Consent is a myth. Let's see how it came to be.

It came to pass on a blue marble lit by a yellow star lost in endless space that some men decided that the pile of women a man accumulates is the proper measuring stick by which to judge his power.

The discussion as to why society is in all times and all places a structure of the decisions of men does not interest us hereⁱ, as it doesn't interest us here to consider why should anyone discuss some random marble of some arbitrary color - if you wish to be that abstruse go live with your alien brethren instead.

There exist alternatives, of course : the always popular (and hence more commonly seen) "he who dies with the most toys wins", the more romantic (and hence more normatively common) "he who sees the most things wins", the list goes on. Nevertheless, they picked what they picked, and if you wish to argue the point you're more than welcome to go talk to the dead.

It happens that the men in question weren't just some men, but the representative elite of the almighty French empire.

It is easy to misunderstand history, especially if history means millenia and one lives not a century ; it is easy to misunderstand power, especially if one's lost in the arid labyrinth of monolinguism. Let us try and summarily recuperate what "almighty French empire" actually means. So : out of all the provinces of the almighty Roman empireⁱⁱ, Gallia was certainly the brightest. It was had after a bloody, atrocious sort of war - harder, harsher and less humane than the conflict which resulted in the incorporation of any other province. The debaissement worked as it always does, and a few short centuries later Galia was not only richer than Italia, but actually fiscally stable - Rome would have collapsed in all of three days if it had to actually balance its budget.

Then the Roman empire failed, as all states eventually do, and Galia went to rejoin its German brother. Their creation, Francia, an immense conglomerate reaching past Carinthia failed eventually, and the Eastern and Western Franks split up. So begins the almighty French empire, the center of the world from pretty much that day until the rise of the "democratic" socialist state and the carnage they produced. Do not ever forget that La Belle Epoque ended in a horrible bloodbath because "progress", and because "democracy", and because socialism.

Nevertheless, in this interval spanning just about a millenium, the almighty French empire ruled the world. William, the first to invade Englandⁱⁱⁱ, as well as Napoleon, the first to invade Russia are both French, and are both French in the same manner : ambitious marginals, a Norman and a Corsican.

That the empire was occasionally mismanaged is indisputable. Such momentary lapses allowed the rare German victory in 1870 - an incredible feat, that, to the eyes of contemporaries, specifically because France was actually larger than Prussia, England and everyone else put together - or the moreover amusing episode of Jeanne D'arc. Nevertheless, France was throughout the center of the world, people in Serbia or Romania rebelled against their rulers inspired by the French example^iv and the word for a passport today is passport specifically because trade, diplomacy and culture meant, for about half the history of Europe^v, French.^vi

However, the empire was by and large well managed. That at the end of the XVIIIth century France beat everyone five an' a half times in rapid succession^vii is not particularly surprising, but most importantly : it is not exactly the deed of Napoleon. He gets credited with it all as a matter of course by all those who don't really understand how things work past what their eyes immediately perceive, but there's more Mazarin and Richelieu^viii in that result than there is Napoleon. His choice was primarily how to squander the inheritance carefully built up and preserved by his forefathers^ix, and his merit is the superb execution of that squander.^x

So, that large paranthetical exhausted : some men had decided that the pile of women a man has is his score. This arrangement, whatever merits or dismerits it may have politically, is insanely inconvenient for women. Not only do they have to put up with the common indignity nature bestowed upon their ass^xi but now they have it compounded, because their personal choice in sexual partners has an impact far removed from anything they may personally know or would naturally care about. Specifically : whether any sixteen year old woman opens or doesn't open her legs for some random forty-something banker makes a world of difference to some other, fifty-something banker. The sixteen year old girl is in no position to well evaluate even the existence of the second banker, because really, how would she innately even know such a thing as bankers exists in the first place ? Besides, that a girl may evaluate a boy is an unlikely proposition enough, but once the boy's premier incentive to even proposition her has little to do with her as she is and everything with the metaconsiderations of some complicated psychosexual game he's playing with some other guy(s) all is lost for reason.^xii

And so, the next generation came exactly to the only conclusion possible in this insane system : that the only winning move is not to play! You don't know what novel doom any choice may produce, and so just, keep your head low, your mouth clenched and slowly walk away.

Which is exactly to a t the Puritan strategy. It didn't come out of a void, and it didn't come out of reading the Bible. It came out of practical necessity - there's just no other good way to survive. And so, in spite of its patent insanity (seriously, who ever heard of a girl that didn't want to fuck ?!), the thing spread, because it was sorely needed to counteract... another, greater patent insanity. Isn't life in the city great ? (Yeah, this is the other side of that urban - rural dispute : you have to do stupid shit because others are doing stupider shit still.)

That patent insanity worked its poison, however, because the sexual impulse exists and will continue to exist no matter the "needs of society" and the "best interest of all those involved", resulting in some very angry women, and the entirely bizarre arrangement of the unconscious fuck. Because consent had such a heavy implication baked in - specifically that the man is thus therefore better than all the other men, something they then were willing to raise hell over - while at the same time copulation as an activity remained as stringently necessary as ever, the only proper mode of female behaviour became... being fucked while asleep. Because if she wasn't conscious it meant that she didn't consent, and if she didn't actually consent, well... that meant she could just fuck, rather than create a complex social contract involving many powerful actors outside of her control. Which is how idiocies like "Sleeping Beauty" even came to be, and which is why to this day people don't fuck like normal people do in this alleged art that makes its subject the silver screen.

As you might imagine, such nonsense is no way to live. The following generation was so angry with this otherwise stupid arrangement that they created the myth of consent. Supposedly there exists an exact opposite of the sleeping beauty, and that will thenceforth be the only mode of human sexuality, and anything else should be burned at the stake!

