feeling dramatic i love the moon and the magic

i didnt hear what you said

hold on i need to blow my nose

wow

i feel kind of nauseous

is this anything

i don't know

this kind of reminds me of that one song

we can probably ignore that noise if you want to

why is my sock wet

it smells bad in here

that was weird

where are my glasses

ow

this is normal

sorry

just 2 chill people chilling

this is cool

can you say that again

are we good

an important social construct nonetheless! but like a lot of things about how we conceptualize consent, and the flaws therewithin, i feel come from treating consent as like. some vague form of social magic, and not a concept we made up and have been actively re-making up, and also that trying to take a legal concept and use it as the sole framework to analyze messy human relationships is always going to be problematic.

like. part of the reason the difference between rape and sex in ancient greek/roman myths are so blurry is because (people classed as) women could not consent, legally, because they could not be legal actors* at all. sex and gender and patriarchy are all ultimately about property and wealth. in order to get a wife who will take care of your household and provide you with heirs, you need to get permission from some daughter's father to make her your wife and have sex with her. if you have sex with her without permission, that is rape - because the term "rape" comes from a Latin term which literally just means seizing something by force, stealing something**

at the same time, people did have a sense that the woman in question could have opinions on the sex she was involved in and be more or less a willing participant, and that matter a variable degree depending on the situation. but "rape" was never supposed to be about the harm of violating a person's bodily autonomy, it was about legally regulating the violation of property and punishing those who broke that law. which also meant a woman could be "raped" when she was having willing sex with a person of her choosing, because it wasn't of her father's choosing. and this also means that "person choosing to be a slutty slut whore and cheat on her husband" and "person being forced to have sex against her will" are two situations that might be categorized the same way, making victim-blaming VERY common and easy.

what feminism did was say hey, (people classed as) women can be independent legal actors, and legally you need the person you are having sex with's permission to have sex with them, because they own and represent themself, legally. the sexual damage was re-conceived as coming not from the economic or spiritual or social damage to a father's reputation or a family's honor but the harm done to the victim themself. that change was genuinely vital! it is EXTREMELY important that "rape" stopped being about anyone's permission but the person actually involved in the sexual encounter.

but this is where we get to the problem i mentioned above. consent in this legal context can be much more black and white (although not completely) because the ultimate goal of considering consent at all is figuring out if a law was broken and what to do about that. when it comes to interpersonal relationships and sociopolitical context, things get a whole lot messier.

this is where you get issues like the "enthusiastic consent" model. it seems like a very good idea to define sex around not just willingness but desire, but then you have situations where people are insisting that sex workers are being raped because their sex isn't "enthusiastic" because of the economic factor. which creates a situation where everyone involved in a sexual encounter is saying "yes, i am willing to do xyz with you under these conditions," but a third party finds this problematic. which, you might notice, is VERY similar to the exact situation we were in before that feminist approach to consent, where what a person can choose to do with their body depends on what some other, unrelated but "more knowledgeable" party feels they should be allowed to do. and with that considered, i must ask if "consent" really should be doing the work of weighing desire and emotion and the immense complexity of how that relates to our choices.

similarly, i do not think adults should have sex with children! i think that is not good. but ultimately "legal minors cannot consent to sex with adults" is a legal construct. the law does not recognize sex an adult has with a person under 18 as consensual because that is how our legal framework currently seeks to prevent children from sexual harm from adults, by saying "this class of people is not legally capable of consenting." that doesn't necessarily make it the best way to accomplish that goal, but it is how the current framework goes about it. that can be true without claiming that "minors can't consent because their innocent underdeveloped brains are incapable of having genuine sexual desire and seeking it with an adult" because that just isn't true! and it can diminish the subjective experience of many young people with sex and sex work and deprive them of the ability to understand their own desires, what it feels like to be taken advantage of, what choices they made and why, etc. and can serve to alienate survivors who do not narrate their experiences with sex as a minor in the "appropriate" way. all because the legal inability to consent is conflated with a biological inability to desire or will.

ultimately right now my opinion is that we should try to distinguish between consent and will and desire and allow for shades of grey and multi-dimensionality in our sex lives and moral frameworks. i think someone who does sex work because they are in poverty and disabled and can't get another job should be allowed to explore and express that experience on their own terms, navigating the questions of what they chose and what they didn't and what "choice" actually means for them and what they need and want and how we as a society should react to them having been in that situation, without having people, unrelated to any of the actual sex had, try to do Morality Math to decide whether or not it was "consensual" or "not." we make up the law to help structure our society and our legal frameworks should not be the basis or the extent of our moral frameworks.

