Ciara's Reviews > Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power and A World Without Rape

i expected to find this book irritating, because i find most of what jessica valenti is involved in irritating (see my scathing review of full frontal feminism for more), & i find a lot of discourse around consent tedious & lumbering, a game of one-upsmanship in which people are proposing ever more individualistic & unrealistic-outside-of-incestuous-radical-enclaves solutions to the tremendous problem of sexual assault & rape culture. the calls for submissions were framed as jessica & her co-editor, jaclyn friedman, asking feminist thinkers to leave "no means no" in the dust & write some essays on women reclaiming autonomous sexual pleasure & power as a way to end rape once & for all, which i think we can all agree is absurdly ludicrous & could only be the product of self-referential bloggers who have lost all touch with reality. i sincerely doubt that most rapists & sexual assaulters would be particularly impressed or dissuaded from raping in the face of impassioned essays on female sexual power. it just puts the onus on ending rape on women, in new & more insidious ways.

HOWEVER! it seems like a lot of folks who contributed essays to the book were thinking along lines very similar to mine. & rather than giving the book up as a bad job, they wrote essays that specifically countered the spoken aims of the call for submissions, & these essays turned the book into something different & much better than it would have been. one of the best essays, in my opinion, was miriam zoila perez's piece, "when sexual autonomy isn't enough," about the epidemic levels of rape & sexual assault faced by immigrant women without the means to protect themselves or escape abusive situations due to racism, classism, & exploitative immigration laws in the united states. she repeatedly states that reclaiming sexual power is not going to help these women fight back against the institutional powers that are oppressing them. a lot of other contributers wrote similar essays, pointing out that women can relcaim their sexual power until the cows come home, but rape culture is an endemic & enduring system of interlocking oppressions that need to be consciously dismantled before we're going to start seeing significant changes.

a few of the essays had me nodding my head in surprised agreement, like in rachel kramer bussel's essay, when she critiques the slogan "consent is sexy," asking if we really needed to "sell" a concept like consent. YES! finally, someone willing to say that they find that slogan as vapid & inconsequential as i do! leah lakshmi piepzna-samarasinka blew me away, as usual. (she's apparently working on a memoir & i COULD NOT be more excited!) other essays were predictably obnoxious. jessica valenti herself contributed something on purity balls, a pretty blatantly obvious attempt to whet people's appetites for her forthcoming book on the construction of feminine purity. *yawn* it's no longer 1983, this topic has been tread into the ground, & i don't get why she has to constantly be forwarding her future career with every essay or book she writes. why not just stick to the subject at hand, for once? worse than that was javacia n. harris's awful piece, "a woman's worth," which took twelve pages to basically say, "i know that women working in hooters-type restaurants are being exploited because of their low self-esteem, because i used to have low self-esteem & wanted to work in a hooters restaurant. then i became an aerobics instructor & got over it." wow, tell me more about how you know what all women are thinking because of how you once thought, & how your experience must be the experience of every other woman in the world making choices with which you disagree.

the set-up of the book was gimmicky in certain ways. jessica & jaclyn wanted to mimic the "information-sharing" & "user-guided" reading models of feminist blogs (seriously?), so they assigned a few overarching themes to each essay & "linked" to similarly-themed essays throughout the book. the themes seems to be assigned at random sometimes. like, i think every author of color was squished into the "race relating" theme, even if they didn't write specifically about race issues in their essay. ditto with queer contributers. i sometimes felt that these weird gimmicks were a way for the editors to show off how "diverse" their essayists were, so that this supposed intersectionality would reflect back on them & make them seem like awesome intersectional feminists, even though jessica valenti has only ever seemed invested in the interests of young, white, able-bodied, straight women (i don't know enough about jaclyn friedman's work to judge). but whatever. there was indeed some good shit in here, mixed with some boring or enraging shit, & as long as you can read with a critical eye & don't just swallow every idea as The Last Word on Feminism & Sexual Autonomy/Dismantling Rape Culture in 2009, you should be okay.