Death Note: Rules, principles, and the purpose of a remake

Oh, hello friends.  I didn't see you there.  Please, come in.  At the time of writing, I just finished watching the Death Note remake on Netflix and it proved to be the perfect material to break the ice on this long-forgotten snark platform of ours.

(I wish I could say this is the start of regular blogging here again, but that tragically seems unlikely.  I do have a twitter now, and of course the blogqueen has been tweeting prolifically for years.  We'll see if I can follow in her illustrious keysteps.)

Death Note (The American One, Mostly)

(Content: death, murder, sexual assault, misogyny.  Fun content: that depends on how much you missed me.)

I feel like any adaptation--whether it's book to film, or a series reboot or reimagining, whatever--has two extra criteria for judgment that original creations can ignore: 

1. Does this story stand on its own, without already knowing the source material? 
2. What value did the adapters get by changing whatever they changed?

And I feel like, regardless of one's opinions on the original story, the American Death Note fails completely on both of these points.  Its protagonist, Light, is changed in bizarre ways that sabotage the thesis of the original, while the supporting leads Mia and L are burdened with new rubbish flaws all too typical for the treatment of women and black men in US cinema.

Death Note (as in 'notebook') started out as a hit manga, which got turned into a hit anime, which got turned into a bunch of other supplementary materials and movies and such, all of which were Japanese and all telling the same core story of high school student Light Yagami, who gains magical murder powers and gets into a years-long battle of wits with law enforcement as he slaughters hundreds of criminals for the supposedly greater good.  It was far from perfect, but it was compelling and creative, telling a story of a seeming paragon of his community who didn't need to be corrupted--he just needed the opportunity to be evil and he'd drag himself down without a blink.  In the name of saving the world from dangerous criminals, he'd kill innocent people to cover his trail, to protect himself, or just to make a point.  He'd manipulate people's emotions, twist and control them, sure of his own perfection and his justified ends.

Light Yagami is a model student, a star athlete, an Encyclopedia Brown-grade genius who helps his cop father solve crimes, and gorgeous heartthrob with legions of girls swooning over him.  He might have gone on to become a brilliant lawyer or miracle doctor or follow his dad's path and be a legendary detective, but he finds a magic book that can kill people and he thinks why not be a god?  Death Note is a story about how someone who's basically modern nobility might actually be the worst kind of monster.  (Before it meant anything else, 'aristocracy' meant 'rule by the best people'.  Sometimes we have to remind ourselves not to trust that idea.)

Light Turner, the protagonist of the Netflix movie, is not this*.  Instead of the outwardly perfect superman, he's a standard American teen protagonist: a nerdy outcast, smarter than bullies but still getting into trouble, with a recently-dead mother and a crush on a cheerleader.  Where the original story makes the Yagamis a magazine-perfect family with mom, dad, and 2.3 kids, Light Turner lives with his dad in a tiny house next to a freight rail line for no apparent reason.  Class politics aren't part of this story, it's just a truth universally acknowledged that a sympathetic teenage protagonist comes from a working-class family.

Where Light Yagami showed vulcan-ish logic and emotional control, Light Turner is every inch the awkward teen, ineffectively confronting bullies and stuttering when pretty girls acknowledge his existence.  Where Light Yagami started experimenting with the killing book of his own accord and didn't hesitate to start offing detectives getting too close to his trail, Light Turner has to be pushed into using it for the first time (to rescue another student), and ultimately goes through the whole movie without killing anyone who hasn't already committed some ghastly crime.  (His second kill is the mafia goon who killed his mom in a traffic accident, who apparently went free because the mob bribed the jury.)

I spent most of the movie trying to figure out if the adaptation writers had intentionally chosen to make their protagonist nothing like the original, or if they thought we were supposed to sympathise with Light.  I think it was intentional, but good lord, at what cost?  Let's talk about the women of Death Note.

Light's mom is not significant in the original story, and she's already been killed for plot fodder in this one.  Other women were mostly extras or quickly killed.  His sister got left out of this version entirely.  The only major female character in the original is Misa Amane, a model who hero-worships Light for killing her parents' murderer and becomes his willing accomplice and nominal girlfriend.  She's clever by normal standards but, of course, foolish compared to proper geniuses like Light, and thus spends most of the story being his willing plaything, killing as he directs and absorbing whatever casual cruelty he shows because she just wants to be useful to him.  It's awful, and the audience is meant to condemn Light for his treatment of her, even if she is also a killer.

