Consent

A week or so ago, some acquaintance on facebook posted this video from Parenting Gently. Despite the fact that I am not a parent and have no real interest in contemporary parenting (gentle or otherwise), the title of the video intrigued me enough to get me to click through: "4 Ways Parents Teach Kids That Consent Doesn't Matter."

Because it's the start of the school year, and I have two classes full of college freshmen, I've been thinking about anti-rape education a lot lately. I did a brief reminder (with handouts from the internet!) about what Consent means - the most important reminder, I think, is that being asleep/being drunk/being passed out does not mean you are consenting. And that maybe if your person is really drunk, even if they are consenting, they might not really mean it. So use some intelligence.

It struck me as rather awful that at age 18 or 19, these students might need some information about what consent actually means, but then i realized that we don't talk about it very much until then, and it's almost always in the context of rape. The Parenting Gently video makes it really clear that there are ways we, as adults, model consent/disregard of nonconsent - and that that carries over into all aspects of life, including sex and sexual coercion.

Parenting Gently's 4 ways that adults teach kids that consent does matter are:
*Tickling & Rough-house Play
*Contradicting Their Feelings
*Forced Affection
*Respect For Elders

You can watch her extremely concise and insightful discussion of each of these, but I was particularly struck by what she says about Tickling/Roughhouse Play: If you're tickling a kid and they say no (even if it seems like a playful no), stop immediately. That way, they learn that saying NO results in a behavior ending, but it ALSO shows them that the correct response when someone says No or Stop is to stop what you're doing. It works both ways. It models the effectiveness of saying NO, it gives power to the kid, and it also shows what you do when someone doesn't like what you're doing to them.

A couple of days after watching this video, which I've been turning over in my mind since the initial viewing, I checked my much-neglected tumblr stream. For some obviously masochistic reason, I still follow "Reasons my son is crying," and this was near the top of my tumblr stream.  
And it made my blood boil, especially in the context of the Parenting Gently consent video.
The tumblr is a photo of a little girl, maybe 3 years old?, sitting on the floor in a blue dress, crying.  the caption: "She asked Daddy not to look at her.  He didn’t listen."

I think steam probably came out my ears I was so angry. Who knows why she asked daddy not to look at her? But when a girl asks a man not to look at her, "he didn't listen" is not the best response. And yes, it's her dad, and yes, she's only 2 or 3, and yes, it was probably all quite silly anyway. But who knows? Who knows what was going on in her mind when she asked her dad not to look at her? Maybe she had a really good reason for it. She's clearly in a safe, secure location - looks like she's sitting on a kitchen floor - so it's not like her dad needs to keep an eye on her for safety reasons. We don't know who took the picture, but if it was dad, I'm even angrier - imagine, not only ignoring your daughter's request not to look at her but PHOTOGRAPHING her in that moment!
I do think my reaction is influenced by the gender dynamics there as well as the age dynamics. Girls are so looked-at, their whole lives, and sometimes you just don't want to be on stage. Laura Mulvey, fetishistic scopophilia, etc. Men are taught to look at women, their whole lives, and that they have every right to look at women when and how they want. And even if the woman is a three year old girl, and the man is her own father, it's still a problem. I won't even go into any of the stats about child sex abuse and likelihood of family perpetrators. I don't know anything at all about the situation being reported in the tumblr other than what I see and read. I don't do hysteria over child molestation, either, for a variety of reasons, but I also see no reason to pretend that no father has ever molested or been sexually inappropriate towards a daughter. It is a Thing. You can't say "but it's just her dad," as if that, in every single case, is an automatic exculpatory statement.

Sometimes you just don't want to be looked at, and when there's no pragmatic reason that supervision is necessary, no one *should* look at you if you ask them not to.

Taking Parenting Gently as a guide, fast-forward this moment by about 16 years. Girl, age 18 or 19, asks Boy not to look at her (for whatever reason; maybe she's changing, maybe she's taking off a layer of clothing and doesn't want her shirt to pull up in view of him, maybe she's feeling shy, maybe he's making her feel creepy, maybe he's looking at her in a disturbing way, who knows). Boy ignores request; in fact, Boy takes out his phone and takes a picture of Girl.

And suddenly we're in a disturbing coercive situation where Girl's right to be not-looked-at is violated. Girl has been set up for this situation by parental disregard of consent/nonconsent. Maybe Boy has been similarly set up - say, by the "contradicting of feelings" item on Parenting Gently's list. Girl says "Don't look, I'm feeling shy," and Boy thinks "Oh, you're not really shy, you're just being silly/self-conscious/a tease."

