A lot of my friends’
testimonies seemed to
carry a similar theme:
One of pseudo-con-
sent, with many of
their male dates be-
having under the im-
pression that a date
party invite meant
implicit consent, con-
sent that lasted all night
and expired at sunrise.
That all their nights would
end in an inevitable, albeit
not
explicitly-consensual
hookup.
“You know that’s not okay,
right?” I inquired wearily.
Intrinsically, we all knew
this behavior was not okay, but
that didn’t stop the stories from
the night before to be told with a
casual lightness — with us all too
afraid to address the underlying
level of discomfort. With each
story of one of my friends being
groped or continually hit on by
her date, I became increasingly
disgusted. I began to wonder
why this was coming up now.
My friends and I go out to
bars and parties on a regular ba-
sis without having to withstand
such blatant lack of respect for
our bodies. There was some-
thing about this outing — The
Date Party — that made the no-
tion of consent feel different.
Date parties are a common
occurrence on college cam-
puses in many student organiza-
tions. While they have origins
in college Greek Life communi-
ties, they also occur frequently
in professional fraternities and
other organizations, like pre-
law frats, pre-health frats and
other university clubs.
LSA Sophomore Jenna
Al-Nouri has experience with
date parties as a member of both
a social sorority and a profes-
sional
pre-health
fraternity.
Thankfully, Al-Nouri hasn’t
had a date party experience in
which a date has pressured her
into feeling like hooking up was
the only way to end the night.
But, she is still aware that this
culture exists. She reminisced
on a time when a male friend of
hers stated that he “wanted to
bring a date that he could hook
up with.”
Al-Nouri recognizes the
disrespect toward a woman’s
boundaries that is often height-
ened around date party season
and has come up with ways to
combat this negativity while still
preserving the fun of the event.
“I made a rule that I will
only bring a best friend that’s a
girl because I know she will be
chill,” Al-Nouri shared. “I have
a lot more fun when I bring a
friend.”
Read more at MichiganDaily.com
2012
2022
Sex or scripture?
The Madonna-Whore complex
Sex, in a sense, has become
one of the most commercialized
phenomena of our evolution-
ary biology. Evolving for over 2
billion years, the first archaeo-
logical record of penetrative
intercourse dates to 385 million
years ago between prehistoric
fish named Microbrachius dicki
(giggle now if you need to).
Since the time of Mycenae
Greece, however, sex has been
streamlined into embodying the
more sociocultural aspects of
our societies, with the biological
effects of pregnancy and disease
being redefined as a simple and
banal prologue to the complex
and emotionally-enriching pro-
cesses of sexual intimacy.
Often the source of drama
and action in art as much as in
real life, sex has come to define
humanity and its transience,
influencing political beliefs and
policy, cultural and structural
development of societies and
our self-identity and relation-
ships. The psychology of sex, in
a way, supersedes its physicality
because the meaning behind the
act distorts our cultural values
more so than physical penetra-
tion ever could.
The most notable contribu-
tions to our contemporary val-
ues of sex stem from the works
of
psychoanalyst
Sigmund
Freud, who rose to prominence
for his outlandish (and often
correct) hypotheses about sex.
Of the most striking — and
trust me, there’s a lot — notions
is the foundation and defini-
tion of the Madonna-Whore
complex. The term came about
when the shifty, yet often spot-
on, psychoanalyst had observed
a strange dichotomy in his male
patients, who came to him com-
plaining that they didn’t feel any
sexual desires for their wives as
they did for prostitutes.
Mostly applicable to het-
eronormative ideals of sex, this
complex, as defined by Freud, is
the black-and-white splitting of
female partners into two groups:
the chaste and virtuous Madon-
na, and the immoral and promis-
cuous Whore. Freud illustrated
the paradoxical nature of this
phenomenon by explaining that
“where men love, they have no
desire and where they desire,
they cannot love.” This theory
turns respect and attraction into
mutually exclusive traits, with
tumultuous implications in the
scope of sexual dynamics.
What drew me in about
this complex was the absurdity
of this subconscious rationale,
how the male-centered fallacy
views a woman’s modesty as a
determinant of the respect she
is owed, and the implication that
a woman who has liberated
herself from the anxiety of
social scrutiny ought to be
ousted from the societal
hierarchy.
Design by Serena Shen
Design by Serena Shen
A DECADE OF SEX
VALERIJA MALASHEVICH
Statement Correspondent
ELLA KOPELMAN
Statement Columnist
Read more at MichiganDaily.com
Design by Serena Shen