In this version, Misa becomes Mia Sutton, and she is the Real Villain of the story.  Mia is the one who pushes Light to kill more people, more publicly, to kill anyone who dares challenge him, and possibly manipulates his emotions to keep him on her side.  I'm sort of impressed that the adapters managed to substantially increase female agency while also keeping the misogyny, and even bumping it from 'evil people mistreat women' to 'the only woman is pure evil'.

Mia is introduced early in the story as the cheerleader that Light watches from the sidelines like an earnest shy creeper.  He's shocked that she knows his name (as American movie tradition demands), and the minute she shows any interest in the book he's reading, he tells her everything about it.  He even declares that she "of all people" should understand the potential of the book, indicating she has some important backstory that got cut from the final version of the movie.  They talk about being able to bring peace to those who have been let down by cops and politicians, and inventing a god of justice to make people too scared to commit crimes.  And then they have sex, because (again) American movie tradition demands it.

[Light and Mia sneak past his dad, sleeping in front of the TV, and up to his room.  Light leans toward her, then hesitates.] 

LIGHT: Can I kiss you? 

MIA: You're not supposed to ask. 

ME: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

We actually have scenes where they are actively making out or undressing each other while googling war criminals to kill off.  This is just apparently their fetish. (ERIKA NOTE: Just saying, Drawn Together picked "murder and wreckage" as a fetish for one of their episodes and probably handled it better. That is not a high bar.)  They also decide their murdersona needs a name--where the Japanese public just started referring to the force murdering all these criminals as Kira ("killer") in the original, Light intentionally chooses the name in this version, with the justification that it means 'light' in Celtic and Russian, and then tries to use the Japanese connection to throw off suspicion.  It doesn't work, and that's when we meet L.

In all versions of this story, L is the counterpart to Light.  Light appears normal, trustworthy, and pretty, and he is an utterly amoral murderer-protagonist.  L is weird, no one trusts him, he looks creepy, and he's the virtuous antagonist.  He's Light's only intellectual equal, tracking down an untraceable killer just as fast as Light can cover his tracks.

Like everything else in this story, the adapters appear to have missed or ignored the point.  Even just consider the following:

Pictured: the live-action American Light played by Nat Wolff, an archetypal gawky Movie Teen, next to the cool and precisely styled anime version of Light.

Pictured: the anime L, an unkempt man with an unsettling stare, and his American live-action counterpart, Lakeith Stanfield, who is more attractive than any human really needs to be.

Granted, apart from making L hot, the adaptation's initial depiction of him is pretty solid.  He's still eccentric, still obsessed with sweets, and they even cast a black actor in this heroic role (I'm generally for this!).  We find him inspecting a Japanese crime scene (cameo by producer Masi Oka) and then boarding a jet with his assistant, the elderly Watari, the only character who stayed Japanese through this adaptation.  L is a Sherlock-esque consulting detective, smart enough to have already narrowed down Kira's true location to Seattle.

(While the original story spends immense time on the details of Light and L's battles of wits, this movie glosses over most of them for the sake of time.  I will summarise because I have a question.  L realised that, before the Kira name started going around, a guy in Seattle in a standoff with police suddenly set his hostages free and then died in a convenient traffic accident, inexplicable events typical of Kira's murders.  To confirm his theories, L started seeding older criminal files into police databases in the Seattle region, and Light apparently used one of those to kill off gangsters in Japan.  When we first see L, he's examining a club where said gangsters appear to have killed each other, but the staff working the club are also dead.  Light wouldn't have been writing the names of the club dancers or waiters unless they were also violent criminals.  Was that just literally a Villains-Only club, or did a bunch of innocent people get killed as well?  That's not supposed to be how the Death Note works.  It has rules.  It has so many rules.**)

Once L arrives, the hunt for Kira amps up, and Light realises he's being tailed by an FBI agent (on the grounds that Light may have access to the police database, which they know Kira does).  Light, as our sympathetic protagonist, gets scared and wants to stop using the Death Note entirely, even though public faith in the justice of Lord Kira is taking off.  Mia says they just have to find out who all of the agents on the team are and kill them simultaneously, to scare off further investigation without implicating Light specifically.  Light is shocked, shocked to hear Mia suggest they use murder to solve their problems.  He's a sympathetic protagonist, after all!  All he's done is kill a few hundred bad guys.  That's what American heroes are supposed to do!  But Mia isn't an obedient girlfriend in this one--she steals a page from the book and kills the FBI agents herself, while Light just thinks it was the work of Ryuk.

