New Language

Our guest lecturer on Wednesday, Katie Macdonald, facilitated an in depth look into our readings for the week. One part of our discussion was the importance of language in talking about sex and sexual violence. The prompt was to discuss the usefulness of additional terms for characterizing sex: ethical sex, unethical sex, and unjust sex. While the academic world seems to accept a multitude of different terms for every little thing, I do not think that popular media would be so accepting of more terms for sex. I can imagine the hateful headlines and comments that would arise from new terms categorizing sex, accusing feminists of complicating sex and oppressing men.
        I do wonder about the usefulness of these terms. Does it just complicate the issue further? When some people do not even understand the entirety of sexual assault and consent can we, in our current society, hope that they will understand these terms too. Am I being too diminishing of the knowledge our society may hold? There is so much ignorance around sexual violence and I worry that if we cannot establish a basic sex education that includes consent, information about the presence of power imbalances, and inclusion of LGBTQ+, the terms will just fall on ignorant ears.
        When discussing these terms in class it was mentioned that the word unjust and justice bring up the idea of revenge. So to term sex as unjust what connotation does this bring up. I do agree that the idea of revenge is linked to the word justice because the word justice is often used as an action: "I will get justice for what was done to me" etc. While I do relish in the idea that all bad actions are met with justice this is often not the case. Justice is also liked to the legal system and to term sex as unjust is met with an assumption that justice will be done for this unjust sex but again this is often not the case. So just as mentioned before that there needs to be a change in education for these terms to be useful, there also needs to be a change in the legal system to make these terms effective.