Inkhaven Day 15 - The Tyranny of Benign Advances

In the Spirit, Not the Letter: Part 1 of 4

By the night of April 6th, I was one week into a monthlong writing residency, and was curled up at one end of the Winners’ Lounge. I’d just been introduced to Blood on the Clocktower, learning through playing and consequently losing quickly. There was an allusion to Jude’s ex-girlfriend, and he launched into the story of how they’d gotten together, because it was allegedly a cute one.

I soon cut him off: “Baaad look. There’s nothing cute about having had to ask someone out three separate times.” I was teasing, but not entirely kidding.

This led to a lively, good-faith conversation I had not planned to have amid a sausage-fest of rationalist-and-adjacent bloggers, many of whom self-describe as chronically online. I liked the people in my cohort, but asking them to digest nuanced and incredibly subtle dynamics—that are often opaque to people, including many women, who haven’t been forced by repeated experience to reckon with them—seemed naive.

It went better than I expected.

---

In November, I headed to an invite-only private event with my group of close friends who’d gone the year before, plus a couple newcomers, including Miles and Lana.

Everyone was excited about Miles. I’d socialized with him peripherally, in groups; he’d given off reserved, thoughtful teddy bear. In our three-car caravan, Kieran and I claimed the rental truck for ourselves. On the drive, I asked him—pointedly, given his catlike reticence to truly warm up to people—who he was most looking forward to spending time with.

His immediate answer: “I really like Miles. I’ve barely talked to the guy, but just get such a good vibe. Like I could live with him, or start a business with him.”

I was excited about Lana. We’d been friends for ten years and our journeys, internal and external, had drawn uncannily parallel tracks, but we’d rarely seen each other given our similarly tumbleweed-y lives. For weeks I raved to my friends about how much they were gonna love her. They humored me.

My raving was prescient. She was warm, smart, considerate, funny, pretty, competent. I’d already known this; everyone else, entranced, had not been ready for it.

As someone who could relate to the double-edged-sword of being a shiny newcomer, I noticed this. During the first of our many private sitting-on-the-bathroom-floor sidebars that weekend, I asked whether anyone had crossed over from giving neutral-to-positive attention to making her uncomfortable.

Her immediate answer: “It’s not gonna happen with Miles.”

I hadn’t picked up on their dynamic yet, but asked if she wanted me to do or say anything.

“No—really—but thanks for looking out. He’s nice, I do like him, but things are definitely not going to go where he wants them to.”

That night, I saw it. She was curled in the Jacozzy near me, coming up too hard on a molly analog, taking deep breaths and mostly non-verbal. Miles scooted right up into her and started sliding his hand up her thigh. She grimaced and shook her head. “Nuh-uh…”

He did not immediately take his hand away. Instead, he asked, “Too much?”

Eyes still squeezed shut, looking like she might puke, she said, “Too much.”

Having been asked not to make a thing of it, I stared at him pointedly from a few feet away. Finally, he removed his hand. He did not remove the rest of himself, despite there being plenty of room to give her a little space.

Less than an hour later, I heard him ask, “So, when you said no before to me touching your leg, was that just because you were overstimmed at the time, or…?”

She groaned, climbed out of the Jacozzy, and lay on the floor. I saw him watching her, contemplating joining. I inserted myself nearby.

That night, she slept between me and the wall; we’d agreed this might prevent more “misunderstandings.”

I did not learn until much later that the next morning—after I’d been the first to wake and left to get food—Miles had gotten up from across the room and laid down next to her, snuggling up while she and everyone else remained asleep. She woke up thinking he was me, and froze in horror upon realizing he wasn’t.

That was just the first night.

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The next evening, from across the room, I saw Miles approach Lana while she was mid-conversation with someone else, pulling her aside, physically corralling her into a corner.

Whatever he said to her next catalyzed a reaction I could see from twenty feet away: deer in the headlights, thinly veiled disgust, a slow shaking of her head, the unmistakable mouthing of a horrified “Noooo.”

Instead of excusing himself, he continued talking. Lana recovered, put on a neutral expression I recognized as dissociation, and nodded in a placid, tension-diffusing sort of way until she could make a clean break.

Afterwards, I described to her what I thought I had seen. “Was I just projecting onto you from across the room, or was that actually a deeply gross conversation?”

“Dude, you fucking clocked it. He was trying to talk me into going with him to an orgy.”

