Obviously, I agree 100% with Belle.
I do wonder, though, if the original poster simply didn't (with, granted, a staggering degree of cluelessness about the way people talk and feel about stuff here in the streets beyond the ivory walls of the Tower of Boy Thought) misspeak. In his update he writes --
"Even if you feel entirely unaroused (neither pleasantly aroused nor, more likely, unpleasantly aroused) by someone caressing your private parts in public, you may feel quite upset by the likelihood — not certainty, but likelihood — that this other person is deriving some arousal from the action, and from your involuntary involvement in the action."
"Unpleasantly aroused" almost seems to suggest we're meant to construe "aroused" not to mean "pleasantly sexually stimulated" but in a kind of neurological sense -- so that "intense disgust and horror and a visceral feeling of violation unmitigated by any sexual response" counts as a kind of "arousal".
Thus, pleasant arousal, the kind that makes us horny, would be one end of a spectrum, revulsion and trauma the other end, and feeling unattachedly neutral would be in the middle. Then we'd read the passage as saying, "sexual assault is when you are involuntarily touched either in a way which makes you feel intensely (usually bad, but even good would be bad), or where, even if you remain dispassionate, cool, neutral, and unaffected, it bugs you that your body is being exploited for someone else's jollies."
That seems to be the only way you could read the post where it would make any sense. Read that way, it's actually a pretty reasonable definition. It is, of course, a kind of bizarre semantic violence to read "aroused" that way. But there's also something very telling about that reading of "aroused", if it is intended.
In the Tower of Boy Thought, any kind of physical feeling -- any assertion by the body of its primacy, in which it has the temerity to occulde the workings of the mind -- is a kind of assault. The disinction between the good arousal of horniness, and the bad "arousal" of being kicked in the head by a mule or falling into a nest of tarantulas, which for most folks is kinda significant, is secondary.
Obviously, I agree 100% with Belle.
I do wonder, though, if the original poster simply didn't (with, granted, a staggering degree of cluelessness about the way people talk and feel about stuff here in the streets beyond the ivory walls of the Tower of Boy Thought) misspeak. In his update he writes --
"Even if you feel entirely unaroused (neither pleasantly aroused nor, more likely, unpleasantly aroused) by someone caressing your private parts in public, you may feel quite upset by the likelihood — not certainty, but likelihood — that this other person is deriving some arousal from the action, and from your involuntary involvement in the action."
"Unpleasantly aroused" almost seems to suggest we're meant to construe "aroused" not to mean "pleasantly sexually stimulated" but in a kind of neurological sense -- so that "intense disgust and horror and a visceral feeling of violation unmitigated by any sexual response" counts as a kind of "arousal".
Thus, pleasant arousal, the kind that makes us horny, would be one end of a spectrum, revulsion and trauma the other end, and feeling unattachedly neutral would be in the middle. Then we'd read the passage as saying, "sexual assault is when you are involuntarily touched either in a way which makes you feel intensely (usually bad, but even good would be bad), or where, even if you remain dispassionate, cool, neutral, and unaffected, it bugs you that your body is being exploited for someone else's jollies."
That seems to be the only way you could read the post where it would make any sense. Read that way, it's actually a pretty reasonable definition. It is, of course, a kind of bizarre semantic violence to read "aroused" that way. But there's also something very telling about that reading of "aroused", if it is intended.
In the Tower of Boy Thought, any kind of physical feeling -- any assertion by the body of its primacy, in which it has the temerity to occulde the workings of the mind -- is a kind of assault. The disinction between the good arousal of horniness, and the bad "arousal" of being kicked in the head by a mule or falling into a nest of tarantulas, which for most folks is kinda significant, is secondary.