Bareback sex,queer legal theory,and evolving socio-legal contexts

Introduction

Rofes has argued that prior to 1996 there was no such thing as bareback sex. ‘Unprotected anal sex’ was the term used whilst men rarely talked publicly about engaging in such activity (Rofes, 1998: 196). This arguably changed when Poz published the now well-known article by Stephen Gendin entitled ‘Riding Bareback’. This was significant, Rofes has suggested (1998: 197), in coming to understand bareback and raw sex, for it became positioned as more than just ‘run-of-the-mill unprotected anal sex’; it was something that was about heightened erotic charge, cultural cachet and a recklessness that had – in this first 1990s iteration – men transmitting HIV at its heart. Moreover, this is a purely same-sex understanding of bareback sex, reflecting the historic construction of HIV/AIDS as a ‘gay disease’ or the ‘gay Holocaust’ (Altman, 1986; Kramer, 1990; Stychin, 1995: 134–138).

We also know that like ‘top’ or ‘bottom’, ‘pig’, ‘pup’, and ‘bear’, ‘bareback’ or ‘barebacker’ has become another self-identifying label for gay men in the last 20 years (Shernoff, 2006: 26). Technology further supports this through specific bareback websites and even on older websites in which men indicate whether they have safer sex ‘sometimes’, ‘always’, ‘never’, or that it is something for discussion (see Mowlabocus, 2010: 147–182), whilst changing attitudes to HIV stigmatization and ever more complex decision-making by gay men feeds into a more nuanced construction of the barebacker identity (see Frasca et al. 2012).

Since 1996, bareback sex has been increasingly cited as a cultural phenomenon, appearing to counter the increasingly pervasive homonormative agenda which has seen the ‘gay rights’ agenda refocused around the issue of same-sex marriage, and a concomitant development of an identity based upon a new normative framework, beyond the heteronormative (Ashford, 2011). This homonormative discourse has been comparatively silent on issues of continued police harassment of LGBTQ people, violence, persecution, discriminatory practices, and perhaps most significantly, the sex lives of LGBTQ folks.

Bareback sex, and the embracing of cum-fuelled erotic encounters by gay men runs counter to a narrative that sees them aspiring not only to the heteronormative institutions – upholding and sustaining them – but which also demobilizes and depoliticizes gay culture, on the premise of having reached our ‘goal’ of equality (see Duggan, 2003: 5). This ‘job done’ narrative was notably offered by Stonewall’s former director Ben Summerskill, who described same-sex marriage as ‘the final piece of the jigsaw’ for gay rights in the UK (Robertson, 2012). Ruth Hunt, the current acting director of the campaigning charity, oversaw the 25th anniversary of Stonewall in which they sought to strike a different tone, offering instead the slogan ‘Lots done. Lots to do’. In the UK, France, and the USA, like much of the Western world, recent years have seen the continued march of legal reform in the lives of LGBTQ people in the arena of partnership rights, family rights, employment protection, access to goods and services and a range of non-discrimination laws (Ashford, 2011; Harding, 2011).

Bareback is a term that immediately evokes penetration, but unlike the buggery and sodomy socio-legal debates, it also evokes semen. It is this aspect, the cum-fuelled nature of encounters, the celebration of ‘seeding’, ‘breeding’, and ‘dumping a load’ that is crucial in bareback discourse. The ‘transmission’ of seminal fluid from one partner to another not only deposits genetic material, but serves to breach the membrane of hygiene and ‘good gay’ sex that the homonormative and contemporary sex education seeks to prescribe (see more generally Rubin, 1984). These ‘bad queers’ – socio-legal discourse suggests – need to be stopped.

Yet, the law does not prima facie seem interested in bareback sex. This has started to change, as will be discussed later, with pornography coming under increased scrutiny and attempts to erase the bareack image. More generally however, the law has sought to control and criminalize the transmission of HIV. It is this socio-legal regulation that has become intertwined with our understanding of bareback sex. This meshing of bareback and HIV serves to confront us with our collective sense of queer history whilst also challenging us as to the way forward for identity politics.

At the same time as conflating HIV and bareback, the law is also blending bareback as identity with bareback as sexual practice. The regulation of pornography – in which we see an act manifest as identity – sits alongside a developing jurisprudence of HIV transmission through bareback sex, which has (particularly in the UK context) focused on the transmission of HIV between men and women.

