I Said No to Bill Cosby and Yes to Jian Ghomeshi

Jill Soloway

originally published on wifey.tv

When I was seventeen, Bill Cosby offered me a ride.

It was around 1983 in Chicago. My best friend and I were hanging out at a health club, sort of an urban country club. Celebrities appeared in the café every so often. Including Bill Cobsy.

My best friend and I approached Bill. Bill was incredibly kind. So so so nice to us, considering that we were just teenagers. We spoke for a few minutes, then he asked where we were going. We told him. He asked us how we were getting there, we said taxi. He said his car was downstairs and he could be our taxi.

We almost went. For some reason we said no. Maybe it was our age. His age. I wanted to go with him, I really did. Meeting famous men wasn’t unusual, it was another day spent in a summer doing our sport of using our cute teen selves as access passes to rooms with famous people or interesting people or just brand new people. Honestly, we weren’t thinking about having sex, we were just thinking about changing the nature of our days from boring to interesting.

Maybe if I was looking for a way out of my life or into a career or if I thought I could get out of being a high school senior I would have joined him. I’m lucky I didn’t need anything from him.

I didn’t go, but I could have gone, and in my life, when I was younger, and then when I was older, I did go. I could still go, following powerful people into spaces where I wanted to see what it was like to spend time with them, and then them alone. Those powerful people are usually men.

When the Cosby thing was at its peak Obama said that “if a person gives someone a drug and has sex with them without their consent, that is rape”. But to my satisfaction, no one yet has parsed out where the without their consent part goes. Did he mean someone was given a drug without their consent or had sex without their consent, or both, or either? Was the problem the unexpected kind of the sex that wasn’t consented to or the unexpected effect of the drug?

A lot of the women accusing Bill Cosby willingly swallowed a pill. Some thought it was a Benadryl, some thought it was a Quaalude but didn’t know how strong it was, some knew it as whatever a ‘party drug’ is. They swallowed that pill with consent, intent to party or loosen up or even to relax enough to enjoy time with Bill Cosby. What they didn’t plan for was the part where he fucked them while they were less than half conscious.

We are talking about a societal hate crime against women. These questions about consent seem exclusively to be about people with vaginas. So why aren’t more people talking about misogyny?

I think one of the most powerful unspoken aspects of misogyny is that it encourages men to think of the vagina as a liar, and the holder of the vagina as a liar. The world thinks the vagina is untrustworthy.

The erection is assumed trustworthy, maybe because one of the things it often does is get hard and goes in. It gives the impression that it is acting upon its desire.

If someone is fucking it is assumed they are doing so because they want to fuck.

If someone is getting fucked it is questionable as to whether or not they chose to be fucked. Perhaps the vagina can be deemed untrustworthy for setting the reliable action of the erection into motion, yet occasionally failing to complete the trajectory.

Unspoken, like the air we breathe, is how our cultural understanding laminates the “doer” with masculinity, while the “done to” is laminated into the feminine.

The vagina is understood as a liar, or a sometimes liar. Cosby proudly shared with a court that he often suggested women take a Quaalude to “come into their bodies.” He asked one woman who was unsure whether she consented whether she “told her mom she had an orgasm”, as if her orgasm was her consent. Does your mother know you’re a whore, he asked, shaming her for pleasure that she hadn’t planned for, shaming her for the way he was able use his drugs to annex her body, by “allowing” her body to receive.

I wonder if some mens’ fascination with idea of making someone allow something inside of them could be described by a female Freud as “vagina envy”.

I wonder if we are expected to vigilantly guard this entrance, and sometimes we don’t, for example, when we swallow a pill or a drink or two, or wear something, or forget to wear something, or leave the house. Perhaps we get punished for not safeguarding the entrance to our one and only monthly egg, which is not considered our property, but rather society’s. Our value is not ours. Being a slut is like being a bad mother.

We are expected to guard this Once a Month, in Time with the Tides, Moon-shaped biology, cherished so much more than sperm, which arrives in such surplus that it can be spent or spilled in not only in intercourse, involving consent, but also, in jerkoffs, in jerkoffs on unsuspecting faces, places, passed out girls, awake girls, hands, Kleenexes, down the shower drain, porn waste, a day’s waste.

The female half of the conception handshake doesn’t spill, it doesn’t get wasted. It surfs out in a tide of blood. It tells time.

Every few days there is a story in the news. The senior salute, or the football team, it is almost always a boy who said it was consensual, a girl who said it was not. When will we finally begin to look at the He Said/She Said dynamic not to decide whether He or She is telling the truth — which seems to be the subject in courts of law and public opinion — but rather, for its form:

If this were a syllogism, a philosophical proof, we would look at the pieces:

He always proceeds She. It is never (or rarely) She Said/She Said. Nor He Said/He Said.

