Hesin (2018. pp.950) claims that Langton (1993. Pp.315) makes a harmful
distinction between the two scenarios. The alleged distinction is that whilst they are
both forms of illocutionary silencing, only the first “counts as genuine illocutionary
silencing” (Hesin, 2018, pp. 905) as the speaker is unable to refuse at all. On
Langton’s (1993) account the second is “perlocutionary silencing” (Hesni, 2018, pp.
905) as uptake has occurred but the perlocutionary act is still different from what the
women intended. Hesni (2018) suggests that this distinction made by Langton (1993,
pp. 315) is harmful for two reasons. Firstly, it is disrespectful to the victims of rape
(Hesni, 2018, pp. 951-952). Under Langton’s (1933, pp. 321) account of illocutionary
silencing, in scenario 1, it is suggested that refusal didn’t take place. Hesni (2018,
pp.952) stresses that it should be recognised that the women did refuse. To not
recognise that refusal did occur in the first example is to strip women of their
individual autonomy, and right to act as individual agents.
The above issue of the woman supposedly not refusing sex successfully has already
been subject to criticism by Bird (2002) with his ‘rapist, not a rapist object’. However,
I showed that this could be dismissed by siding with McDonald (2020, pp.44) that
“lack of refusal is not the same as consent”. Despite this, Hesni’s (2018) object does
not regard the judicial consequences of the rapist but the treatment of the rape victim,
an objection much harder to overcome. The second reason why treating the two
scenarios as different is harmful requires a deeper look into what counts as a refusal
(Hesni, 2018,952).
Once the nature of refusal and what it means to refuse is understood it shows that
the accounts are even more similar than initially thought, and so Langton (1993, pp.
315) cannot be justified in her distinction that uptake is only present in the second
scenario.
In order to understand Hesni’s (2018) thought that uptake is present in scenario 1, a
way of understanding how a hearer comes to interpret indirect speech must be set out
(Hesni, 2018, pp. 954). By indirect speech, Hesni (2018) is referring to how “no”
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