(I haven't mentioned Ryuk until now because, in this version of the story, he's basically irrelevant.  Ryuk is the death god who originally owned the book, and he pushed Light to initially use it to kill the school bully who was at that moment threatening to rape another student.  In the original story, of course, Light needs no tempting, and Ryuk mostly exists so Light has an audience surrogate to explain his schemes to.  In this version, he has Mia to help with plot exposition, and she handles the corruption for him too.)

In the aftermath of the agents' mass "suicide", Light's cop father makes a public challenge to Kira, and when he doesn't die for it, L immediately concludes that Light is the killer.  (They have a showdown which is actually pretty good, because Lakeith Stanfield is a top-notch actor.)  To save himself, Light uses the book to compel Watari to go find L's real name.  (The book can "influence" someone's actions for up to two days before killing them, but One Time Only you can burn a page from the book to spare someone's life even after condemning them, so Light is planning to save Watari once he's got the information he needs.  Light's a protagonist, after all, and therefore a good guy!)

I said at the start that adaptations need to stand on their own without knowing the original version***, and this is once of the places where Death Note faceplants.  In the original story, L and some of his colleagues have a complicated and mysterious backstory that is only occasionally hinted at over the course of many chapters.  In this version, the compelled Watari phones up Light and hypnotically explains that L is an orphan raised in a special program that conditions its subjects from childhood to become ultimate detectives.  L was only initiated into the program when, at the age of six, he was able to endure the requisite seven months in solitary confinement without a complete mental breakdown.

That's...

Uh...

Look, in a fifty-episode anime or a hundred-volume comic book, okay, I guess you can spread out the heavy lifting that it takes to introduce those sorts of concepts organically, but in a robotic monologue from a hypnotised butler in the middle of this movie about the corrupting influence of power, that's fuckin' weird.  (Not to mention also being much more backstory than Mia ever gets!)

The conclusion of this is that L's name can only be found in the abandoned orphanage's records, which the writers could have done without the bizarre Ender's Game For Detectives exposition slam.  Watari goes off to hunt for the name, and his disappearance immediately causes L to crack.  Now, far be it from me to object to rational characters acting irrationally when people they care about are in danger, but for the rest of the movie L becomes an increasingly loose cannon, starting with storming the Turner house to accuse and threaten Light's life face-to-face.  That's not something the original L would ever do, and it's at best uncomfortable that they've decided to add this uncharacteristic emotional unhinging after making him the only significant black character.  (It only ramps up after the plan fails, Watari dies, and L, who hates guns, grabs a gun and steals a cop car to chase down Light.  But I'm getting ahead of myself; there's more feminine evil to discuss first.)

Lest we forget just how incredibly American this version is, the climactic events all occur on the night of the homecoming dance at Light and Mia's school.  There's some very weak misdirection involving a top hat that's supposed to let Light slip away from the dance, get L's name from Watari by phone, and then burn the page to save him, but Light discovers that page has already been taken from his book by Mia.  This knocks Light into realising that Mia, not Ryuk, was behind the deaths of the FBI agents--as she explains, she was "protecting" him, both from the cops and from his own cowardice.  She doesn't want to ever stop meting out death in judgment, so she demands that he make her the official owner of the book.  As insurance, she's written his death into it, but since she stopped him from saving Watari, the One-Time-Only Takeback can still be used to spare him.

(Side note: like a lot of the schemes in this movie, this doesn't actually make sense.  Light knows where the book is; Mia does not.  To save himself, he doesn't have to give the book to her, he just has to go burn his own page.  Mia does have one page that she stole, but that's not the one with Light's name on it.  There's no reason for him to give her the book now.)

A prolonged chase scene across the city ensues.  L manages to corner Light at one point, and Light starts to spill everything, but a random bystander shows up on the scene.  L makes the mistake of saying that he's caught Kira, and rando knocks L out with a plank because he is a true believer in Lord Kira.  Light and Mia have their final confrontation on a Ferris wheel.  Light asks her to Choose Love and give up on the book, but as soon as he's distracted she grabs for it and they both fall from the wheel.  She dramatically lands on a flower stall and dies amidst petals, while Light falls into the harbour and gets rescued.  The page with his name on it 'coincidentally' lands in a literal trash fire.