In the same way Ta-Nahesi Coates writes how Blackness was invented, named, written into the story and plot of a nation for the purpose of inventing a whiteness that confers a “better than” -– same can be said of what Maleness gets from naming Femaleness.

Naming Femaleness as Other occurs everywhere much like air. It is in stories and book and culture, in movies, in homes and churches and law.

As we move into the doing to or done to, the going in or receiving, we often come to another crossroad: the question of whether or not one should hold the ability or right to continue discerning while receiving. Can we say no, halfway through? Is there a hatred on the part of many men for the immense vulnerability of an unfolding reality — such that the first Yes absolutely dissolves any future Nos?

What about “I changed my mind,” “Stop, that hurts”, “Not in my ass, actually”, or “Don’t do that, do this instead”?

Speaking of, “Stop, that hurts, I changed my mind, actually”:

About a year ago, I was invited to be on Jian Ghomeshi’s radio show. I had to decide fast so I asked around about him. The word from women friends I knew was that he was a horrendous human being who was hated among the women of Canada for being sexually despicable.

I said yes to the interview.

I thought it would be funny to go on the show and ask him about his reputation among women in Canada. Instead I went to the green room, tried to put on some hair and makeup, got ignored by Martin Short, shared a hug with Zack Galifinakias and Bob Odernkirk, talked to Jenny Lewis about her cloud suit, and then went onstage. He interviewed me and it was just a regular/usual/bad end interview. I felt like shit afterwards, but I always do.

Two days later the allegations about him came out. When I heard that he was conflating BDSM with assault, my friends and I flew into a creative rage. There were multiple women describing the same events. He likes to start out talking dirty, but his boner generator is surprising women with violence beyond their point of consent. We made a video about consent with Nina Hartley for WIFEY.

The din died down. He was arrested and charged. I was thrilled. He would go to jail forever. Yay.

Except he didn’t. Some disgusting cis male scum judge who has spent his life on a bench chortling with other men, bathing in their privilege of being able to tell women how women should be, consulted and listened then judged these vagina holders as liars, because they have vaginas.

Is it their vagina envy that emboldens them to obsess about our own word on our own consent in courts of law? They look into each other’s eyes as they make laws about our bodies, they pound their gavels, shake the cum off their dicks, and pass laws about us, around us, for us, but never including us.

The good girl/bad girl Divided Feminine dynamic allows them to perpetuate their story. Dividing us into those who desire (and are therefore shamed) and those who are admired (for holding a boundary) allows men to split us. This split perpetuates their protaganism, their fun, their status as main actor on the planet. It gives them something to talk about, together, in story, in law, on the streets when they drive past you and agree, this one’s fuckable, this one isn’t. Look more closely at the behavior of men and notice that it is often each other and themselves, in the forms of their own dicks, that they are mostly interested in, anyway. Sometimes it seems a rare man who actually loves women.

It is falling to women to vociferously create a new narrative with our creative work, employing female protaganism. We must invent a Divided Masculine, a splitting of men so that they understand that we are finally noticing that some of them don’t know how to act right. Maybe we name them Man/Scum, and Man means Good Man, and Scum means Bill Cosby or Jian Ghomeshi or any man who refuses to ally with us and acknowledge loudly in front of the world and their brothers that — you know what, actually — hey — you know what?

You DO know when someone is consenting. Yup, here I am, floating the radical idea that when two people have sex, they have one another’s best (sexual) interests in mind. The radical idea would be that they are both there to have fun, and if one person is only half-certain that the other person is having fun, they should stop.

In this weird week of worst ever news about the election and terrorism, heroes dying and people passing laws meant to state-sanction hate, I’ve been overwhelmed. But more than that I am excited because of how we see each other, spark each other. I write today because of what Zoe Kazan wrote yesterday. She wrote because of what Lena Dunham said about what Kesha said. Kesha spoke because of the women who came out about Cosby. We are finally talking to one another, and we are empowered exponentially towards believing ourselves to be true. There is a gathering, an uprising. We have in our hands these machines, connecting us into an ultra-powerful jungle-gym-shaped touch everywhere in the world at once thing. We join up in this ether: the women, the people of color, the queer, and those who vibrate at the intersections. We are only beginning, but it’s impossible not to be inspired by this movement of constant connection. The Others are talking to Each Other now, daring one another towards truth, onward toward the dream of an ever-evolving #power movement.