The authors of this and I definitely are coming from very similar places, and have similar values and overall goals, which I appreciate.

I definitely do not agree with "if you feel violated after a sexual experience that you engaged in willingly, then it was rape and that person is a rapist," although I also disagree with "if you feel violated violated after a sexual experience that you engaged in willingly, you aren't allowed to say that experience was traumatic and the other person/people involved have no obligations to you." I think the authors of this article both make genuine, good criticisms and also do not grapple enough with the nuance of what is being discussed, or alternative models, in their pursuit of validating subjective experiences of harm and, ironically, calling for more nuance.

I definitely think that article is getting at the same problem I am. But in my opinion it still engages in what I'm criticizing here: taking the legal concept of sexual consent and trying to stretch it so that it covers the full extent of harm in all possible sexual situations. They say "consent is an experience" but like. Is it? Or are we just taking the legal term and then giving it a new definition? Why does "(sexual) consent," a legal concept, need to carry the weight of one's entire experience of a sexual encounter?

Did you ever consent to something, but still came away feeling violated? Ever said “yes” to someone and then wished you could take it back? Well, you can. Here’s the thing: it is possible to consent to having some experience and then, sometime in the future, not consent to having had that experience. Put another way, you have “the right to retroactively withdraw consent” from any encounters you had, at any point in the past, that no longer feel good or safe to you. Currently, the way we talk about consent leaves no space for people to re-evaluate their own experiences. Nevertheless, people frequently do re-evaluate their experiences—including and perhaps even especially their sexual experiences—based on a variety of factors. Newly learned information, changing circumstances, or the way they themselves have changed are all things that can and do alter people’s feelings about the past. Discourses about consent that don’t make space for such after-the-fact evaluations are flawed. There’s a better way to think and talk about consent, one that honors peoples’ entire experience of a situation—past, present, and future—not just the tiny time-slices of that experience during which they were asked, “Is this cool with you?” Instead of understanding consent as “giving someone permission to do a thing,” we can and should talk about it as “being okay with a thing happening.”

I think this is all a pretty noble pursuit and everything said here is pretty true. But then we get to:

In such a model, if Bob and Andy have sex, and Andy says, “Yes,” “Sure,” “Okay, fine, whatever,” or even, “Ooh baby, do it to me!” but still wakes up the next morning feeling like he was raped, that means Andy was raped. Conversely, if Andy and François have a steamy make-out session in which no words are exchanged but they both go home feeling great about it, and they keep feeling great about it, that experience was consensual. If our concern is with not violating a person, rather than not violating a rule, then “a violation” is defined by what happens when a person processes and continually re-processes their feelings about an experience. Likewise, if our concern is about behaving ethically and with integrity, rather than making sure we are not held accountable for coercive actions, then we should respect consent as an experience people have, not a commitment people make.

But why? Why does Andy's feeling of violation need to mean Bob violated him? Do the actual events not matter? Clearly they do, since they are what Andy is reacting to. Obviously this is a highly abstract example, but this practically, the morality of this situation shouldn't be abstract. Andy would be a real person with specific and complex feelings and experiences, and Bob and he did specific acts together. Does he feel that way because of internalized homophobia and shame, making even pleasurable sex he desires feel violating and filthy? Did Bob treat him in a way that made him feel dehumanized or disrespected? Did he reflect on his choice to say "yes" in that moment and realize that the circumstances made that "yes" less an expression of his actual will / desire than he thought?