I know a lot of people would think this is a huge leap to make, and maybe it is. But I somehow don't think so. Ignoring children's actual feelings and desires - for instance, to not be looked at - tells them, as humans, that it's okay to ignore people's actual feelings, and that their own feelings and desires aren't legitimate. If we're lucky, we re-educate them at some point down the line to have self-respect and to know that their emotions are legitimate and should be respected, etc etc. But why not start that training from the very beginning? Why not say "Your feelings should be respected, and you should also respect other people's feelings"?
That sounds very Mister Rogers-y, not surprisingly of course, but I think it's also true and important. Kids, as much as adults, are human beings with thoughts and feelings and wishes. We don't get to ignore them, make fun of them, trample over them, or contradict them just because we're older (see item 4 in the video: respecting your elders). Doing those things suggests that those behaviors are okay in adults, and they aren't. Doing those things suggests that your resistance/refusal is going to be ignored.
These are not behaviors we want to encourage amongst people in our society - or they shouldn't be.
Consent matters, and it matters from the very earliest imaginable moments.

my dreadful mixed feelings over reasons my son is crying tumblr

 So there's this tumblr called 'reasons my son is crying.' It somehow exploded everywhere, apparently in the last 48 hours, because suddenly it's all over the place. Of course I went and read it, and was delighted and amused and followed it on my tumblr page. And then this morning:

reasonsmysoniscrying:

We mic’ed him up for Good Morning America.

And BAM just like that I suddenly feel less pleased with this tumblr. I felt/feel a little weird when people use their young children in such a public way - this kid is too young, really, to consent with full knowledge of what he’s consenting to, but at least on the internet there’s a (very thin) layer between the Kid and the Audience. The Kid’s “performance” (i.e., crying) happens ‘offstage,’ so to speak - there’s no microphone, no other people intervening or influencing, it’s just the not-so-much-privacy of his own family and their own camera. but when you add in things like a live studio audience, a crew, interviewers, a set - then you’ve created an artificial and highly manipulated and manipulative arena, and the Kid is On Stage and being used by multiple adults. It turns a mostly-private emotional reaction into a public performance, and performances aren't about the performer so much as they are about the audience, especially, I think, when the performer is a kid (cf. Shirley Temple, every child on 'Toddlers & Tiaras,' etc).

The premise of ‘reasons my son is crying’ is kind of interesting in addition to being funny - I don’t find it “cute” at all, but I do like the way it records the incredible frustrations of being small and quasi-helpless and inexperienced/untutored in the world. To us, maybe it’s funny that a kid would cry because he can’t run naked into Times Square, but the Kid presumably doesn’t know why he’s dreaming the impossible dream there.

I often tell my students that being a little kid is hard - the world isn’t sized for you, you have very little actual freedom and autonomy, you can’t pour your own juice or milk, there are monsters under the bed. You don’t know yet that your hand will get burned if you touch the stove when it’s on. You learn everything the hard way, or experience a world of what appear to be irrational restrictions. It’s this sense of difficulty that ‘reasons my son is crying’ captures that I like.
But I don’t like converting that into a sideshow - it’s already perilously close to being reproachably exploitative. I mean, would YOU want someone taking a photo every time you cried or felt frustrated, and posting it on tumblr for all the world to see? What if you couldn’t say no? what if you couldn’t say yes, either?
I am always, constantly suspicious of performing/trick children, and more suspicious of them in the age of “reality” media, where a kid might not even know or realize he’s being turned into a performer. And so this tumblr - and its transformation into a viral! media! sensation! meme! - makes me uncomfortable now.
[And that doesn’t even begin to address the fact that i suspect you’d see a VERRRRY different public reaction if the evidently continually crying child wasn’t white.]

I should say that I don't think this Kid's parent(s) are being neglectful or abusive or even truly exploitative. I think the original idea is actually quite clever, and I like that you (or I) can read the "reasons" in multiple registers. I'm not especially concerned that this Kid evidently cries constantly. I do think we as a culture are way too quick to embrace emotion-as-spectacle/entertainment, and I think we absolutely make a hash out of the way we treat child performers. I also think we use children, in our culture, in all kinds of ways that aren't really about the kid, or aren't in the kid's best interest. Even more than that, I think it's really easy to turn your kid into a vehicle for money and/or fame - again, the story of virtually every child star demonstrates this - and in this modern world, I can't think of a better example than the Gosselins, who originally appeared in a one-off TLC show about quintuplets and sextuplets. Easy to see how you could agree to doing this, a kind of documentary, and get paid a bit - with eight kids, who wouldn't need the extra cash? And then the reality show - you think, 'great, we can set up college funds for each of the kids,' and/or 'we'll give it a try,' and/or 'this could be fun.' And then you're on tabloids and having a very ugly very public divorce and running through money like water and oh hey, turns out reality-tv 'star' children aren't protected by the kinds of laws (like Jackie's law) whereby some portion of their earnings have to be banked in trust for them, untouched by their parents.

I'm not saying the Kid who is crying is going down that path. Probably he isn't. Probably he's just a kid, with average-affluent parent(s) who are kind of amused by the whole thing. Probably he'll grow up and be kind of mortified at these crying-kid photos, and not much more.

But in the meantime, the tumblr - and now the national tv appearances - raise some interesting and, I think, important questions/issues about how we view and use children in a variety of kinds of media. There's no Jackie's law for social media, there are no protections (and I am thinking primarily of economic/ financial protections) in place for child "stars" of tumblr or instagram or their parents' blogs or youtube.

There are also - and I do think this is very important - lots of reasons to cry when you're a very small child, and those reasons should be taken seriously by the wider culture when we think about children and childhood, even though in the moment, those reasons might be exasperating or just plain hilarious.