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Comparing Jaclyn Friedman's Yes Means Yes And What You Really Want

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The speaker I went to was Jaclyn Friedman, she has a Master’s degree in creative writing from Emerson College. The main topics she covered in her presentation were sexual safety, consent, sexual violence, and feminism. Her presentation was based on her books Yes Means Yes and What You Really Really Want. The speech was to inform the audience, college students, of safe sexual behaviors to practice. She had an interesting analogy for rape, on the topic of rapists she said, a person who commits rape is not a monster lurking in the shadows, just a human being who makes a monstrous decision. Friedman used very colorful language to connect with the audience and make them laugh. She also spoke about more lighthearted things to be informal and interact with the audience. For example, Friedman blamed her loudness and extroverted behavior on being from New Jersey. When she used unfamiliar terms she would define them, such as, ‘mob psychology’, when someone sees something bad happen yet they don’t take the lead to change it because they assume another person will do something about it. It was easy to tell she was very passionate about preventing sexual assault, because she spoke about her experience with it in college and how she wants to inform college students about the importance of consent in sex. …show more content…

She used the term slut-shaming for when people make girls feel bad about expressing their sexuality. In class we examined the term double-bind, when girls are shamed for both having sex and not having sex. It was a positive that she discussed the shame girls face with expressing sexuality, but it was negative in the sense that she didn’t mention they also face being shamed for not having sex. She presented her information like a heterosexual script, where the woman is the ‘gatekeeper’ for sex and the man is the sexual aggressor, always pushing the limits of the woman to have

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