Typically, we define “consent” as the act of communicating to someone that it is okay for them to interact with us in a particular way. In other words, people generally believe consent is synonymous with permission. Andy “consented” to sex if Bob asked, “Will you have sex with me?” and Andy said, “Yes.” They behave as if “consenting” means agreeing to do something. If Andy says “yes” to sex with Bob but still winds up feeling like his boundaries were violated, Bob bears no responsibility for Andy’s discomfort as long as Bob stuck to their agreement. Bob can be a nice guy and help Andy process his feelings, if he wants, or he can be a dick and just tell Andy it’s not his problem. Later, Andy can choose not to play with Bob again because he had a bad time, but he is not “allowed” to call Bob a rapist—Andy would be making a “false accusation”—because Bob didn’t break any rules. We call this the “consent-as-permission model,” or “contractual-consent.”

Again, what did Bob do, though? Why does feeling like your boundaries are violated make what actually happened irrelevant to calling someone a rapist? I'm not saying this because its never right to retroactively realize you were raped. But generally when people do that, its not just because they felt their boundaries were violated. They felt their boundaries were violated because they were, or they realized that the context they were in had a much stronger impact on their ability to meaningfully say "yes" than they realized at the time.

This realization can come as a result of feelings and allowing oneself to explore those feelings and treating those feelings like they matter. But the reality of the violation is not the product of those feelings alone.

If you accept the premise that someone’s experience of sexual violation “counts” as rape, regardless of whether they granted verbal permission beforehand, then in order to avoid being accused of rape you’ll have to shift your mindset from, “I’d better make sure I was told it was okay to do this first,” to “I’d better make damn sure this person isn’t going to wake up tomorrow and feel like I raped them.” The latter is a standard requiring much more communication, understanding, and compassion from the people involved than the former, especially in situations with near-strangers like one-night stands, hook-ups, or play partners you might meet at a club.

But "is this person going to feel like I raped them" is kind of the point of seeking consent. Like, I do think there is a lot more to having a positive sexual experience with someone and not hurting them, so again, I don't think permission is the only thing to be thinking about. But this model sets people up to be in a position where you can never truly know if you raped someone. Now, I know the authors talk about trying to move away from people seeing "rapist" as this uniquely evil category of person, which I agree with. But I also find it unfair to act as though people are only off put by this idea because they are "men or sadomasochistic "Dominants"" who don't want to be held accountable.

The authors chose to use the most extreme word possibly, as if they don't trust that it is possible to take negative sexual experiences seriously without attaching the Serious Word to it. And yeah, when you start saying people can retroactively become rapists no matter what they actually did in the moment, even if the other person gave enthusiastic consent, people are going to have a strong reaction. The authors seems to be concerned primarily with how people use "they consented" as an excuse for otherwise harmful behavior, but like. we can absolutely talk about those situations and how to hold people accountable.... without creating a model where, in their own words, even if someone gives explicit, enthusiastic, verbal consent the only thing that matters when it comes to it being consensual or not is how that person feels about the experience over time ("In such a model, if Bob and Andy have sex, and Andy says, “Yes,” “Sure,” “Okay, fine, whatever,” or even, “Ooh baby, do it to me!” but still wakes up the next morning feeling like he was raped, that means Andy was raped.")

This isn't necessary to handle these topics and the harms people experience, and it is extremely obviously going to cause a lot of immediate resistance to some otherwise important ideas, so why are we doing it?

I think this person puts it well:

On some level, my objection is linguistic. As shown by both OP's analysis and mine, most people already have a strong definition of what they think consent is. In my opinion, such a strong shift in how we view the quality of sexual and intimate relations is better expressed by using new terminology than by attempting to significantly change the definition of the old. What OP describes as (generally retroactive) violations of consent are failures of the quality of a sexual experience. I take OP's desire to call these violations of consent as an attempt to emphasize the importance of this issue by co-opting the language that we already use to describe the worst of sexual interactions.

That's also a big issue. The authors are using terms that have very strong and specific meanings, and stretching them to a point that, while philosophically consistent, makes this model off-putting for most people. And it is unnecessary, which is frustrating, because I think what they are describing here would be so much stronger if they were not so insistent on using the terms "consent" and "rape."

Not to mention how the legal framework already gets weaponized against trans people. If you have sex with someone and later find out they are trans (or maybe they even transition afterwards) and that makes you feel violated, that means you can call that trans person a rapist? A gold star lesbian has sex with someone who the next month comes out as a trans man, and now they do not remotely feel "okay" about that sexual encounter, they feel violated and dirty. So that trans man is a rapist now? What exactly should he have done during that sexual encounter to pre-plan for his hookup feeling grossed out about fucking a man?

