The Flowers Problem

There’s a Clark University survivor guide circulating online that lists gift-giving as a form of emotional manipulation capable of constituting sexual coercion. Flowers, specifically. The logic: if you give someone flowers because you want to sleep with them, you’re engineering dependency, pressing them toward compliance without their full awareness. Therefore coercion. Therefore assault.

I understand where the impulse comes from. Coercive relationships exist. The slow accumulation of obligation—small gifts, attention, the unspoken expectation of reciprocity—gets used as leverage, and the people on the receiving end of it know exactly what it feels like from inside. Naming that dynamic, teaching people to recognize it early, isn’t a bad project.

Something goes sideways in the execution, though. The guide calls assault an act of aggression combined with a form of sex perpetrated by anyone—strangers, friends, acquaintances—and then defines "coercive" broadly enough to catch almost anything in that net: a dinner, a compliment, a handful of tulips. The word "manipulative" ends up doing enormous work for very little precision.

Amy Alkon, writing critically about the guide, lands the frustration bluntly: According to them, you’re a helpless little bunny the moment you’re born with a vagina. A man just has to throw flowers at your feet and you’re already taking your clothes off. The critique is pointed but touches something real—in trying to name the mechanisms of coercion, the guide ends up describing women as constitutionally unable to receive a gift without being overwhelmed by it.

The problem with language that overreaches isn’t that it protects too many people. It’s that it stops naming anything precisely. Coercion has a specific meaning. Manipulation has a specific meaning. Diluting them to include gestures of attraction—awkward, unwanted, sometimes pathetic gestures of attraction—doesn’t make assault easier to identify. It makes everything harder to see.