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naturally arises from the commodity model is a tendency of property transactions: They are often not equally advantageous, and depend on bargaining power. Since some duress and coercion are common, in order for commerce to flourish it is necessary to have rules about when someone is stuck with the bargain they made, even if they regret it or never really liked it in the first place. This is what rape apologists do every time: defend the transaction by holding the unhappy participant responsible, emphasizing her agency, minimizing coercion, and insisting on the finality of bargains.
     
    When applied to sex, every feminist knows what this looks like. Rape apologists argue that once consent is given it cannot be withdrawn; that acquiescence under the influence is consent; that women who do not clearly say no assume the risk. 17
     

The Performance Model of Sex
     
    Returning to Sally the musician, we do not believe some things to be true of her that the commodity model presumes about sex. The better model for sex is the one that fits the musician: a performance model, where sex is a performance, and partnered sex is a collaboration. Music is an obvious metaphor. (There are others: dance, which is also frequently a two-partner but sometimes a multipartner activity; or sports, which imports a problematic competitive aspect.)
     
    The commodity model assumes that when a woman has sex, she loses something of value. If she engages in too much sex, she will be left with nothing of value. It further assumes that sex earlier in her history is more valuable than sex later. If she has a lot of sex early on, what she has left will not be something people will esteem highly. But a musician’s first halting notes at age thirteen in the basement are not something of particular value. Only an obsessive completist would want a recording of a young musician’s practice before she knew what she was doing; and then only after that musician has made her mark by playing publicly, well, and often. She gets better by learning, by playing a lot, by playing with different people who are better than she is. She reaches the height of her powers in the prime of her life, as an experienced musician, confident in her style and conversant in her material. Her experience and proven talent are precisely why she is valued.
     
    Because it centers on collaboration, a performance model better fits the conventional feminist wisdom that consent is not the absence of “no,” but affirmative participation. Who picks up a guitar and jams with a bassist who just stands there? Who dances with a partner who is just standing and staring? In the absence of affirmative participation, there is no collaboration.
     
    Like the commodity model, the performance model implies a negotiation, but not an unequal or adversarial one. The negotiation is the creative process of building something from a set of available elements. Musicians have to choose, explicitly or implicitly, what they are going to play: genre, song, key, and interpretation. The palette available to them is their entire skill set—all the instruments they have and know how to play, their entire repertoire, their imagination, and their skills—and the product will depend on the pieces each individual brings to the performance. Two musicians steeped in Delta blues will produce very different music from one musician with a love for soul and funk and another with roots in hip-hop or 1980s hardcore. This process involves communication of likes and dislikes and preferences, not a series of proposals that meet with acceptance or rejection.
     
    The performance model gives us room to expand comfortably beyond the hetero paradigm. This model encounters no conceptual problem when two men or two women or more than two people have sex. Their collaboration will produce a different performance because their histories and preferences differ, as do all people’s, and the result is influenced (not constrained) by the bodies