I kept checking in with her, offering to intervene. She kept declining: making a thing of it felt nuclear. She was new to the group. She didn’t want to disrupt social cohesion. She was used to dealing with sex-pests. After we shared a frustrated, cathartic laugh at his expense, she said, “I just appreciate that you see it.”

He never cornered her when they were completely alone. Instead, when Lana got comfortable enough with some of my other friends to cuddle with them, Miles took the opportunity to walk up and slide in right up behind her ass, or in some other not-overtly-non-sexually-neutral configuration. [Incidentally, Lana and I commiserated during our bathroom debriefs about how rarely we can stand to be in cuddle-puddle situations for this very reason: someone staking a claim, someone taking advantage of ambiguous, “nonsexual” dynamics to force proximity.]

A few times, she would scoot away, or physically pick up his hand and throw it off her: “Don’t. Touch. Me.”

It wasn’t enough to keep him off for long. The options he implicitly gave her were to endure, to overtly single him out in front of everyone [for behavior that looked similar to what had been permissible coming from others], or get up and leave. On the last night, Lana asked Alex and Kieran, the two biggest dudes in our group, to sleep on either side of her—human shields.

During the event, Miles let some of the others—that is, the guys, and the one girl who had lived as a guy till her twenties—know he was crushing on Lana and thought they were vibing. He came off as timid and clueless—just a hapless boy of nearly forty—and asked for advice on how to flirt.

They had reportedly each given him reasonable advice: variations on “flirting is like playing catch, not dodgeball.”

Obviously, he had not followed this advice.

Know who he didn’t ask? Me. The person with the most similar lived experience to Lana’s, and her only prior friend in the group; i.e., the one person, besides Lana herself, that it would have made sense for him to consult if he’d actually been interested in getting in her good graces, or inferring her true feelings and taking them for a final answer.

By the end of the event, others had caught whiffs, but had talked themselves out of it. Lana hadn’t complained to them, and I had bitten my tongue at her request, so they’d given Miles the benefit of the doubt and assumed they were imagining things.

After the event, Miles sent Lana texts warping the narrative, implying some deep connection over their “shared Philly roots” from their very first conversation, even though she had begun visibly extricating herself from his presence by the end of that first day.

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Months later, wine-drunk in the Winners’ Lounge, I quipped that the moment a guy makes an overt advance, I lose interest, because I want to be the one to make the advance.

It was a glib oversimplification, but not entirely untrue.

If you’re actually flirting, you’re information-gathering. Whether shrouded in banter or transparently positive, you’re signaling interest in a way that doesn’t try to possess or restrict. This is the open invite, or the brief touch on the arm that puts the onus on the recipient to up the ante—where the default response is “no” until otherwise demonstrated. Catch: throw a ball and see if they throw it back.

What I call the Tyranny of Benign Advances is the opposite. It is not forceful or intimidating. It’s worse: it leverages plausible deniability by, mostly, not making overt advances. It controls someone’s freedom of movement by weaponizing their empathy, their reluctance to reject someone in front of others, their fear of appearing cruel or conceited, and their own need for belonging, in order to “wear them down.”

In this case, “no” may be accepted as an answer, but not as a final answer—they must repeatedly swat off advances. Dodgeball: keep throwing balls until you hit them. It’s the modus operandi of a fucking mosquito.

Say you’re a woman, sitting in a group, trying to make new friends. A guy sits down so that he is subtly resting his arm and leg against you, despite there being a wide berth on the other side of him, and appears not to notice he is doing this. You’re somewhere that doesn’t allow you to subtly move away: already right by a wall, or another person, or the edge of a couch. He is someone who’s established some social credit with you, or at least with the group, but not someone with whom you’ve established this sort of persisting touch as being chill.

I learned early in life that a man who is resting his bare thigh against yours definitely fucking knows he is doing so, but pointing this out easily gets gaslit away, especially in front of other people [sorry, I didn’t even notice, do you think everyone’s in love with you or something?!].

This may not be intentional or malicious. He may see himself as a Nice Guy, not a predator, and may interpret what’s happening as something wholesome.

Nonetheless, by putting you in that position, he’s not gathering signal of your interest or lack thereof. Whether he “means it” this way or not, he is corralling you: you are less an agentic [and sexually motivated] being in your own right than you are a frog he is trying to sneak up on and catch.

