Cross-posted from Yes Means Yes Blog
I said in the Shroedinger's Rapist post that it was part of a larger idea and might be Part I of two. Here's Part II.
It's all about boundaries. The Shapely Prose post started with a discussion of women's fear of rape, and moved from there to public spaces, interruption, intrusion and boundaries. My post focused on public transit as a particular case of public spaces, and staked out the position that bothering a woman whose activities and body language are not inviting interaction is a violation of her boundaries. I'm saddened to see pushback on that.
In comments, AJ wrote something that made me think about how this comes full-circle:
I felt like this article was good in that it helps het/cismen to realize that most female-bodied-people are terrified of rape and do a lot of weird things to try to lessen their "risk." Its the "risk" thing that worried me.
1) If a man rapes a woman, it is not her fault because she had somehow put her self at risk.
2) Because most rapists are someone the victims knows well, I dont like the perpetuation of the stranger-rape story.
And I wrote back:
Really, really good points.
(1) should go without saying. That it needs to be said at all is the product of rape culture.
(2) I totally agree that there's a wild imbalance in the discourse on rape where stranger rape and rape in public places are overrepresented -- but I see this post as not so much talking about the threat of the archetypal stranger rape, but the more general issue of boundary transgressing, which I can see from the comments here and at Shapely Prose are everywhere.
This isn't about walking to the car with keys in hand and checking the back seat. Those are narratives that have little to do with the rapes that have happened to so many of the women I know.
This is about whether men understand women's boundaries to be real.
And that has everything to do with how rape happens.
I'm not a radical feminist, but I do have a lot of respect for the pioneering work that radical feminists have done. On this blog in the past, I've quoted Dworkin with approval, even though as a BDSMer much of my intimate conduct falls into areas that she viewed as intensely problematic, and the depictions of which she attacked as part of her life's work. And I'll quote her again, when I agree with her. For example, in the opening lines of Chapter 7 of Intercourse, she wrote:
This is nihilism; or this is truth. He has to push in past boundaries. There is the outline of a body, distinct, separate, its integrity an illusion, a tragic deception, because unseen there is a slit between the legs, and he has to push into it. There is never a real privacy of the body that can coexist with intercourse: with being entered. The vagina itself is muscled and the muscles have to be pushed apart. The thrusting is persistent invasion. She is opened up, split down the center. She is occupied--physically, internally, in her privacy.A human being has a body that is inviolate; and when it is violated, it is abused. A woman has a body that is penetrated in intercourse: permeable, its corporeal solidness a lie. The discourse of male truth--literature, science, philosophy, pornography--calls that penetration violation. This it does with some consistency and some confidence. Violation is a synonym for intercourse. At the same time, the penetration is taken to be a use, not an abuse; a normal use; it is appropriate to enter her, to push into ("violate") the boundaries of her body. She is human, of course, but by a standard that does not include physical privacy.She is, in fact, human by a standard that precludes physical privacy, since to keep a man out altogether and for a lifetime is deviant in the extreme, a psychopathology, a repudiation of the way in which she is expected to manifest her humanity.
There is a deep recognition in culture and in experience that intercourse is both the normal use of a woman, her human potentiality affirmed by it, and a violative abuse, her privacy irredeemably compromised, her selfhood changed in a way that is irrevocable, unrecoverable. And it is recognized that the use and abuse are not distinct phenomena but somehow a synthesized reality: both are true at the same time as if they were one harmonious truth instead of mutually exclusive contradictions.
As I'm reading that, I am struck by how the language of physical privacy and boundaries is so parallel in discussion both of interactions on public transit, and penis-vagina intercourse. Dworkin is talking about a social structure that normalizes intrusion -- that calls the resistance to intrusion abnormal, and stigmatizes it. That's true whether a woman resists intercourse with the penis (and is othered as "antisocial", "frigid", "dyke") or with the interloper ("rude", "stuck up", "bitch").
In order to justify a social order where women must tolerate these intrusions, even when unwanted, there is an entire mythology that these intrusions are necessary and proper: that if a woman doesn't want them, she is unnatural and acting improperly. Men, specifically cis- het- men, benefit from these structures (and are also subject to them in ways they often don't even see, but that's another discussion). And they defend them. They don't want to seem like they don't respect boundaries, but isn't a Nice Guy(tm) entitled to a chance to convince a woman to accept the interaction that she shows no sign of wanting? Just a sporting chance? That's what they ask.
