This is a good book on an ugly subject.

Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape (edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, Seal Press, 2008), examines America’s rape culture, exploring rape in all its forms and probing the factors intrinsically linked to rape. Writers with a host of perspectives and diverse racial, sexual, class, cultural and gender backgrounds offer readers a sense of the unique challenges of rape culture and how we might overcome it.   This is a powerful collection.  To really do the book justice, I would need to dig into every essay and quote nearly every page.  I can’t do that, but I hope I can suggest the amazing range and importance of its contents, well edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti.

Yes Means Yes! is basically all about empowering women to take charge of their sexuality, reject fear mongering attempts to discourage women’s sexuality, and pursue pleasure for pleasure’s sake in communicative, consensual environments.  It raises many issues I had never thought about, lays out the primary causes and effects of rape, shares moving personal stories, and, best of all, presents practical advice about how we might combat the rape present in our world.  I hate when books complain about societal problems yet fail to present feasible action plans; most of the essays in this book don’t fall into this trap.  I put down Yes Means Yes! feeling empowered and inspired to stop the vicious cycle of rape.

Jill Filipovic (of Feministe) lays a solid groundwork for the collection in her contribution, “Offensive Feminism: The Conservative Gender Norms That Perpetuate Rape Culture, and How Feminists Can Fight Back.”  If you were to read one essay to give you an idea of the entire book, this would be it.

Several pieces remind us that rape cannot be uniformly dealt with.  Miriam Perez, Latoya Peterson, Kate Harding and Brad Perry in particular each give us undervalued perspectives that we must weigh in confronting rape culture.  They remind us that the politics of race, class, immigration, the body, and gender play a significant role in how society and the law treats rape, sometimes as a crime and sometimes not, sometimes accepted and sometimes condemned.  Kate Harding’s “How Do You Fuck A Fat Woman?” really riled me up—she dissects the “rape as a compliment” view that permeates the psyche of fat women with histories of sexual abuse.

Jessica Valenti (of Feministing) covers the myth of sexual purity and how it contributes to rape culture.  In rejecting the virgin/whore construct, she echoes the sentiments of Thomas Macaulay Millar in his “Toward a Performance Model of Sex” (perhaps the collection’s most thought-provoking piece).  He asks us to consider sex as we would a musical performance, rather than, say, a computer.  A computer (and a woman’s sexuality, as our society currently objectifies it) is most valuable before it has been used, and depreciates with age and wear.  A musical performance, however, is considered at its best after much rehearsal and perfection.  Musical collaboration is also superior when the musicians perform enthusiastically and with full consent. By pursuing a performance model of sex rather than a commodity model, Millar argues, we can act against rape culture by reducing obsession with virginity and affirming the importance of sexual collaboration and consent.  Another male contributor Brad Perry bolsters Miller’s points in his discussion of the nice guy/stud dichotomy, a revealing parallel to the virgin/whore construct.

Despite the contributors’ efforts to undermine rape culture, violence against women (sexual and otherwise) is unlikely to rapidly disappear. Jaclyn Friedman expertly navigates this territory: she recognizes the pleasure inherent in traditionally “risky” behavior (drinking, flirting, partying); she encourages women to do what they want, but urges them to recognize the importance of taking precaution, defending themselves, and, should they experience this violence, to reject the blame or shame often associated with being the victim of rape or sexual assault.

I liked the book’s format—it’s outside the box with a “blog-style” configuration.  Each piece includes one or more themes: Electric Youth, Fight the Power, Here and Queer, Race Relating, Media Matters, The Right is Wrong, for example.  And at the end of each selection, a list suggests other entries linking readers to similar themes.  This feature is supposed to mimic tagging or hyperlinking in the blogging world, and it works pretty well, making for a fun reading process.  I do wish the editors would have included page numbers with the suggestions at the end of each piece, but that’s a pretty minimal criticism.

Yes Means Yes! is a groundbreaking volume that should be required reading for women and men alike.  I hope that its sometimes-explicit language doesn’t keep it off the shelves of young women and men (probably the audience that needs it most). 

So, should you check out the book? Yes! (And I mean it.)