However, as Dean has commented, not all men who engage in bareback sex might consider themselves to be barebackers (2009: 9), but those that do adopt the label appear to be distant from the homonormative legal agenda:

Self-identified barebackers, although now constituted as a visible and vocal minority, appear to be uninterested in the rights-based discourses that serve to consolidate other minority populations. (2009: 9)

It was once again Rofes who noted that it was the AIDS epidemic that also empowered and brought forth a new voice within the LGBT community. Gay men entered the movement who were ‘neither knowledgeable about nor respectful of gay liberation and gay rights before AIDS… while utilizing similar in-your-face tactics as gay liberationists, queer activists took uncompromising positions on a wide range of issues. Lacking the Left ideological roots of gay lib and flouting the assimilationist demeanour of gay rights, queer activists introduced a wildly divergent worldview into the hybrid gay movement’ (1996: 112). This radicalism also took place in the shadow of death, and of a public narrative of pollution, disease and contagion (Stychin, 1995: 135). Whilst semen is arguably seen as the originator of life for heterosexuals, it seemingly remains inseparable from death and disease for the queer narrative. As such, to challenge the socio-legal control and positioning of bareback is to offer an alternative radical queer perspective.

Queer legal theory and (re)positioning bareback

The late Guillaume Dustan, a leading French queer thinker on bareback sex described an (auto)fictionalized 1990s France in which men routinely engaged in bareback sex, for: ‘nobody used condoms anymore’ (Dustan, 1996). Men have, this work seemed to suggest, never been afraid of HIV and AIDS but rather the death that it brought. With the availability of drugs, and the rendering of HIV as a chronic condition, the fear had seemingly dissipated. Contemporary bareback encounters continue to be described, primarily in a London context, but also internationally, especially in the USA, by the Swedish artist, pornographer, and barebacker Anton Dickson (2013, 2014). This tapestry of autobiography and (auto)fiction depicts a world of celebrated bareback slutdom in which seemingly endless anonymous – and always bareback – encounters are described. The need to engage in safer sex is replaced by a flawed expectation to do so.

Joshi’s (2012) concept of ‘respectable queerness’ perhaps further explains this shift. Joshi notes that in addition to identifying with the norm, ‘respectability entails differentiating oneself from others who fall outside the norm’. Thus, with ‘equality’ comes the need to entrench those values which celebrate not just marriage, but monogamous marriage. A hyper-domesticated marriage and domesticated existence. Our weddings will be whiter, purer, more marriage brochure than ever before. Sex is replaced with institutional domesticity. Just as Orwell [1936] satirised Gordon Comstock’s Aspidistra-conscious existence, bareback has arguably become positioned as the counter-domestic, the counter-Aspidistra, and counter to ‘the new orthodoxy’. The ‘unrespectable’ queers, the barebackers arguably speak to the desires that – as Mowlabocus et al. (2013) have argued – have been marginalized by 30 years of safer sex health promotion strategies (see also Greteman, 2013).

Former porn star, Scott O’Hara – who died of AIDS-related complications in 1999 – was one of the first voices to challenge the new ‘orthodoxy’ which had emerged by the early 1990s in which responsibility equated to safer sex. O’Hara argued that ‘in another sense, [barebackers are] behaving in an absolutely responsible fashion: they’re making their own decisions, not trying to pass the buck’. It’s an informed decision, or as O’Hara summed it up ‘There are trade offs in life’ (1999: 29).

At the heart of bareback and this ‘trade off’ is semen, cum. It is the bodily fluid that fuels bareback sex. Ruggero has described the ‘tribal, ancient’ desire that is sometimes associated with cum: ‘my very first lover fucked me, and as he was coming, he said, “My Seed is in you for eternity.” I felt a warmth of love when he said that, and when I fucked him, I said the same thing’ (Quoted in WI Johnson, 1995: 212). The question becomes one of desire for semen weighed against avoidance of risk. Gay men have to decide which they want more.

Interestingly, readers will search in vain for any reference to ‘bareback sex’ in the index of Halperin’s most recent book, How to Be Gay (2012a). Halperin had earlier asked What Do Gay Men Want? (2012b, first published in 2007) and concluded that whilst they wanted bareback sex, there was a need to develop strategies to reduce risk. Halperin included as an Appendix to that book a copy of Michael Warner’s 1995 essay, ‘Why gay men are having risky sex’, in which Warner acknowledged his own unsafe practices. That essay concludes with a negative HIV test for Warner, and the death of a former partner from AIDS. Halperin (2012b) is advocating a safe space in which gay men can be open about barebacking, and the reasons for the complex behaviour that surrounds barebacking. Only then can we get a reduction in HIV rates.

In contrast, Dean – who similarly to Shernoff states that he does not seek to promote one form of sex or another – has described the public bareback sex of sex clubs such as the now closed Mack Folsom Prison – once known as “bareback central of San Francisco”. Dean describes a man ‘stood spread-eagled facing the wall, gyrating gently to the music, as various men (including me) fucked him bareback from behind. This very handsome guy never turned his head to see who was penetrating him; clearly anyone was welcome to do so. He was good-looking and in such magnificent physical shape that he could have been extremely choosy about his sexual partners; I thus found it to be striking that this man seemed to care not one whit what those fucking him looked like, how sexually proficient they were, or whether they wore condoms’ (2009: 180). In place of the agonizing ‘good gay’ Halperin, Dean reflects the ‘bad queer’ and his sexual desires. In the face of the rights-based discourse of the homonormative, driven as it has been by civil law, barebacking can be seen as the anti-homonormative (see Dean 2009: 9) and a focus for the criminal law.

Legal responses to bareback

As has already been noted, the law has generally responded to the issue of HIV transmission rather than bareback sex per se, and yet such is the socio-cultural construction of bareback sex that, they continue to have a symbiotic relationship.

In the early days of AIDS, law was used as a defensive tool by the LGBTQ community. Altman describes one incident in the early 1980s in New York City where a doctor whose practice included a number of people with AIDS was threatened with eviction from his building – an action which was ultimately defeated with the support of Lambda Legal Defense (Altman, 1986: 61). The law was – as it always is – a neutral tool, given meaning and power by its use.

In the UK, Chalmers has observed that we need to talk of ‘legal responses rather than legislative owing to the general lack of references to HIV and AIDS in the statute books of England and Wales’ (2008: 1). Matthew Weait (2007) continues to provide the most authoritative overview of the criminalization of HIV transmission in the context of England and Wales, whilst reported cases from France and North America highlight the continued emphasis on criminalization with a number of high profile cases, including Olympic bronze medal winner, Darren Chiacchia in Florida – whose own case was ultimately dismissed on the basis that intercourse could only occur between a man and a woman (Thomas, 2010). These laws vary between HIV/AIDS specific and pre-existing laws that are now being applied in new contexts.

The law has, however, sought to intervene to regulate bareback sex – rather than HIV/AIDS – in the context of pornography. In 2012, Los Angeles County passed a ballot measure known as ‘Measure B’- The Safer Sex in the Adult Film Industry Act (Birkhold, 2013). The law requires not only that condoms are expressly used in all porn shoots in the County of Los Angeles but also extends to requiring that signs must be put up at a porn shoot – in sight of the ‘performers’ – stating:

The use of condoms is required for all acts of anal or vaginal sex during the production of adult films to protect performers from sexually transmitted infections. Any public health concerns regarding any activities occurring during the production of any adult films should be directed to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health: (the program office address and telephone number to be provided by the county health officer).

The law also requires the notice to be in a font size not smaller than 36 points.

A subsequent attempt to introduce a statewide condom law continues to advance through the California legislature (Mason, 2014). This has provoked some porn studios to threaten to leave the State if the law is passed, including the iconic San Francisco-based Kink.com studio, reportedly worth $30 million (Young, 2014). Assembly Bill 1576 will require that an exposure control plan will be produced for all commercial porn, detailing each scene and what ‘personal protective equipment’ was used. Although the proposed law is being interpreted as therefore requiring condoms, it could be argued that PrEP (Pre-exposure Prophylaxis) meets such a requirement – and could thus still allow for barebacking porn.