Like, I love talking about how we devalue subjectivity, I genuinely think it is extremely important and that is a part of my original post. But I don't think "whether or not something was rape can be retroactively decided upon based on how (one?) person who was involved feels at a later date." Or consider a white girl who has willing sex with a Black boy, and then her racist parents find out, and she comes out and says it was rape because she actually feels really bad about it retroactively. In that circumstance, no amount of proof the Black boy gave that she consented will ever be enough because her consent has nothing to do with what actually happened, only what she feels in the present moment, and if she says it was rape, he has literally no recourse. Like, can we not pretend that false accusations of rape are something that is never used to seriously harm vulnerable people?

I think consent is just permission, tbh. But "permission" is not the only relevant thing in a sexual encounter. It also necessarily involves setting the terms for what circumstances, under any, you are giving permission (i.e "I will have sex with you if we use a condom, you don't touch my neck, and you treat me with respect.") I think this goes along with how we need more language to talk about sexual harm that isn't just sexual assault; you don't need to have been raped to feel violated and have that experience of violation be real and serious. I think the goal of getting people to understand "rapist" not as some fundamentally different category of person, but anyone can do to another person, is really important! But I don't think this is really the best way to go about achieving that?

I think that the binaristic view of consent is built into the concept of "consent" in some degree, so even when you try to inject nuance, you are still fundamentally working within a framework where the sex had was either consensual or nonconsensual, and it can't be both or neither. So even though Andy's experience may be complicated, it gets reduced down to either "consensual sex" or "non-consensual sex (rape)" without much wiggle room. What if Andy doesn't want to describe what happened to him as rape, but it also didn't feel harmless on Bob's part? People can say "You did something hurtful to me" without calling the person who hurt them an abuser if the situation simply would not be usefully described as abuse. And the same goes for sexual assault.

Or, to put it another way: I think its accurate to say that if you give someone permission to enter your home, and they had a gun to your head while asking, or you were very intoxicated or dissociated when you let them in, or they harangued you for hours until you finally broke down and let them in, or you gave them permission under specific conditions that they broke but then refused to leave, that permission wasn't really freely given (or unrevokable) and its not right to say that you consented to them entering (or remaining in) your home.

But just because you gave someone permission to enter your home, never asked them to leave, and then later realized that you didn't actually like having them in your home, and maybe they even treated your poorly during their stay, doesn't make that a home invasion. Your feelings can be fully real and valid. The other person can even be in the wrong! You can be pissed at that person, you can talk to others about how terrible their time in your house was, and it doesn't mean its right for that person to act like they have no responsibilities to you as a person around how they acted just because they technically had permission. And yet that STILL doesn't mean you retroactively didn't consent to them entering your home and they are now guilty of breaking into your house against your will. And that doesn't become more of a reasonable framework even if you accept that "home invaders" are not some uniquely horrible type of person. Anyone can break into someone else's home, but that doesn't that anyone should be considered guilty of home invasion because someone somewhere retroactively stops being okay with having given them permission in the first place.

You can apply the same basic metaphor to violating business contracts vs. behaving poorly or unethically in a business relationship. Notably, both of these metaphors are also fundamentally based around legal concepts. Because again, that is where we get the idea of sexual consent. Its not that consent is used in a legalistic framework, it is a legal concept. If we don't want to be strictly legalistic in our understanding of sexual harm, why are we so dead-set on never giving up the basic premise that sexual consent = ethical sex? We can just. not. you know.

Making fun of a group of people that are privileged over you is one thing, but wishing non-cartoonish violence and death on them ("they should fall off a cliff" vs. "they should be wiped out"), wishing sexual violence on them, dehumanising them, claiming that they're less capable of creating art or living meaningful lives, saying that their relationships are inherently shallow and fake - these things are fucked up. I understand venting and saying extreme things when in pain, but when you find yourself regularly posting about wanting certain people tortured and killed, you need to examine that.

I always think of the Rwandan Genocide when it comes to this. Thank you for bringing it up.

In particular, from that second link: