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celebratedrecluse wrote

sounds like you ran into an archetypal stumbling block of anarchist discourse, the fixation on process over outcomes. Fuck the community, and fuck the individual: we're talking about what world we want to live in, not what kind of world hypothetical people might hypothetically want to live in.

It's about coercion. If you coerce or pressure someone into sex or doing something sexualized-- with physical force, but also with emotional blackmail, with begging, with repeated insistent requests, by lying or taking advantage of some sort of power differential between you and the other person, including those of class or gender or age-- then you've committed sexual misconduct, no doubt about it.

Sex is something to be participated in freely, not something that you extract from others. There are a lot of sexual norms that are in fact enshrined sexual misconduct: patriarchal traditional marriages, the predatory buying of sex work from desperate people instead of aiding them without expectation of their body/labor in return, toxic sexual expectations in dating culture, and more. this is what is meant by "rape culture": it is the spillover of capitalist commodity fetishism to the terrain of human sexuality.

It is good for anarchists to be internally consistent, by ensuring that their relationships are as free from coercion as possible. This also has the positive effect of building strong communities resilient against informants, unburdened by ineffective interventions of the police to address abuse in our communities, and lessened trauma and social division amongst fellow radicals and anarchists.

I suggest everyone read "Why misogynists Make great informants", which is a great primer on why actively anti-coercive relationships are for anarchists not just an ethical or personal imperative, but a collective and political one as well.

https://www.sproutdistro.com/catalog/zines/security/misogynists-make-great-informants/

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