That said, a 2014 ruling from California’s Department of Industrial Relations, Division of Occupational Safety and Health’s Appeals Board (Cal/OSHA) ruled as part of a judgment against one bareback studio that only ‘barrier protection’ is appropriate, citing the California Bloodborne Pathogens statute which does indeed state: ‘Personal protective equipment will be considered “appropriate” only if it does not permit blood or OPIM to pass through to or reach the employee’s work clothes, street clothes, undergarments, skin, eyes, mouth, or other mucous membranes under normal conditions of use and for the duration of time which the protective equipment will be used’. However, on an equally reasonable reading of this statute, one would conclude that protective goggles should also be worn during sex, particularly in the vicinity of ejaculations. That we have not seen a spate of goggles-enforcement cases in California suggests what might generously be described as selective application of the statute.

The proposed additional state-wide law already includes an explicit clause stating that the ‘equipment’ does not need to be seen in the final film, so where condoms are used a studio could digitally remove the condom, giving the appearance of bareback. As such, the State law appears more moderate than the Los Angeles County law, but both mark a significant shift in legal responses to bareback.

One studio that has unashamedly positioned itself as a bareback studio and which has served as the bête noir of regulators and the non-profit AIDS Healthcare Foundation is Treasure Island Media. The studio has a presence in the USA, the UK and, through a partnership with Eric Videos, France, and can be viewed as being at the forefront of bareback porn and its associated controversies.

Bareback porn and legal truth(s)

Bareback porn, like the sex it depicts is as controversial as it is prolific. Porn sales statistics are notoriously difficult to quantify and don’t take into account the vast quantities of porn illegally downloaded, yet anecdotally, bareback porn seems to be in the ascendancy. Paul Morris, head of Treasure Island Media (TIM), has described himself as ‘the most pirated gay pornographer in the world’ (Morris, n.d). In subsequent correspondence, Morris revealed that in one month there were over 2 million pirate uploads of his material, a figure arrived at via pirate tracking software.

Morris is himself at the heart of the bareback controversy, revelling in a brand that casts him as a demonic and twisted porn master, his ‘performers’ cast as the male species set free. Morris has commented that ‘TIM was meant to be a kind of pornographic nature reserve, a place where wildness could take place and be observed’ (Ashford, 2010a). For him, bareback porn represents an authentic documenting of the gay sex experience; the notion that wild ‘authentic’ men released from the bonds of a homonormative society fuck as TIM records them. Rather than porn as the producer of fantasy, here TIM seeks to document gay masculinity as a lived experience. Like Dustan and Anton Dickson – the latter an employee of TIM – Morris is seeking to depict the reality of gay men’s lives. That law should seek to silence such a depiction arguably underlines the radical and transgressive power of bareback.

This radicalism challenges the established norms of the HIV/AIDS world, a socio-legal culture that seeks to respond to the medical realities of a world in which the spread of HIV/AIDS is a political and cultural concern in which even promiscuous slutdom is constructed through the ethics of high-risk health strategies (Easton and Hardy, 2009: 95). Since the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s and the subsequent medical response, the lives of gay men have been transformed leading to one queer academic noting that ‘the politics of safe sex education… is surely one of the primary moral issues surrounding our sexuality today’ (Stychin, 1995: 84). Two decades on from those words being published, it remains the case. Although we have seen a transformation in the normative rights LGBTQ people access, these rights are for the ‘respectable queers’.

The battle over the visual production of bareback is itself an attempt to define today’s truths of men’s butt-fucking. Gay porn has simultaneously become more accessible and ubiquitous following regulatory reform in the UK and a global technological revolution. Concomitantly, we have seen the emergence of the new gay porn identities such as the ‘scally’ or ‘chav’ porn celebrated by companies such as Triga (P Johnson, 2008). Alongside this, the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s had a significant impact in forcing companies to develop specific policies or adapt their practices so as to comply with new regulatory requirements to ensure porn can be produced within a post AIDS moral framework. Those who challenge this post-AIDS settlement, such as Paul Morris and TIM, are cast as outsiders in the porn industry.

Regulating pornography and bareback erasure

In 2004, the British Broadcasting Corporation reported that around 60% of porn for the gay market was now bareback (BBC, 2004). The figure came in the wake of a BBC Newsnight piece that highlighted the production of DVDs featuring footage from a week-long shoot during which eight British models had sex with each other in multiple combinations without condoms. Four of those who took part were diagnosed as HIV-positive soon after – the models did not believe anyone was HIV-positive and the models had recently had HIV tests.

