Kavanaugh, Country Music and Consent

I’m not saying that Chris Janson is the Brett Kavanaugh of country music. But non-consensual sex is NOT a rite of passage. It is not an inevitable mistake boys can’t help but make as they come of age. Non-consual sex is a crime whether you remember committing it or not, whether the victim was drunk or not and whether it was thirty years or thirty minutes ago.

Let me explain what some country song you’ve probably never heard of might have in common with a Supreme Court Justice nominee. After some blackberry cider and a couple of Tom Collins this summer I was talking with my friend about flirting, dating, relationships and sex. As we have for years. He’s a good ol’ boy with much more socially conservative politics than mine but we discuss and explore a lot of contentious topics with respect. And some trepidation. But always respect.

Summer in Oregon is all backyard barbecues and river floating. Lake camping, sailing and cold drinks on the porch. The quiet magic of summer nights here is more sylvan than Southern balmy with fireflies at twilight or street parties in big cities where someone busts open fire hydrants and everyone dances in the water. I don’t know if they actually do this in big cities but I’ve seen a lot of movies and music videos that show these celebrations in the fever break of high summer. So it must be true.

But back in small city Oregon, very few of my friends like country music. So we take some shelter in each other and eagerly share music. My good ol’ boy is one of my few fellow country music lovers. And after many hours (and drinks) of conversation about #metoo and our culture slowly catching up to the simple concept of consent, he offered up a new-to-me country song to demonstrate that #hetoo understood.

“I gotta play this song for you,” he says, scrolling through his phone. He turned it up and a voice I hadn’t heard before crooned a chorus that is dangerously counterproductive to the progress we’ve been making as a society.

Take a drunk girl home
Let her sleep all alone
Leave her keys on the counter
your number by her phone
Pick up her life she threw on the floor
Leave the hall lights on walk out and lock the door
That’s how she knows the difference between a boy and man
Take a drunk girl home

Wait, what? Swing and a miss, my friend. Swing and a miss. That it is not the difference between a boy and a man but the difference between a criminal and a law-abiding citizen. There is nothing sweet or romantic about not fucking an incapacitated person. As another friend of mine often says, you don’t get points for doing what you’re supposed to do. As “sweet” as this sugary country ballad wants to be it implies that boys have no impulse control but men do. Patiently waiting for boys to become men is not the solution. This is *precisely the problem*. All people, regardless of their age, gender or maturity level are accountable for their actions. They need to be held to the same non-criminal standards as everyone else in order to promote and protect the safety of everyone else. Boys don’t get to rape along the way. And boys who don’t rape as they’re growing up aren’t entitled to rape-free points.

There’s a million things you could be doing,
but there’s one thing you’re damn sure glad you did
Take a drunk girl home
Let her sleep all alone

Yes. You could commit a crime if you wanted. It sounds like she wouldn’t be able to stop you. You could touch a blacked-out woman’s body or put parts of your body in her unconscious body. But you don’t get points for not doing that. As Chris Rock once said, you can kick an old man down a flight of stairs. Just don’t do it. If female revenge in media has taught us anything you can fill your ex’s BWM with all of his expensive clothes, soak it in gasoline and light it on fire. I personally don’t think vandalism is the solution to betrayal. Whether you get stopped or not, whether you get caught or not, nobody gets points for not committing crimes. Regardless of your motive or opportunity.

For a relatively young singer to be resuscitating this anachronistic boys-will-be-boys rhetoric, especially to differentiate “real men” from “just boys” perpetuates the danger of boys not being responsible for their actions. Branding yourself as a progressive (read: non-raping) romantic is a bare-minimum marketing tactic if I’ve ever seen one.

The man who takes the drunk girl home and doesn’t fuck her is not a folk hero. But this ballad-y bullshit song sadly implies that he is a heroic exception.

If not taking advantage of a drunk girl is taking the heroic high road then my friend deserves high praise for not taking advantage of me the night we got drunk on Tom Collins and talked about sex and dating until 2am.

Maybe he too should go play a grand piano in the middle of a road somewhere and sing about what a good guy he is for not even making a pass at me.

I don’t think this Chris Janson realizes how self-congratulatory he sounds but in his attempt to be progressive he actually reveals just how regressively entrenched our attitudes about female bodily autonomy are. The title of the song itself is also a shameless ploy to surprise listeners. Simplistic plays on words are common country music song titles. But there’s nothing dangerous about Two of a Kind, Workin’ on a Full House. It’s a poker metaphor for monogamy and starting a family. Party on, Garth.

If American pop country isn’t spelling it out clearly enough maybe the Brits can elucidate the complex nuance (sarcasm font) of consent with their dry humor.

Not forcing unconscious people to do things while they’re unconscious seems pretty straightforward. But the lines somehow blur and get murky when the unconscious person is female and the conscious person is someone with an erection. But what if two people are just considering having tea? There is no more British way to explain the simplicity of consent than with tea. This public service short from the Thames Valley Police can help even the most willfully oblivious person admit that they actually do understand someone else’s free will. It’s a cheeky metaphor with rudimentary stick figures to help explain how not to commit a crime against someone, whether they’re conscious or not.

Now if a crime has already been committed against you maybe the best you can do is to learn from it in order to prevent another one from happening. Tracy Ullman is as British as they come. And this sketch makes the simplicity of consent painfully clear when we consider it in terms of how a man might have provoked his own mugging. Two female detectives use the same rhetoric to interrogate him that too many rape victims endure after reporting. If the way this male victim is treated is bewildering to you see: #WhyIDidntReport. Victim blaming is the train that’s never late every time an accusation is publicly made against a prominent figure. And the spin is always right behind it.

But we can shake this mortal coil of exonerating all males from any sexual wrongdoing as an incontrovertible impugnable age of innocence. Pardoning boys for indulging their sexual impulses is as criminal as the offenses themselves. If only “real” men know not to rape it means that women and girls (and other boys) are still in danger of being harassed/assaulted/abused/raped by boys *and* that said boys are not responsible for their actions.

So let’s not perpetuate a culture of violence by propagating this idea that the only way boys learn is by making mistakes. Let’s not romanticize doing the right thing as a chivalrous exception. Not doing the wrong thing doesn’t make you a man. It just makes you not a criminal.