Fuck Yeah, Gender Studies! was set up to discuss gender, sexuality, body politics & related issues from the very personal to the universal & everything in between; to address those gender/sexuality issues that, though of great importance, get fewer column inches than they should. For more information, please use the links below.
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Anonymous asked: Ok consent, but isn't that like unhygienic and that stuff?
I dunno. Can it be that unhygienic when we let doctors/researchers/forensics teams deal with cadavers/bits of cadavers in all stages of decay/disease/decomposition? And when we let people have open-casket funerals etc? Presumably safety precautions could be taken.
But the truth is that i don’t know. Not washing your hands after going to the toilet is unhygienic, right? But that’s not illegal.
Anonymous asked: Are you serious right now? It's not okay to have sex with a dead body. Period. They are not giving consent at the moment of the actual having sex. Second of all, this conversation isn't just frivolous, it's also DISTURBING that you would think it's okay to not only promote bestiality but also having sex with non consenting bodies. Stop.
Promote bestiality?! WTF?
Anonymous asked: imo it's just disrespectful to the person's body to have sex with them after death. you're defiling it. i doubt most people would actually give consent to people having sex with their bodies after death. this conversation is frivolous.
But if they did give permission, what’s the problem?
P.S. if i thought a conversation was frivolous i probably wouldn’t make part in it…
Although while we’re on the topic of necrophilia…
There’s nothing wrong with it in principle, surely. Things are done to corpses all the time without consent—autopsies being the primary example. But putting (non)consent aside, for now:
We give people the opportunity to stipulate in their wills what they want to happen to their corpse after they die. If someone wishes to allow their partner (or a named person, named people, or anybody) to have sex with their corpse, why shouldn’t their will be carried out? I can’t think of a good reason why not.
I welcome your comments.
OH
MY
FUCKING
GOD
I CANNOT
I ACTUALLY CANNOT
‘But putting (non)consent aside,’
WHAT THE BIGGEST FUCKING MOST ASSHOLISH THING TO EVER FUCKING SAY
SERIOUSLY??????????
god DAMN
Way to miss the point. Congratulations.
Well, if someone were to indicate in their will they want their body to be used for sex or what have you, that to me would be consent of sorts.
Right, which is what i was talking about—if someone put it in their will, it’s permission.
The reason i want to put (non)consent aside in this discussion is because i don’t think it’s pertinent to bring up the matter of autopsies being performed on the bodies of people who never agreed to it, or sexual acts hypothetically being performed on the bodies of people who did not agree to that, etc. This issue of acts being carried out on a body against the wishes of the deceased is a totally separate thing, whether that refers to sexual acts, medical procedures, forensic investigations, or whatever.
Cadavers can’t even consent.
What i’m talking about is a prior agreement, a stipulation in one’s will, that one’s body may be used for a specified non-burial/non-disposal purpose.
Although while we’re on the topic of necrophilia…
There’s nothing wrong with it in principle, surely. Things are done to corpses all the time without consent—autopsies being the primary example. But putting (non)consent aside, for now:
We give people the opportunity to stipulate in their wills what they want to happen to their corpse after they die. If someone wishes to allow their partner (or a named person, named people, or anybody) to have sex with their corpse, why shouldn’t their will be carried out? I can’t think of a good reason why not.
I welcome your comments.
OH
MY
FUCKING
GOD
I CANNOT
I ACTUALLY CANNOT
‘But putting (non)consent aside,’
WHAT THE BIGGEST FUCKING MOST ASSHOLISH THING TO EVER FUCKING SAY
SERIOUSLY??????????
god DAMN
Way to miss the point. Congratulations.
Anonymous asked: Not sure if I have understood this right but are you saying that if someone with a penis forcibly without consent inserts them self into a vagina that's rape but if someone with a vagina forcibly and without consent inserts someone else's penis into themselves that's not rape? Really?? That's messed up!
Well, i’m not saying it. That’s how the UK Sexual Offences Act 2003 says it.
blackma asked: The presence or lack of consent is typically the basis for rape prosecutions. However, consent is revocable, meaning that if you change your mind about sleeping with that person, you have a legal right to do so, regardless of your prior consent. To put sexual consent into a will would create an irrevocable right to sex with another person (or their corpse) which would create precedent that could extend to other situations where with person is unable to explicitly revoke that consent.
But a corpse is a corpse. Not a person. Rape is irrelevant here.
Someone writing a last will and teastament will well be aware that they won’t/couldn’t possibly change their mind after they die because they’re dead. They’re dead, they can’t feel shit, they’re not coming back, they’re fucking dead.
Everybody knows that’s going to happen to them one day. They know that once they die they couldn’t possibly change their mind because they don’t have one because they’re dead. Consequently, they are allowed in law to say “i want to leave my body to science” and nobody starts worrying about how soon researchers might be allowed to use live (sleeping, or anaesthetised, or whatever) human subjects in anatomy lessons or car safety tests—because that argument would make no sense!
blackma asked: There's a difference between consent to an isolated procedure and ongoing sexual consent. It would undermine every rape law in the United States which considers consent isolated and revocable. This is not an issue of a medicine, it's an issue of sexual agency. Irrevocable consent to sex with your dead corpse is not an inheritable right. Also, that working with dead bodies requires such stringent protective measures necessarily implies a persistant health risk. Wrapping it up won't change that.
What isolated procedure? Forensics teams do all sorts of shit to cadavers. When you leave your body “to science”, that’s what you do—then the body gets dealt with however the research team needs to deal with it. Could be for anatomy lessons, could be for crash testing, could be for all manner of things, and multiple things.
What is the difference that you’re trying to highlight here? I don’t see it and i don’t see how you came to your conclusion that it would undermine every rape law in the US (aside: i’m not based in the US anyway!). A corpse can’t consent to sex, yes. But a corpse also can’t consent to procedures for scientific research (because corpses can’t consent to anything because they’re corpses), yet we do permit people to leave their corpses to science as part of their last will and testament.
It negates the idea that consent is incident based and revocable, as opposed to something that can be given away via a blank check type transaction between two parties. Dead bodies = health issues. Moral relativism is not a catchall.
But people can already donate their bodies to science. Why is donating one’s body to necrophilia different?
Health issues, if they even exist, should be discounted. Pathologists, forensics teams and coroners stick their hands into corpses in all stages of decomposition all the live long day. They wear gloves. Safety regulations for sexual contact, too, could be put in place if necessary.
mynameislyddy asked: Interesting post about necrophilia; good point, really. I think necrophilia is like paedophilia, in that people hear/read the word & jump to extremes. Even I automatically imagine someone with a few weeks old corpse, that is maybe their murder victim, horror stories etc, like the word paedophilia conjures up images of men in their 60s kidnapping wee kiddies. In reality, necrophilia includes your scenario & others, just as paedophilia includes a 16yr old & a 15yr old in a long term relationship.
But that isn’t what paedophilia is. Paedophilia is an attraction (not necessarily an act!) in an adult to a pre-pubescent child or a child in the early stages of puberty. A teenager of age who is attracted to someone just under the age of consent (say, 15) is not a paedophile.
I’ve mentioned paedophilia a lot on the blog, and if you google the term along with the site:fuckyeahgenderstudies.tumblr.com function then you should come up with plenty of my thoughts on that.
For now/today i’d like to stick to discussing necrophilia without blurring the issue or drawing in other things.