The easiest way to ignore women's boundaries, and what women say about them, in this discussion is simply to reframe the discussion from women's boundaries to the ways and means for dudes to meet women. Reframing this as "but if she won't talk to me how an I going to meet her" presupposes all of the major issues. The entitlement is built right into the question.. Right into the question, and it works so well that it's often invisible, even for folks who are looking at it.
And that's rape culture. Not a definition, or the whole, but a significant component. That right there: framing the discourse away from women's boundaries, so that the important questions are about what the guy wants and how he may go about getting it, not what women want and whether men must take them at their word about it. Simply dodging the question of how a woman communicates what she wants and doesn't want; deflecting it so that what women want is never discussed. A culture that can mouth the words "no means no," and still follow them with an ever-present "but ..." A culture that doesn't understand "yes means yes" because it recognizes no mechanism for hearing or saying the affirmative.
I'm not talking about all men being rapists, or all p-i-v being rape (and neither was Dworkin -- her lifelong partner was a man and she explicitly disclaimed that reading, and when I've seen folks try to say that Intercourse says that, their argument does not survive actual analysis of the text.)
The rape culture is the culture in which rapists, even if a minority, have a social license to operate. The prevailing conditions are such that they can do what they do and not be immediately incapacitated. In a world where we expect consent to be affirmative, the invasion of boundaries is an aberration that does not escape notice. In a Yes Means Yes world, if a woman on the subway is interested, she'll flash a smile and let someone know. Creepy guys trying to ... trying to ... trying to get a conversation started wouldn't be so common, and it would seem creepy not just to women, but to the men standing around. People wouldn't ask, in response to a report of rape, what it was that maybe she did that maybe he thought might not be "no," because if she had wanted sex she would have said "yes," and if there was no yes, how could there possibly have been consent? Only a rapist would try to insert himself in a woman without knowing he had her consent, right? In a world where the knowing is normal, the guessing would be strange, and the rationalizing about a miscommunication would be incredible (not her account, which in the world we're in always seems to the the one the credibility of which people attack, but his).
In a Yes Means Yes world, women's boundaries are what they say they are. When a woman's boundaries are universally respected, rapists do not have the room to operate.
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This. For years I never realized it was the men's outlook and desires that were always the default, that what women felt, believed, wanted or didn't want was, in fact, absent from the argument. We're not even at the table, are we? There's still work to do to open everyone's eyes. Thank you for this post.
thank you-My issue with the shapely prose post is that it's not about fear of being raped then and there the way that post makes it out to be. yes, crossing one boundary does make me think you're more likely to cross another one later, but not 100% of the time.
but that's not actually why I don't want to meet random men on the bus. I want to take the bus and get home without having to provide directions, or other social service every time. And not be poked while I'm reading to force me to provide those services, or called a bitch when I actively say I don't want to talk.
I don't disagree with your analysis a bit.
I happen to believe that we were created by a higher power and as such, women were granted a vagina and men were granted a penis. (My apologies in advance towards transgender and intersex individuals and in advancing a purely heterosexual interpretation. Including them into this particular debate complicates my argument and I'm honestly not sure how to correctly include them without losing the thread of my larger point.) Whether or not you believe that we were divinely constructed or not, our private parts and their intrinsic function are not in debate.
Establishing boundaries and rules of conduct are worthwhile. However, in all of our striving for equality, understanding, and sensitivity we can't forget the penetration, invasive component to it, which to me is a kind of biological inequality in and of itself. This doesn't justify inequality, by any means, but it does raise an important issue that we often don't take into account. From this basic fact stems a wide variety of issues that we variously ascribe to Patriarchy, misogyny, sexism, and other prejudicial attitudes. And as for the reason WHY this penetration relationship exists within humanity, your guess is as good as mine.
You see, I'm off the bus with your thinking in the first paragraph. I don't recognize an inherent function to our bodies or our lives. We have parts. How we employ and relate to them is up to us. So I do debate the intrinsic function.
I think the reason you can't explain your theory if you depart from a cis- het- model is that it falls apart right away if you do.
Let's assume a penis and a vulva, each belonging to a different person, and these two people interacting sexually.