(There's then an incredibly uncomfortable scene in which a bunch of old white cops tell L that Light, currently hospitalised, is clearly not Kira and that, while L might not get jailed for his false accusation, he should know that he ain't welcome in their town anymore.  In a better movie, that kind of implicit threat would be an intentional reflection of police racism.)

Light wakes up from a two-day coma.  He's alive because everything that just happened was according to his last-ditch plan.  He used the book to compel a couple of sex offenders to rescue him from the water and hide the book while he was in his medically-induced coma, then kill themselves when their job was done.  He wrote his own survival into the book as part of their deaths, which... should not work according to any rule we've seen.  It's a book that kills, not saves.

He also wrote Mia's death in, which he admitted to her during their confrontation, but he insisted that it was a conditional thing that would only happen if she tried to steal the book.  This is presented as if it's something we should believe, but according to the rules as presented to us, the fact that he wrote 'she dies after taking the book' means she was magically compelled to steal the book, even if she really did want to Choose Love instead.  Was that what the writers intended?  Was this supposed to be a tragic mistake or a cover for a sinister plan?

Finally, Light's dad arrives and declares that he's realised Light really was the killer--no one else would have caught the connection, but the mafia goon who killed Mom Turner died right before the Kira business started.  Neither of them seems to know what to do now.  Meanwhile, L continues on his Emotionally And Morally Compromised Quest and searches Mia's home (she seems to have lived alone in an apartment, what was her backstory?!) until he finds the page of the Death Note she stole.  He twitches and cries and laughs as he stares at the page and at the nearby photo of Mia and Light together, obviously trying to decide whether to kill Light or not****.  Ryuk pops up to remark to Light that humans are "so interesting!"--and roll credits.

In summary, the white male protagonist gets rewritten as a misled but principled antihero, the white female lead gets powered up from amoral accomplice to ruthless evil mastermind temptress, and the black hero actually on the side of peace and justice goes on a rampage for revenge because he can't control his emotions.  Nothing remains of the original story of an apparent paragon of humanity becoming an unfathomable supervillain just because someone gave him the chance to act without accountability.

So what exactly was the point of this remake?

---

*When people first heard there was going to be an American remake of Death Note, many people pointed out the worst implications due to cultural differences (like American school mass murders, and the overfilling of US jails with black prisoners).  At least they avoided some of that in this script?  Which isn't to say there isn't still plenty of racism and xenophobia to go around: when we see Kira execute a military commander who's been torturing prisoners, they make sure it's an officer in some east Asian military, not American.  Acknowledging evil within the US army is going too far even for this Super Edgy movie.

**The rules of the Death Note are a central part of the original story, and we get every single one of them in detail over dozens of chapters.  This is a good choice for a battle of wits, because the audience understands exactly what the terms of the game are, and it helps us not feel like conflicts are just being resolved by someone pulling a new superpower out of their ear.  Here in this movie, we get a half-dozen rules and the rest are just blurred past with various exclamations of "Why does this thing have so many rules?"  I can see why they would do that to save time, but it does sort of undercut the characters' supposed cleverness, and Light Turner writes various things that the original rules would never have allowed.

***My personal go-to for failure on this is Star Trek Into Darkness, which wants the audience to be shocked and terrified by the revelation of the name Khan, a character who hadn't been featured anywhere in 30 years, let alone in this storyline.

****They obviously wanted to be able to pick it back up for a sequel if they could.  I'm guessing if they did that, L would in fact kill Light's dad to cause Light to suffer as L has, and then it's back to one-on-one cat-and-mouse between them because no one trusts L or believes Light is Kira.  I would protest the loss of the original conclusion as well ("teamwork > loner geniuses"), if it weren't so obvious that they're hoping to continue this story.

Surprisingly Feminist Media

Erika here! Since Will and I have been spending a lot of time battling a malevolent being (which lives outside the realm of space and time just beyond our mortal understanding that wants to consume consciousness--you can understand why this is a difficult and time consuming task) we're going to try something a little different with the updating. 50 Shades was weakening me in the previously mentioned battle, but we're pretty sure that between the two of us we can get out a weekly post (still Wednesday) as well as save the world so long as I don't lock myself into only 50 Shades. So, without further ado, let me introduce a new feature to the blog:

Surprisingly Feminist Media!

I will take a piece of media that is not trying to be feminist or "empowering" and point out some that are unexpectedly kind of feminist. I've got a short list of things to work on for future posts, but suggestions on songs/books/movies (ideally things that are stand alone) would be wonderful.

