Member-only story
How We Tried and Failed to Fix Consent in Our Community.
And why it was worth it.
I am very proud of a program that failed.
Shortly before #MeToo became a hashtag, I was part of a subculture of performers and hobbyists for a particular kind of Japanese-inspired art. Think of it as a cross between an anime convention and Cirque du Soleil.
Thing was, we had a problem — the same problem anime conventions and blues dance groups and hot yoga schools and really, every subculture has: a lot of people, especially men, didn’t understand consent.
There were problems of coercion, there was harassment, there was bias against believing the women who reported the incidents. There was what I called the “Law & Order” mentality — everyone wanted to put things into a dramatic narrative of “a crime has been committed; the perpetrators must be brought to justice!”
Most of all, like most of the people who resisted the truth the #MeToo movement revealed, they wanted to pretend that the problem was “a few bad apples” rather than a fundamental flaw in how we model consent in our culture.
They wanted it to be simple — “consent is like tea” was one effective but problematic meme. Unfortunately, as any tea aficionado can tell you, tea is anything but simple: it’s personal, it’s nuanced…