First: the person with the penis may or may not be a man. The person with the vulva may or may not be a woman.
Second: these people may interact sexually without the penis and vulva interacting. There are lots of ways to get off, at the same time or one at a time, and they can be sexual without being oriented towards orgasm. If the penis and vulva are touching each other, it does not necessarily mean that the penis is in the vagina.
Third: penetration is one way to describe the penis-in-the-vagina. However, it is just as true that the vagina can envelop the penis. How we see that is a social construct.
I don't accept that biology is destiny.
Very astute, that comment about the enveloping vagina. However, noting that penetration = invasion and that this is the primary construct *now in place* in our society seems quite accurate.
Totally agree. But Kevin's point was about intrinsic function.
"we can't forget the penetration, invasive component to it, which to me is a kind of biological inequality in and of itself.
I'm deeply offended by this comment, both as a woman and as a biologist.
The vagina can just as easily be seen to surround and take in the penis. You are not stating an inherent fact, but merely your subjective point of view on how the genitals interact.
The following is quite graphic, but it was the best way I could think of to make my point that the language we use to describe PIV sex can completely color how we view it: her vagina approaches his penis swallowing it up until it is completely encased and imprisoned by her.
As I'm reading that, I am struck by how the language of physical privacy and boundaries is so parallel in discussion both of interactions on public transit, and penis-vagina intercourse. Dworkin is talking about a social structure that normalizes intrusion -- that calls the resistance to intrusion abnormal, and stigmatizes it. That's true whether a woman resists intercourse with the penis (and is othered as "antisocial", "frigid", "dyke") or with the interloper ("rude", "stuck up", "bitch").
In order to justify a social order where women must tolerate these intrusions, even when unwanted, there is an entire mythology that these intrusions are necessary and proper:
This seems to seriously conflate what an individual will do or claim, and what society will take away from the interaction. I've seen the behavior you describe but I have always seen the response as almost universally negative towards the guy.
Most of the guys I know are interested in how they can better read body language, the vast majority when they cannot read body language (or when they can but do not trust their own ability to do so) simply opt to do nothing.
It seems that you are assuming that some of the loudest most boorish members of society inherently reflect society as a whole, and you are using that to slander all men.
I'm not talking about all men being rapists, or all p-i-v being rape
We read the same chapter right? You know the chapter you quoted from which claimed the physical act of PIV was worse than the holocaust? That the very act of penetration was violent? That by its nature it is a violation. Not because of social constructs, but because of its nature. Where she mocks at length the concept
(By the way, props for citing a chapter which claimed women can't rape men, classy.)
Sounds like you read the same chapter, and read it very differently, and that you now do not remember the text and are remembering it reading how you interpreted it, not how it reads.
I read it as describing not the act of intercourse, but the social structure of intercourse in patriarchy. Obviously, Dworkin did not believe that all penis-in-vagina sex was rape. She herself disclaimed this reading in her lifetime, and it is inconsistent with her behavior to posit that that's what she was saying -- though that's not necessarily determinative because lots of people do things that they don't believe are right.
She did not say the things you said she said. She did not say "the physical act of PIV was worse than the holocaust." Flat did not say it. She said:
"There is no analogue anywhere among subordinated groups of people to this experience of being made for intercourse: for penetration, entry, occupation. There is no analogue in occupied countries or in dominated races or in imprisoned dissidents or in colonialized cultures or in the submission of children to adults or in the atrocities that have marked the twentieth century ranging from Auschwitz to the Gulag. There is nothing exactly the same, and this is not because the political invasion and significance of intercourse is banal up against these other hierarchies and brutalities. Intercourse is a particular reality for women as an inferior class; and it has in it, as part of it, violation of boundaries, taking over, occupation, destruction of privacy, all of which are construed to be normal and also fundamental to continuing human existence. "
She's not talking about the particular instance of PIV -- she's talking about the experience of being a subordinated part of a social structure that defines one as subject to it, made for it and compelled to do it. You may not agree with that, but it is a wholly different thought from the thing you claim she said.
She said a lot of stuff, including stuff that I disagree with and stuff where the language is so dense that it's hard to follow where the hell she's going (I'm not a fan of her as a prose stylist). You can think what you want about Dworkin, but if you want to engage on the text, start quoting, because your memory is not reliable in that regard.
