'No' Is a Woman's Most Powerful Word - Bloomberg View

'No' Is a Woman's Most Powerful Word - Bloomberg View

Whether or not "no means no" might have been adequate to prevent the problems of date rapes behind the sock hop, it was not adequate to all the difficulties we faced. My generation drank more than our mothers had, so that women were more frequently incapable of saying no, or much of anything else. There were no parietal rules to keep us out of each other's rooms, or force us to come home at an early hour. Nor could we fall back on "nice girls don't"; we had to refuse this specific man each time, not on the grounds that some external force was stopping us, but because we simply didn't want to have sex with him. That's an uncomfortable conversation, and modern though we may be, most of us still hated uncomfortable conversations, especially if we'd had a few and just wanted to go to sleep.

I'm not calling for a return to single-sex dorms, curfew rules, and the presumption that "nice girls don't." I'm just pointing out that these things gave our mothers an easy way to say "no" that didn't have to be explained or defended, and wouldn't be taken as a specific rejection of this person right in front of you. We were chanting a slogan designed for a world that no longer existed. In the world where we lived, it required an assertiveness and a confident self-knowledge that a lot of 19-year-old girls found hard to muster. It required actions we weren't always willing to take, like loudly saying "no," and leaving if he persisted. In other words, it left us vulnerable, though not in the same way that our mothers had been.

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I understand what Dominus is trying to do, but I don't think it will work. Twenty-five years after I registered for college, we're still searching for an alternative to the stark simplicity of "No." And unfortunately, there's just no substitute. If you want to "teach men not to rape" -- a formulation that floated around the Internet a lot in the days after the Rolling Stone story was published -- then you need to give them a rule that can be clearly articulated, and followed even if you've had a few.

That's why "no means no" worked so well, even if it wasn't perfect. It's a heuristic that even a guy who's been sucking at the end of a three-story beer funnel can remember and put into practice. The rule obviously needed some refinement, by adding other equally clear rules -- like "if she's stumbling drunk or vomiting, just pretend she said no, because she's not legally capable of consent." But the basic idea, of listening to what the woman is saying, not some super-secret countersignals you might think she is sending, is exactly the sort of rule that we need in the often-confusing, choose-your-own-adventure world of modern sexual mores.

Compare that with "we're in the red zone." What does that mean? It seems to me that a guy can take this one of two ways: either as "no," or as something less than "no," something which means that there's still hope and he should consider asking again in 15 minutes. If it means "less than no, but maybe more than yes," then we haven't fixed things; we've just added another layer of confusion.

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But even a good rule needs good women to make it work: proud of our decisiveness, confident in our right to self-determination, courageous enough to bear the awkwardness of disappointing those who badly want what we don't want to give. Women need to learn "no" not just to protect themselves from aggressive men in the bedroom, but also to make themselves more powerful in the world outside. We need to embrace "no" in all areas of life, and teach men to expect to hear it from us more often. We need to insist on our own right to have opinions about everything, and to have our opinions count for just as much as a man's do.

So we need to tell men "no means no," and that fierce punishment will follow any violation of this simple rule. But we women also need to tell them "I mean no," not "we're in the red zone" or "I shouldn't -- I have an early class tomorrow." Most important, however, is what we need to tell women: that the power of "no" is their inalienable birthright, and that those who are given such great gifts have an obligation to use them.