While constrictive enough, and while not seriously implemented by pretty much anyone sane^xiii, this arrangment is still less stupid than the thing it rebels against. Yet it is by no means sane, which means the Grand Oscillator of Sexual Mores will make another pass or two before things settle down sensibly.

The only hope is that the nonsense of "consent", a logical impossibility as well as a ridiculous construction^xiv won't long survive the necessary revolution^xv. More pointedly, the hope is that the nonsense of "consent" won't find a nook or cranny somewhere unrelated to its original stem to entrench itself and cause mischief long after everyone involved forgot all about what the hell they were even involved in.

Hope. The love of myths.

1. It flows from childbearing, if you must know : maternity is positive while paternity is declarative. Society being necessarily the outgrowth of family relations, society is necessarily predicated on the beings of women and the declarations of men. [↩]
2. There was not until its time, nor hence, anything as great. Other empires were arguably larger (most egregiously, the British claim some ridiculous figure based on purely declarative nonsense, conveniently forgetting that most of the people involved in that statutory "empire" couldn't speak the language, or that a good fraction lived their entire life without ever as much as seeing an Englishman from any distance), but it is a pointless, hopeless sort of argument. The Roman empire was the largest, the longest lived and by a very thick margin the most important, successful and instructive attempt in the otherwise doomed quest to create states that matter in the world.

   Before you even start with the Maurya & Han/Ming/Qing nonsense : nobody cares, seriously. So Iron Age India had some sort of centralised state, which went away like dust, so that centuries later the continuators of the Romans had to teach the stranded Indians how to work iron again. What nonsense is this ? The Qing dinasty doesn't survive past its vases, which is as much as can be said of the Etruscans. Let it be, there's no shame in being either the center of the world or superior people. It happens, tis a fact of life, learn to live with it. [↩]

3. The other is also William, but a Dutchman. Interestingly enough, in both cases the foreign invasion completely (if openly and quite explicitly) restructured the country, to everyone's benefit. England, in this more neutral historical perspective, plays exceedingly well the part of the ideal whore : if strictly disciplined by a well chosen but foreign to her master she does deliver impressive results down the road. Essentially the curse of the island : useless on its own, ideal setting stage for foreign interest. A very feminine geographic feature, the island. [↩]
4. What the US is trying to fake these days with its Nuland-sponsored "color revolutions" the French obtained naturally. The same spirit of difference stands between a historical novelist, who actually wrote well, and a contemporary American "best selling" author, who pretends to have at some point written something. [↩]
5. A straight millenium bridges Cluny to the 1900 exhibition. [↩]
6. By comparison English is merely a temporary convenience - it does not look likely it will matter three straight centuries. It certainly does not look like it has the substance to do so. [↩]
7. You perhaps remember Wellington's victory. It came in the War of the Sixth Coalition, and according to the man himself it was the closest thing ever seen on a field of battle. [↩]
8. Both ambitious ministers of autocratic, absolute and disinterested monarchs - let it never be forgotten that this and this only is the avenue to anything good in this world. [↩]
9. Essentially, once it became obvious that the empire is going the way of empires, the choice was whether to slide into the darkness slowly and painfully, like the Byzantines (who, by the time the Turks finally relieved them of responsibility essentially consisted of four or five smallish villages scattered among the gigantic reinforced walls of a much more glorious past - the city of Constantinople was something like two thirds pasture when it finally fell) or to go out with a bang. Napoleon went "eh shit, let's at least throw a funeral party" and most of France shrugged its shoulders and followed him. [↩]
10. Not in any sense similar to Hitler on this score. If you bother to read his speeches throughout the 30s, and then bother to pick up a newspaper or look at a map you will no doubt notice that all of Hitler's geopolitical complaints have in fact been resolved.

    You may argue whether the war was necessary to resolve them, but if you do that you'd better also argue whether the Civil War was actually necessary to resolve the civil complaints Lincoln claimed it intends to solve. For all we know of alternative history the slave owners were going to release their slaves anyway, and in better conditions than the war left them - poor lumpenproletariat at the mercy of the Northern capitalist (an altogether probable outcome) and similarly the British leeches were going to release their grip on the world by their own volition (an altogether more improbable outcome).

    Nevertheless, he did in fact put an end to the British Empire, and to the arrangement of the world that flowed from it. An expensive approach towards that goal, no doubt, and in many parts poorly executed and even worse thought through, but nevertheless : a century later England is begging Scotland not to abandon ship while Germany is - for the first time in the history of the continent, if you don't count the brief taste of power under Bismarck - at the wheel. [↩]

11. To quote,

    The first part of that statement happens to be true, women are in fact malleable by nature for very good reasons, which certainly aren't entirely cultural, and live the misfortune of not actually owning their own body as a matter of course - it belongs not just to itself, a problem shared with men, but also to their children, and in a greater sense to "society", because any shortage of men can be remedied by an alteration of sexual mores, but a shortage of females can not be remedied in any way shape or form : the maximum number of children born in any one year is exactly equal to the total count of ovulating females in that population.

    [↩]

12. Incidentally, these overtones are why women generally - specifically contrasted to femidiots, who are emphatically not women - are put off by the entire PUA thing. It'd be nice, you know, if one didn't have to go to work encased in ballistic armor, if one didn't have to probe all food items for shit, and if one could rely on the notion that if on the receiving end of a sexual proposition, that proposition stems from something direct rather than from some sort of meta-consideration. [↩]
13. I know I've never actually asked any girl whether she wants to or not, except maybe once, the first time - and seriously, what do you do if your wife gets drunk, jack off ? [↩]
14. Constructing the "opposite" of things is how you end up with the WonderBoy, that magical kid who eats shit and shits whole prunes. [↩]
15. The word is used in its proper sense, like in "The long blade does twenty-four full revolutions each day." [↩]