TD, that was more pointed than it should have been. Sorry.
But I think the text of Intercourse Chapter 7 reads differently than you remember it.
I read it as describing not the act of intercourse, but the social structure of intercourse in patriarchy.
I have heard that reading, and I do not believe that is can be supported when the first paragraph of the chapter (not including the quote) is talking about the nature of the act.
She seems to state all of the text only to support her argument but it in no way seems to be her argument.
She did not say the things you said she said...Flat did not say it. She said:
She said it doesn't compare to the holocaust, but not because intercourse was banal in comparison to the holocaust. That leaves one alternative, that it was worse than the holocaust.
Further she was clearly talking about the act of intercourse in addition to it societal construction.
"By definition, as the God who does not exist made her, this lesser privacy, this lesser integrity, this lesser self, establishes her lesser significance: not just in the world of social policy but in the world of bare, true, real existence. She is defined by how she is made, that hole, which is synonymous with entry; and intercourse, the act fundamental to existence, has consequences to her being that may be intrinsic, not socially imposed."
---
Intercourse remains a means or the means of physiologically making a woman inferior: communicating to her cell by cell her own inferior status, impressing it on her, burning it into her by shoving it into her, over and over, pushing and thrusting until she gives up and gives in-- which is called surrender in the male lexicon. In the experience of intercourse, she loses the capacity for integrity because her body--the basis of privacy and freedom in the material world for all human beings--is entered and occupied; the boundaries of her physical body are--neutrally speaking-- violated. What is taken from her in that act is not recoverable, and she spends her life--wanting, after all, to have something--pretending that pleasure is in being reduced through intercourse to insignificance.
The chapter is littered with references not strictly to society's supposed construction of sexuality but the act itself as evil. That a woman, solely by virtue of taking a penis into herself, must have been violated.
The basic way her chapter reads is:
1.) PIV is Inherently Bad because any penetration is inherently bad
2.) Look at all of these social mannerisms which can be construed to agree with me
3.) Women might enjoy intercourse but they're simply fooling themselves
4.) Therefore #1 is correct
In fact she quite plainly claims that women cannot consent when she gives this little gem:
"Physically, the woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force; even if the occupied person said yes please, yes hurry, yes more."
How can you not take that to mean all (penetrative) sex is rape?
Denial is a powerful thing.
"She said it doesn't compare to the holocaust, but not because intercourse was banal in comparison to the holocaust. That leaves one alternative, that it was worse than the holocaust."
Just wrong. The other alternative is they are different, and not because one is better or worse than the other, but because they operate in different ways so that neither is a good analog for the other.
About the biology is destiny stuff, every time she says that she attributes it to God, and then asserts that God does not exist; and then at the end of the chapter she concludes that she doesn't know whether intercourse can exist outside of patriarchy. I'll find the text and quote.
Note that she considers and dismissed and analogy of PIV to all penetration briefly by saying that a man has an anus that can be penetrated, but that's not the same because man is not defined by that. If she means biologically, then her theory would admit of no way to change patriarchy. The alternative is that she read the man's capacity to be penetrated as not part of a social structure to define men, but women's capacity to be penetrated as central to such a structure.
Just wrong. The other alternative is they are different, and not because one is better or worse than the other, but because they operate in different ways so that neither is a good analog for the other.
Utter nonsense. People don't fill their books with things which aren't related to their thesis. She attempted to compare the two, she doesn't think intercourse pales in comparison, ergo she believes that the two are at least somewhat related in terms of evil.
About the biology is destiny stuff, every time she says that she attributes it to God,
And you don't see how since god isn't actually a source these are just her views wrapped in an aggravating rhetorical flair? Did you ignore the fact that the paragraphs I quoted cited no on as a source and were just her spouting off about the evils of sex and how it was inherently oppressive.
and then asserts that God does not exist;
Which further shows that she is just stating her view in an extremely annoying way.
and then at the end of the chapter she concludes that she doesn't know whether intercourse can exist outside of patriarchy.