Their distress was added to, according to the report, by the continued sale of the DVDs, which additionally attained the cult status of being a video in which participants became ‘bred’ with HIV. The piece placed bareback pornography, its associated risks and bareback identity firmly in the media’s sights, and yet nothing much changed. If anything, today there appears to be even more bareback porn, although there have been equally high profile safer sex campaigns, such as the Fuk-!t campaign in Washington DC fronted by former bareback model, Brent Corrigan.

Whilst traditional concerns about pornography – not least from feminist anti-porn campaigners like Catherine MacKinnon – have focused upon pornography as exploitative and damaging per se, concerns around barebacking porn are focused on the image depicted (see more generally Califia, 2000: 116–130; Segal, 1998; Smart, 1999: 88–99). For example, this means that sexual health campaigners might focus on persuading bar and club proprietors to show ‘safe sex’ porn rather than bareback porn. The debate revolves around the ‘type’ of porn rather than its presence per se. Thus, within these commercial spaces, sex is celebrated but the truth of gay sex presented is a condom-wearing one. Even in TIM’s hometown of San Francisco, its few remaining sex clubs feature condom porn.

To do otherwise risks transgressing the safe-sex morality discourse and in some way ‘damaging’ the assimilationist equality agenda that seeks to present gay men ‘just like you’ in contrast to the radical politics of queer campaigners and historic groups such as the Gay Liberation Front (see Mason, 1994).

When Hollywood gossip blogger Perez Hilton posted leaked pictures of the Milk screenwriter, and now boyfriend to ultimate ‘good gay’ Tom Daley, Dustin Lance Black, engaging in bareback sex with his then partner, the outrage was directed at Hilton for posting them and concern at the barebacking imagery, rather than the pornographic imagery per se. The statement Black released in response was revealing:

More important than the embarrassment of this incident is the misleading message these images send. I apologise and cannot emphasise enough the importance of responsible sexual practices. (Geen, 2009)

The statement could perhaps be summarized as: ‘do as I say, not what I do’. It was a very public pronouncement that no-one minds cock or fuck pics of the 21st-century queer, but you better be wearing a condom if it’s going to go public. Thus, within queer space and queer lives, a debate continues about the lived experience we seek to share, project and construct. This is not least because bareback sex remains synonymous with HIV/AIDS. That evokes a history of disease and shame that locates homosexuality in the dark 1980s. This was a time of heightened fear and prejudice (Weeks, 2000: 152). Reynolds similarly notes how homosexuality was associated ‘with depravity, illness and death’ (2007: 88).

The decision therefore of the California legislature to allow studios to ‘fake’ bareback porn under their new law suggests a willingness to compromise in the face of a market demand for bareback porn. Nonetheless, this will also enable studios such as TIM to further emphasize the authenticity of their bareback porn.

Weeks has commented that ‘HIV reveals the truth about often concealed sexual activities’ (2003: 128). In the wake of HIV/AIDS, areas that had concentrations of a gay population – notably New York and San Francisco – found themselves at the centre of a debate within the so called ‘gay community’; a debate that presented a ‘crisis of ideology’ in which the gay (male) identity of promiscuity and casual sex was challenged by those now suggesting a different course based upon monogamy and safer sex (Rom, 2000: 227–228). Health officials swiftly moved to close down public sex venues and acted to condemn public sex spaces that promoted casual sex (Bérubé, 1996; Disman, 2003; Elovitz and Edwards, 1996; Redick, 1996; Sides, 2009: 178–179). These spaces continue to be seen as sites of heightened risk (Binson et al., 2001) and thus the celebration and defence of these very spaces, as well as the sexual act of barebacking, is significant.

TIM’s use of just such a type of venue is therefore important, for both how they construct the sexual encounter and for a sense of community and identity amongst its viewers. The use of venues such as Play Pit and Hampstead Heath in London and the bar Powerhouse in San Francisco further establishes TIM as a purveyor of Other, of seeking to project a ‘truth’ of modern queer lives that move beyond the artifice of civil partnerships, gay marriage, and other trappings of ‘legitimate’ gay life. Indeed, Bell and Binnie (2000: 134) note Steven Seidman’s (1991) contention that, in the rush towards assimilation, the ‘community’ originally fostered by casual sex is forgotten. Morris’ films bring that ‘community’ back into focus.

