Quotes by "Donna Freitas"
We cannot sanitize every comment, every come-on, every gesture in our efforts to stamp out harassment and assault. We cannot sanitize all of our spaces, we cannot make them irrefutably safe from words and acts and behaviors. We are humans, and our emotions and desires make us into complicated creatures. Sometimes we are nervous and awkward. We misjudge and we make mistakes and we dream of things that will not happen, of people we want to be with who will not want to be with us. We muster our courage and go for someone who seems unattainable to see if, by some miracle, it turns out they like us back, and this is not a crime. But we can certainly do a better job of teaching people how to understand romantic feelings, how to read signals, how to back off when someone says no, how not to keep pursuing someone when they have rejected us, about what is appropriate and what is inappropriate in certain contexts, in professional and educational circumstances. We must become better thinkers—critical thinkers—about this aspect of our lives, better communicators on every level with respect to consent and non-consent. We may not want consent to be present-at-hand forever, but we should not want consent to go back to being invisible, so invisible that we don’t notice its function, that we don’t care or refuse to care or even see when it has been ignored, disregarded, when this disregard has caused someone else to suffer, to become traumatized, when it has changed her life forever.