Which would mean, even if we take your incredibly overgenerous assertion that she's just using an intellectual game, that all sex now is rape. Reinforced by the fact that she claimed that women cannot truly consent with that quip about it not mattering if they do. Reinforced by the idea she puts out that penetration is inherently violent, inherently oppressive. That the mere presence of a penis in a vagina is an "occupation"
I'm sorry, you're bending over backwards to give this woman credit and she deserves none. I don't see how someone who works for a site called "yes means yes" can support a woman who
1.) Did not believe women could consent
2.) Did not believe men could be raped
3.) Did not believe women could be rapists
So what, Yes Means Yes, and if your a woman receiving a No still means Yes but if your giving a yes your just a stupid dupe of the patriarchy?
Come on, lets go over this one again
"Physically, the woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force; even if the occupied person said yes please, yes hurry, yes more."
Utter nonsense? You didn't just misread what I wrote, you misunderstood it. I didn't say it was not important to her thesis. But she expressly disclaimed that a culture of compulsory penetration paled in comparison the the holocaust, and she didn't say it was worse, and she said that there was no analog. What I said what that I read that as meaning that it was not less or more bad, but bad, and not really comparable. You're stuck on a weighing of magnitude, but the text says she's not doing that. I'm beginning to think your misreading is willful.
Since I engage in sex, including intercourse as both the entering and entered participant, with a woman on a fairly regular basis, I think it's fair to say that I do believe women can consent. If you want to know what I think about sex, read Towards a Performance Model of Sex in Yes Means Yes, or the Yes Means Yes blog. I have written a bit on the subject and I've made it perfectly clear that I think women can consent to sex. Your assertion to the contrary is unsupported and is obviously a product of your outsized animosity to Dworkin.
I could keep quoting text to you, but we've been around and around on the Holocaust paragraph and you are still insisting that it says something that is absolutely and plainly does not say; and you've made it clear that you reject out of hand any reading of the text that does not conclude that it says all sex is rape -- including Dworkin's own. Therefore, I think we really have no room for productive conversation on this topic.
It really comes down to this: she clearly says, and clearly did think, that piv was subject to such great social pressure that "consent" wasn't really meaningful, in that all other alternatives were foreclosed or deeply penalized. You and a lot of people read that as saying that if true, each instance thereof it rape. That is not a leap that Dworkin made, in Intercourse or anywhere else that I know of: in fact, she explicitly disclaimed it in a later interview with Michael Moorcock:
No, I wasn't saying that and I didn't say that, then or ever. There is a long section in Right-Wing Women on intercourse in marriage. My point was that as long as the law allows statutory exemption for a husband from rape charges, no married woman has legal protection from rape. I also argued, based on a reading of our laws, that marriage mandated intercourse--it was compulsory, part of the marriage contract. Under the circumstances, I said, it was impossible to view sexual intercourse in marriage as the free act of a free woman. I said that when we look at sexual liberation and the law, we need to look not only at which sexual acts are forbidden, but which are compelled.The whole issue of intercourse as this culture's penultimate expression of male dominance became more and more interesting to me. In Intercourse I decided to approach the subject as a social practice, material reality. This may be my history, but I think the social explanation of the "all sex is rape" slander is different and probably simple. Most men and a good number of women experience sexual pleasure in inequality. Since the paradigm for sex has been one of conquest, possession, and violation, I think many men believe they need an unfair advantage, which at its extreme would be called rape. I don't think they need it. I think both intercourse and sexual pleasure can and will survive equality.
It's important to say, too, that the pornographers, especially Playboy, have published the "all sex is rape" slander repeatedly over the years, and it's been taken up by others like Time who, when challenged, cannot cite a source in my work.
Emphasis supplied. She called the reading that all sex is rape "slander", and said that the "unfair advantage" of patriarchal compulsion could be called rape "at the extreme." I read that as meaning that she thought that there was an area between relatively unconstrained choice, on the one hand, and the complete negation of choice on the other; an area where consent wasn't free enough to be a real choice and was rather the product of a sort of occupation, but also not rape.
Some folks who have read both the chapter and the interview think she was just backpedaling -- but, first, she wasn't one to backpedal from unpopular conclusions, and second, if she had meant to say that every instance of het PIV was rape, she would have just said that.
