Manipulation & Consent

The Belfast rape trial points towards a society where young people are not sexually educated to hold on to what’s right for them as individuals.

I’ve just watched Derren Brown’s show The Push on Netflix and had quite a visceral response to watching someone manipulated into betraying their own ethics, humanity and social conscience to the extent that they are ‘pushed’ into committing murder. Of course, this is the whole point of the show, which manipulates us, the audience, in turn. It’s a Trump-era warning à la the 1960s Milgram Obedience Experiments, which explored how ‘justified’ the defence of ‘following orders’ was to excuse responsibility for Nazi mass-murder.

To me, the show is an important demonstration of how each of us can be manipulated because of our insecurities, our need to belong and be accepted. Such exploitative manoeuvrings, central to the art of advertising and social media anxieties, compromise our individuality gently and slowly, inviting us into photoshopping small deceits and betrayals, the purpose of which are to lead the individual three steps too far without their even realising it. You have to be in so deep that you can’t even question how you got there. In our urgency to have an app or ‘upgrade’, how many of us notice, never mind read, the online small print before consenting ‘yes’?

A crucial horror in rape is the victim’s fear that they somehow colluded with the attack on them; that they had asked for it, in what they were wearing, how they smiled, what they allowed. The refrain from all rape trials, legal or online, hinge on this question of why the assaulted person didn’t say something, do something, walk out, scream. Watching the central character in Derren Brown’s show may reveal why logical reactions are rarely what happen in horrific situations. Quite the opposite.

Undoubtedly, whatever happened that night in Belfast in June 2016 involved a lot of people being pushed into sexual activity that had little to do with open communication or mutual consideration and pleasure, but everything to do with sexual social pressures. Whatever level of consent was, or was not given by the teenage girl involved, we cannot ignore the social compliance pushed on women to accede to men’s sexual expectations and demands. The old ‘joke’, ‘How do real men know when a woman has had an orgasm? Real men don’t care,’ evidences the stark brutality within male sexuality.

Whatever happened or didn’t happen within the men involved, that night and over the subsequent days, entailed overt or subtle pushing. With their text messaging boasts, and high-five invitations into group sexual activity they acted like a pack that excluded, denied, and objectified the woman. But are they not just manifesting the social compliance that this is what men ‘do’ or should do, or should want, with no, or very little regard to what a woman wants. They are just a thing to be fucked.

I love superhero movies, but to date I have not wrapped a blanket round my shoulders to jump offa building attempting to fly. And yet, how many men and women watch pornography and believe this is the expectation, that this is what should happen? The pornifying of our sexual culture further pushes a social sexual compliance around what one should desire and do sexually. In my work with teenagers and young adults it has become the new normal for 14 or 15 year-olds to ask about anal sex and group sex and bukkake, not from personal curiosity but from the social pressure that this is what is expected of them as men, as women. To witness teenagers sending undressed or naked pictures to each other to get attention or recognition is harrowing until you appreciate that this exactly what the apps instruct us all to do.

At no point in sexual education do we invite young men or women to remember and hold onto what’s right for them as individuals, and not to get lost in the demands of the other person or people and certainly not for society. There is a certain progress in teaching them to protect themselves with condoms, but how do we encourage them to protect their own boundaries, desire and humanity without communicating shame or censorship?

Sex is an incredible thing. It involves power. Honouring this power, respecting it, recognising its operations, its potential to heal or to harm, is inherent in a mutually consensual intimate exchange. Alas, like most demonstrations of power there is little responsibility encouraged or evidenced. It is easy to observe the trial in Belfast and pass judgements, but if we push ourselves we might see something of ourselves, our conceit, our vulnerability, our fear and our society in both the men and the woman on trial.

The twist at the end of Derren Brown’s show demands that we can never afford to take comfort and imagine that when push comes to shove we could not be manipulated into hurting someone, especially when a potential reality is that indeed we may already have.

Ray is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist specialising in individual and relationship counselling. He can be contacted on 086 828 0033.

How many men and women watch pornography and believe this is the expectation, that this is what should happen?