Morris’ films also challenge the truth(s) of ‘mainstream’ gay pornography, and appear to document more accurately the realities of gay men’s sex lives. Two decades on from the 1980s ‘plague’, queers have seemingly turned their backs on the safe-sex messages of the time. Friends and acquaintances might become HIV-positive, but they don’t then die en masse. Our cities and bars on a Friday night are not giant wakes for the masses of queers placed in their coffins that week. Death has been replaced by inconvenience, at least in occidental cultures. Epidemiologist Pisani (2009) has noted:

HIV is no longer a mass murderer in rich countries. It is an inconvenient disease that will have you taking pills for the rest of your life, cost taxpayers lots of money and make big pharma rich.

In 1995, Carl Stychin suggested that ‘we may be entering a period of self-discovery, where our bodies, which have been constructed as disease-carrying containers, are tools with which we can explore new erotic possibilities’ (1995: 84). The emergence of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s ultimately led to a rubber revolution in porn. Porn became, and still is, a tool through which safe-sex campaigners can promote the wearing of condoms for penetrative sex – although interestingly there does not seem to have been the same focus in oral sex or in lesbian porn (see more generally Califia, 2000: 227–235).

For Voros (2014), the moralist discourses around bareback pornography serve only to intensify its appeal. As such, bareback porn becomes the ‘most “pornographic” of all gay pornographies’. Add into this mix the law’s attempt to regulate – indirectly through HIV transmission laws – the act, coupled with recent attempts to regulate the image, and we could also argue that bareback is amongst the queerest of queer.

Morals, mores and the homonormative: Queering bareback sex

Warner observed that this ‘basic impulse to control sex is neither inhuman nor unreasonable. It is, in fact, exactly a wish to make sex reasonable, to force it to obey the dictates of common sense, or propriety, or simply self-esteem’ (2000: 195). Yet, this control – when set alongside the homonormative legal agenda – is to enforce a view of respectable queerness that seeks to impose the law so as to erase or criminalize those anti-homonormative sexual acts that fall beyond the bounds of respectability.

We are of course not merely talking about sexual acts. This article has discussed bareback as sexual practice, and bareback as political identity. Yet this is a distinction that the law cannot make. In regulating the act, it inevitably regulates – and potentially criminalizes – the identity. Queers’ resistance to this regulation is arguably driven by a liberation-inspired sense of freedom, and an intellectual commitment to that liberation struggle (Pratt, 2012).

For Ramos (2013), the 2012 LA porn law needs to be revisited through the US prism of First Amendment protection, arguing that ‘bareback pornography should be recognized for its full expressive value, and, as a result, should be afforded robust, but not impregnable, constitutional protection’. This expression is to reflect the pluralistic nature of queer lives. Whilst the First Amendment argument is an important one, it risks failing to recognize the fundamental discourses of power and resistance, and the importance of queer legal theory as a tool in that battle. Lee (2014) has suggested – in analyzing TIM’s films – that the ‘queerness may not be so far away from “normal” after all’. In the documenting of bareback sex, these lives become arguably presented as normative. Lee rightly argues that ‘queerness should not be read only as a project that visibly rejects hegemonic normativity because this naturalizes the oppositional reading’ (Lee, 2014). However, it is important that we continue to emphasize the importance of queer theory in challenging the domestication and de-sexing of queer identities.

Bareback forms one important point of resistance to the homonormative agenda, not for producing one singular oppositional reading, but for opening up a discussion about the infinite queer constructions of self and the power of law to restrain this. To do so is, of course, to follow the Foucauldian and queer understanding of sexual orientation as socially constructed. For some, this ‘play box’ approach to sexuality serves to unduly diminish the ‘risk’ of bareback and appears overly flippant. Mohr (1988: 269) captures this feeling in his angry recollection of Foucault’s observation: ‘How can I be scared of AIDS when I could die in a car. If sex with a boy gives me pleasure… oh, [d]on’t cry for me if I die’. In an era of PrEP and effective HIV treatments, it is arguably Foucault’s observation that is perfectly reasonable, yet that observation also serves as a reminder of the time when bareback was an act, rather than an identity. The subsequent problematization of bareback sex has created a socio-legal landscape in which bareback is an increasingly entrenched identity, imbued paradoxically with the very power that enables resistance.