Finally, that she did not view the entrance of the penis into an orifice as inherently degrading absent the social constructs that define man and woman around that act is, I think, inherent in the way she dismissed the notion that entry into a man's anus had the same or similar meaning:
There is a deep recognition in culture and in experience that intercourse is both the normal use of a woman, her human potentiality affirmed by it, and a violative abuse, her privacy irredeemably compromised, her selfhood changed in a way that is irrevocable, unrecoverable ... This hole, her hole, is synonymous with entry. A man has an anus that can be entered, but his anus is not synonymous with entry. A woman has an anus that can be entered, but her anus is not synonymous with entry.If the act of putting a penis into an anus (which is trickier, requires additional lube and is much more likely to be painful, and also which fewer men and women enjoy as the receiving participant) is not subject to all the things she says are the "nature" of intercourse, than I think it must follow that she's using "nature" in a particular sense. The Moorcock quote gives a hint, where she says "material reality," and in the text where she repeatedly both invokes and denies God, that she is holding the ideas of "furniture in the universe" either from deity or biology at arm's length and dealing only with the social reality that surrounds us. She doesn't even say that intercourse is immune to reform. She says perhaps it is.
I cited the line. That sex is 'occupation' no matter if the person says yes or not. Since occupation is inherently, and by definition something done against someones will, since she used imagery of the gulags and concentration camps to compare it to, it is entirely fair to say that she argued that sex was so horrible people could not consent to it.
Here is the citation one more time:
"Physically, the woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force; even if the occupied person said yes please, yes hurry, yes more."
Again tell me how that is not denying the ability to consent. Tell me how that does not claim that sex is an evil act regardless of consent. Not some other feminist performing apologetics, give me an actual argument from your perspective.
She doesn't even say that intercourse is immune to reform. She says perhaps it is.
So what you are saying is, that she thought, now and then, that all the heterosexual sex people are having, was violent, oppressive evil. Something which if true, would make it rape.
Some folks who have read both the chapter and the interview think she was just backpedaling -- but, first, she wasn't one to backpedal from unpopular conclusions,
She has rightly been considered an anathema, the very embodiment of the anti-male anti-heterosexual viewpoint that came to exemplify everything people hated about feminism in the eighties and nineties.
I think she had motive to backpedal. I'd think feminists rightly have every motivation to separate themselves from her at any cost. But I think your continued defense, and inability to accept what she said, suggests that in an underlying way you don't think yes means yes, you don't think women can consent to sex, and that you believe all sex is a violent oppression of women.
second, if she had meant to say that every instance of het PIV was rape, she would have just said that.
Read her writing style, there is no way she would have just said anything. She clearly prefers to compare it to the holocaust through in some random things about god and hop around in a nonsensical manner.
I really appreciate this post. It's thoughtful and engaging and identifies some really interesting issues regarding language and boundary issues.
Your approach to Dworkin is not as I remember that text either, so I too will need to reread it!
Sure, it's really radical, and a lot of people find it off-putting. But people claim she said some things that are often subtly but importantly different from what she did say.
Not that I'm a Dworkinite, really. Like I said in the OP, I'm a kinkster, so...
Thanks for your post Thomas. I am fairly new to feminist theory so I had only read about Dworkin in terms of the division on the feminist movement in the 80's, but the sections of her work you quoted seem really interesting and challenging in a positive way. I will be sure to read her work in the future!
Your analysis of her work was very good, as well. Keep up the good work!
Yes. Thank you, thank you, thank you for this post.
Dworkin is fairly problematic in that passage, particularly in her image of parting an unwilling vagina muscle. Yeah, when the vagina doesn't want to be entered, PIV intercourse is a forceful act of pushing its walls apart. But on the other hand, when aroused the vagina is totally designed to be entered. Not only does it both lengthen and expand, but it becomes lubricated and actually acts to pull objects further in.
I am not challenging the idea that rape culture exists, but I am as well still confused when the OP talks how "about these intrusions are necessary and proper: that if a woman doesn't want them, she is unnatural and acting improperly". In reference to queer culture, yes, that is stigmatized in society. However, at the same time straight women are often expected to not want sex, and it is often seen as improper if we want it.
I believe the OP touches on something when she refers to this idea of having to tolerate intercourse... but in my opinion the root of this problem is that the idea women enjoying this act has never fully been embraced. If we can accept this idea of sex (of any type) needing to actually feel good for women, as opposed to thinking it will never feel good, so lie there and take it, we will be taking a huge step forward in terms of sexual equality.