You have three options: 1.) endure the contact you didn’t ask for; 2.) confront the person, which requires drawing attention to behavior they can deny and turn back on you; 3.) leave without giving away why.

The benignness is the entire point. If he’d been creepier, more overt, more alpha, more aggressive, that would have been easy to name, to rebuff, to criticize, or for someone else to notice.

Instead, some Nice Guy controls what rooms you can be in and how long you can stand to be in them. Decisions like what to wear become non-neutral—any presentational choice becomes relative to him, and likely others, whether because of or in spite of. Your body is up for grabs, as long as the grabs are subtle. A slow degradation—a difficult thing to point out, because no single offense is that dramatic, and saying anything often makes your own life worse.

Oftentimes, if you tell someone about this kind of thing or they otherwise find out—especially someone in a position of authority or culpability—they’ll want to take face-saving measures. This usually takes the form of going on an inquisition into the “Truth,” sometimes dressed as a witch hunt for “bad apples” to make an example of. Eventually—when the “bad apple” doesn’t seem quite bad enough—doubts are raised about the accuracy of your perceptions, your ability to make your boundaries sufficiently legible, or both.

What I didn’t say in the Winners’ Lounge, but confided in someone later, was that I had drawn the above example from something that had already happened to me twice in the last week. Sans this behavior, I had found the guy to be genuinely likable and charming.

I’d chosen option 3: find some excuse to leave.

When I told her about it, I learned that the same guy had done the same thing to her. She’d chosen option 1: endure it and pretend not to notice. We’d each done what had made sense in context, in our own rational self-interest.

---

Without understanding the subtler dynamics of control and benignity, it’s easy to straw-man women in the abstract—people talk about how ludicrous it is for them to feel “threatened” by men who are so clearly awkward, pathetic, or clueless. But it’s not necessarily about “danger.” The complaint isn’t always about feeling unsafe in terms of some immediate physical threat. It’s about being persistently and invisibly claimed. It’s about being put in a position where you have to be either avoidant or aggressive—towards some underdog, making you look like a vain bully—just to enjoy your own bodily and interpersonal autonomy.

Someone being “harmless” has nothing to do with whether he’ll assault someone. Rape is, more often than not, opportunism, not force. As it stands, Miles was, and is, Schrödinger’s rapist; no one will ever know what might’ve happened. Well-intentioned and sympathetic from his own point of view, Miles himself may never know what he would’ve done. When he snuggled up to Lana while she was asleep and no one else was watching, he likely wasn’t conscious of being predatory in his behavior. And yet, I, Lana, and so many other women I know have been raped in incidents beginning in precisely this way. What if she hadn’t woken up when she did?

The common response by a friend, or friend group, is to avoid falsifying or verifying someone’s supposed trustworthiness, and to instead accept some degree of uncertainty. Just a few days ago, a new friend told me, “Well, I have this friend who…well, he’s a friend, but I don’t know that I’d trust him alone with a girl.”

---

In the wake of the post-event fallout [see Part 2], Miles sought exoneration, not accountability. He sent identical texts to Kieran and Alex, asking for “feedback.”

Kieran lunged for the opportunity, then debriefed me: “I knew what he really wanted. He kept fishing for me to tell him what, if anything, I’d seen or heard, so that he could react to it and reframe it or claim he didn’t know or whatever. And I gave him fucking nothing, so he couldn’t defend himself without also telling on himself. So he just started babbling.”

At some point, Kieran had asked, “Have you talked to Anna about any of this?”

Miles had stumbled through some excuse about how Nora had told him not to talk to me—a nonsensical reply, even if true, that once again put the responsibility on somebody else.

After Miles spun his wheels recounting his version of the weekend for a while, Kieran had said, “So. It seems like you’re arguing that you didn’t technically violate consent.”

“Yeah, exactly!”

“Want to know what my definition of consent is? It’s making sure that all parties involved are on the same page about wanting something to happen. That’s it. That’s the only reason any of the verbal or nonverbal protocols matter—in order to figure that out. Do you think Lana was on the same page as you?”

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Read the entire essay series: In the Spirit, Not the Letter
Part 1: The Tyranny of Benign Advances
Part 2: The Appeal to Pity
Part 3: The Architecture of Protection: 3i, 3ii, 3iii
[^broken into three wee posts because Inkhaven was a doozy]
Part 4: One of the Good Guys