No means no. Even when you're disabled. Especially when you're disabled.

[elettaria]

Louise Mensch turns out to be quite the interesting read. In her recent Guardian article trashing intersectionality, she thoughtfully provided a link to her series on What Men Want. As expected, I found many of her viewpoints highly problematic. Much of it was about how women should mould themselves to men's desires. Now, I've seen this

Comments

[ext_1130803]

This is an excellent and thorough post - thank you

[elettaria]

Sorry for the late reply, I somehow missed it. Great comment, and great post! People, go and read that post! And thank you for articulating the whole problem around the concept of "I can't have sex tonight" being a rejection.

[aoife_brown]

I never realised quite how much of this attitude was all around me when I was growing up. It's horrible and hurtful and makes good relationships for any gender or orientation harder to achieve. I was very lucky, however, with the way I found out that it wasn't necessarily true: I have had four serious boyfriends so far in my life, and every single one of them reacted positively to the fact that I'm not that interested in sex. This completely gobsmacked me, because I'd been conditioned to think that lack of sex in a relationship was a dealbreaker, and here were all four of the guys that I was interested in saying "Okay, I can work with that. I just want to be with *you*."

So yeah, this is just me commenting to say that not only are attitudes like Mensch's dangerous, they're also WRONG. There are so many awesome men out there, and assuming that they're only interested in sex and good looks does them so much diservice!

[elettaria]

Later note: Louise Mensch and the grotesque spectacle of white privilege. It seems she wasn't content with that awful "intersectional bollocks" article.