And our first entry is...!

Boyz II Men - I'll Make Love to You

Content warning - Aggressively 90s croony boyband ballad, extensive use of soft focus, and a questionable amount of silk pajamas.

Lyrics can be found here.

And no, this isn't a joke. I wish it were. I had initially picked a different song, one that's actually good, but when I double checked the lyrics I realized the line that had initially gotten it qualified is in fact not what I thought it was, and it got disqualified. Also if this doesn't prompt you to send in suggestions, I don't know what will. I had to watch that music video before posting it. I also made Will watch it. Well, I tried to. He gave up halfway through and just giggled at my suffering because he's a good friend like that.

Why this song?

This song is about fucking. Going by the music video it's about courting someone when both parties are openly into it so you can get to slow tender candle- and fire-lit (this is actually just sounding like a fire hazard with all those rose petals scattered around) all-about-her genital mashing. Although it does just talk about being all-about-her sex, so, I mean, if she wanted to get to some pegging there may be no fire or flower petals, I guess that's a your mileage may vary scenario? The singer(s) don't seem to be expecting pegging, but I trust that when they say "anything she wants" they mean it. Meatloaf made it very clear, he would do anything, but he won't do that (I've always suspected that was anal, thoughts?) so who knows where their night took them. Let's be clear, there are a lot of songs about touching junk. So many. Like, at least seven. Maybe even eight or nine. So why this one? Two reasons:

Firstly, it is a song about female pleasure. A lot of songs about boning talk about female pleasure, but often through the lens of male pleasure. The singers are not in this for their bits, they are in this for their partners pleasure. If they, to reference the blog favorite 50 Shades, get to "shatter" as well, hey, awesome, but that's secondary.

Secondly, if you look at the lyrics (and I don't blame you if you don't want to) they often come back to consent and communication.

I'll do anything, girl you need only ask - Pegging or egg beaters? Readers, place your bets.


I'll make love to you
Like you want me to - The singer is again coming back to communication.  This couple (by the song, not the video) presumably have been together awhile, so he knows what his partner is into, but again, there is an open invite of "tell me what you want".





I'll make love to you
When you want me to - WHEN you want me to. He isn't just turning up all turgid claiming it's about her LETS GO. He's here, his rocket is ready for lift off, but this is about her, on her terms, and when she wants it. Just because he's ready to pressure wash the quiver bone doesn't mean he expects or demands to right now. If she doesn't want to and just wants to snuggle and instead of dominating him in the bedroom do so at Mario Kart? Hey, her night, her call.


There are depressing few love/banging songs that consider and concentrate on consent or communication. When I googled around many got counted simply because the actual proposition was in the song. I saw Lady Marmalade counted, and while I like that song, it's about trying to get a John, not making sure your partner is safe and comfortable. Also "I would do anything for love" which is kind of about trying to pressure this woman into agreeing to have sex with Meatloaf, so, awk. But they do exist! There is now another entry for that "Not Rapey sexy time" playlist I know you're all secretly working on. May I also suggest the Power Rangers' theme because it's hilarious?

So chime in on things you'd like to see featured here in the future, otherwise I might be forced to do "Do ya think I'm sexy?" by Rod Stewart, so please. Don't force us through that. Make some suggestions.

Language around consent

I'm sure after reading the little tangent in the last 50 Shades post you all knew there was a post about consent coming. So, trigger warnings: I will be talking about rape, I will be talking about consent, I will be talking about all sorts of issues that float around it, and I'm not sure how qualified I am to be talking about these things, so, be warned. The standard comment rules of "Differ without being a dick" will apply to this post, so if I mess up here don't be afraid to call me out, just, you know, do it politely please.

Right, so, you know the phrase "No means no" right? I mean, everyone does. Yet for some reason, we don't give a lot of power to "no". It has to be a certain kind of no for us to listen. It has to be a firm no. A forceful no. It has to be the type of no that will make you a shrill, uptight bitch. You know, all the things women are told we're not supposed to be. Those types of no upset people, right? So we try to say it passively, we try to say it nicely, we try to say it in every way that lets our "no" be ignored because we didn't really mean it.

