The contemporary image of consent seems to colour it as complex, threatening or unattainable. As if, in the wake of #MeToo, our younger generations have reshaped consent as a weapon, a tool used in hindsight by women to get back at bad shags. Consent has become perceived as a kind of dark presence, a powerful force used to attack those who have power under patriarchy.
Of course, this is nonsense. If anything, consent is now the easiest it has ever been to understand. As the conversations around it expand and move forward, the different ways in which we can give or gain consent have surely become ever clearer? All we are seeing is an increase of nuance in terms of understanding how power dynamics and boundaries are manipulated and violated. We have got better at knowing what we have a right not to experience. Simply put, it is the most obvious it ever has been that you shouldn’t have your arse grabbed unless that’s what you want.
What I’ve found most shocking about the shift in understanding consent is the number of moments my friends and I have had, of “oh fuck, that wasn’t okay”. Less so because we’re shocked to have experienced situations we didn’t consent to – we’re young women, so of course we have – but instead because we’re shocked we didn’t realise we hadn’t consented to them. The more we talked about consent, the more it presented as a void.
When, four days into university, I was carried to bed horrifically inebriated and barely able to carry out basic functions such as seeing and speaking, of course I wasn’t able to give consent. It took me a long time to realise that the man who had sex with me that night had done so without my consent. Only after later discussions about consent did it dawn on me that my own could not possibly have been given on that occasion. I realised that calling out the absence of consent isn’t some clever, dignity-regaining tactic, deployed when we discover someone in our bed the morning after and feel instant pangs of regret. It is the process by which we understand our own agency in finding out what it is we desire, what we want to experience, and asserting that, not what someone else does.
Consent is an opening, not a closing
As it becomes clearer that power dynamics play a huge role in how consent is obtained, I don’t think it is a bad thing for people to be called out for manipulation. It isn’t difficult for men (or women) to wrap their heads around the notion of only having sex with someone who equally desires them – not through coercion or blackmail. And it isn’t criminal to call out manipulation. Consent should be enthusiastic, not given as a result of your career or livelihood being threatened. It shouldn’t be grounded in lies.
I can’t say I was best pleased to realise that the first man I ever had sex with had compiled a complex series of lies to make me sleep with him. He ghosted me soon afterwards, because he’d moved to Israel. I do think that if he’d told me: “I want you to have sex with me now, when you aren’t really ready for it, because I’m about to move halfway across the world and enlist in the IDF,” I probably wouldn’t have. I don’t think it’s crazy, or in any way a complex proposition, to believe that consent should be grounded in reality, and freely given, not stolen.
Personally, the whole “asking for consent isn’t sexy” thing doesn’t make sense to me. Someone expressing their desire for me in a way that allows me to express that I also desire them (or not) is not the vibe-killing chore that some people seem to think. In fact, I think it’s potentially quite hot. Much hotter, at least, than sex that leaves you traumatised. Gaining permission to touch, hold or penetrate someone isn’t a random task that gets in the way of pleasure, but an essential part of it. Consent is an opening, not a closing. It is a gateway into experiences that are true and wanted. It acts as a leveller, a means of platforming the desires of two, or more, people and giving space for them to be fulfilled. It is not just a card we play to get back at people we regret sleeping with.
Lily Webb is a recent Oxford University English graduate, currently writing and bartending
