One in three women and one in six men in the United States experience sexual violence in their lifetime. Yet there’s conflicting understanding of consent and what constitutes sexual assault or rape. To help advance the conversation around consent, Healthline has collaborated with NO MORE to create a Guide to Consent.
Forgive me for commenting in a men’s space, but I can’t help but feel as a woman that a you’ve made a lot of disturbing assumptions about my and other women’s views on consent. Can I ask what might have brought on these views?
It’s worrying to me that an answer of ‘no, I don’t consent’ seems to have room for interpretation, be a form of ‘playing hard to get’, can’t be taken at face value because they lie, or don’t know what they want from sex, or they may complain that the sex wasnt passionate enough despite them verbally not consenting to it.
There seems to be this idea that you cannot hold women responsible for what they say, because your interpretation of what they say holds more weight than what they actually said.
Imagine asking a 3 year old if they want pancakes, and they said ‘no’. It’s possible that they didn’t mean it because they don’t know what pancake means, they’ve shown that they like pancakes before, or they don’t know what the word ‘no’ means and they actually meant to say ‘yes’.
Now imagine asking a 30 year old for pancakes, and they said ‘no’. Is there any world in which they meant yes but had language barriers? Let’s say, they actually wanted pancakes but said no just to be difficult. Is it your responsibility to magically know what they want and guessed that the actual wanted pancakes?Or is it their responsibility to communicate clearly like an adult?
If you said that it is your responsibility to know that they wanted pancakes, then you are treating them the same way you would treat a 3 year old. When you take responsibility away from her and give it to yourself, you are also taking agency away from her and giving it to yourself. The removal of agency in making this decision is the revocation of consent.
Consent isn’t about asking a question and receiving an answer. If it were, drunk and drugged people would be capable of consenting. It’s about making sure that an option was presented to the other person, and a decision was made by them. When you absolve her of her responsibility to state the truth when asked for consent, you are taking consent away from her.
And yes, the outcome of playing by the consent rule book might be that neither of you get to have sex, and that’s okay. Not having sex because of bad communication is much better thing than having sex without consent (also known as rape). When you miscommunicate, can you always take it back and try again. Once you rape someone though, you can’t unrape them.