Here is the triggery personal part. I used to fall into that trap all the time. We'll call him P. P was the first serious relationship I had ever had, and almost all of my sexual firsts were with him. I don't think P is a bad guy and wish him ill, I want to say this first, what I'm about to talk about is just one of the incredibly problematic behaviors he had. I think I'm allowed to still think well of someone and be aware of their faults and problems, after all. So, I would be at P's place and he would try to initiate sex. He'd touch a boob or start kissing and it was blatantly apparent what he was doing. I didn't mind, but I wouldn't be in the mood, and say so. I'd say no. Not a big no. Not a forceful no. Not a stern no. Just a "neh." followed by showing a hand away. His response? Put the hand back and keep going. I could have said "no" again. Sometimes I did, but usually I just went with it. I mean, I usually got off anyways, and he was my boyfriend, so it was fine, right? Ignore the fact that when I did push and stick to my "no" he'd get upset. Not screaming and rage upset. He'd sulk and be moody for a while. He was sulky and moody often enough that at no point in my inexperience did I stop and say "Wait, this is fucked. My wishes around my body are not being respected!"

Then again, I didn't really say no, right? I wasn't firm! I didn't repeat myself! I shouldn't have had to. I wish now I had called him out no it, because he didn't think he was doing anything wrong. He thought "no" that was mild and lifeless meant "try harder" since it wasn't a "real" no which he had been taught for a long time. My not standing up and correcting him was just one more person telling him that was okay. I regret that. I wish I had been more aware, and more bold at the time.

All this is a way of saying that "No means No" isn't as strong as we think it is. Ignoring the fact that saying no is hard. Ignoring the fact that when you're scared and intimidated and shocked and not totally sure what's going that "no" often doesn't even occur to you. Ignoring the fact that saying "no" means having to stop something to do so. There are a lot of problems with "no means no" but I'm not suggesting we do away with it.

I have two solutions to suggest. One is to give "no" more power. When someone says no, leave it at that as much as possible*. Friend doesn't want to dance? Don't make them. Friend doesn't want to drink tonight? Okay. Your body, your call, dude. If in innocuous social situations when you say no it's ignored, or makes people angry, you're going to be afraid to use it when it matters. Like when someone is being sexually aggressive but you kind of like them but you're really not sure if you actually want this or not and- You get the point. If we start treating "no" like it is important, like it matters, not only are we empowering people, we are making it harder for would-be attackers to ignore the "wrong type" of no.

My second solution is to start pushing for "yes means yes" which is, quite simply, that you should ask. I know a lot of people don't like the idea of asking to kiss someone, or to have sex with someone. It's inorganic! However there are ways to ask that are sexy. "Listen, I think you are absolutely stunning and I really just want to kiss you right now, can I?" "Can I (INSERT MANY SPECIFIC EXPLETIVES THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO PREFORM ON PERSON HERE)?" Think of it as an extension to dirty talk if that helps you wrap your head around it. (Once again I'm going to link to Pervocracy because it is just a wonderful place and you should go and read all of it right now.)

Now, why do I think switching from the current standard of "Person A grabs and kisses Person B and things evolve naturally from there" to "stop and ask the person if they want it first" would be an improvement? A few reasons. One is that it would open up dialog about sexual wants and expectations much earlier. I think this is just important period, because sex needs to stop being an awkward taboo and something that is normal to talk about. People are just going to be having better sex because of it. The more important reason in this context is it gives people an opening to say no. It takes the pressure off of the person to come out and say no if they're scared because now it's an option that is much easier for them to take because you asked first! It shows that you value the consent of the person you want to have sexy fun times with, and that is going to help them feel comfortable around you. It also takes a lot of the confusion out of consent. "Well, she didn't say no or stop so I thought..."** You ask, they say yes or no, you keep going or stop, and ask before the next big step (say, going from kissing to fingering) so there remains no confusion over if both parties want to be doing these things. It makes consent more important, and takes some of the mystery and confusion out of it.

I think these are important things. I think a lot of things are important things, but usually I come to a standstill when I try to think of something to DO about these things I find important. Do I start going to protests, or rallies or something? Maybe write letters to my MP? Does that stuff even make a difference? I don't know. I'm still figuring that out, but on this topic, on this one thing, I've at least got an idea. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm hilariously mislead and this is all just PC fluff, but... I don't think it is. I think these are the sorts of steps we need to start taking to shift our cultural narrative to a better one, and if nothing else, talking about it can only help, right? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments!


*I know not to make blanket statements like "no should always be absolute" because that means closing the door on a lot of communication etc, but you get what I mean.
**Or didn't say the right kind of "no" as discussed above.