Personally, I use “good consent” rather than “enthusiastic consent.” Enthusiastic consent is a problematic term. Lots of people consent to sex without enthusiasm for the sex itself: sex workers, people who enjoy pleasing their partners even when they don’t desire sex, even people who are trying to conceive a child and have sex when one partner is ovulating. Similarly, there are lots of enthusiastic people who still don’t have good consent: if you’re a high school teacher and your fourteen-year-old student enthusiastically consents to sex with you, you still shouldn’t have sex with them. Good consent is a way vaguer phrase, but it’s also more all-encompassing.
All parts of good consent are for everyone. We’re socialized into this fucking awful pursuer-pursued dynamic, where dudes are supposed to push as far as they can, and women are supposed to respect themselves by being the gatekeepers to their genitalia. (I think that sentence needs a lot of scare quotes, so here are some you can sprinkle throughout as you please: “””””””””””””””””””””””””””) This dynamic is bullshit. Everyone has to work on getting in touch with their own desires. Everyone has to make sure their partner is consenting.
Getting In Touch With Your Own Desires
The first step to making sure that you don’t do anything you don’t want in bed is to know what you want! You’d think that would be really easy, because you’d just be like “hey, does this turn me on?” and then you’d have your answer. Maybe it works that way in Liberated Sex-Pozzie Utopia Land, but unfortunately in the real world it’s more complicated.
We have this entire culture that’s telling people that there’s One Right Thing To Want. Dudes, for instance, are supposed to have a high sex drive, to like porn, to enjoy casual sex, to be attracted to thin young feminine large-breasted women, to want anal sex and public sex and rough sex, to not want pegging and ageplay and vanilla missionary with the lights out. If you’re asexual you’re broken; if you like drag you’re a pervert and probably a pedophile; if you’re a male submissive you’re pathetic and unmasculine; if you’re queer you’re destroying America. I don’t understand why people do this: what possible gain could there be from reducing the vibrant rainbow of human sexuality to two colors (the dude color and the girl color)? Those two colors look much nicer as part of the whole spectrum.
Cliff Pervocracy has an awesome guide about learning what you want, but I think the most important question to ask yourself is how you feel about it. Does the idea of a particular sex-type thing make you happy, or nervous-excited like you’re riding to the top of a roller coaster, or at peace, or curious? Conversely, does it make you feel sad, or self-hating, or used, or degraded?
People don’t necessarily know what they want. That’s okay. Sometimes you don’t know! Even about things as fundamental as sexual orientation, it’s okay to identify as questioning. I think a lot of people feel pressure to be like “I’m a pansexual monogamous dom with a foot fetish!” when the actual answer is “I dunno. I think I might like feet.” You always have a right to be uncertain, to try things, to do something once and decide you hate it and never do it again, to go through phases, to change your mind.
Communicating With Your Partner
I think the biggest keyword about good consent is negotiation.
A lot of people think of negotiation as the bit where you sit down with checklists in a very formal way and are like “so, how do you feel about flogging?” But negotiation is a lot of different things! It can be snuggling and talking about all the sexy things you’d like to do together in the future. It can be whispering about how much you crave your partner’s hands down your pants as you It can be saying “a little to the left” when your partner is almost there, or it can be saying “ohmigodYES” when they do it right. It can be a casual discussion about the obvious hotness of tentacle dildos. It can be saying “what the fuck were you thinking?” when your partner thinks it’s a good idea to, without asking, bite your clit (this happened).
And, no, negotiation is not just for kinky people. Even with vanilla sex, your partners may be tremendously diverse– some might like having their nipples played with, some might not; some might like one technique in oral, some might like another; some might enjoy watching you masturbate, some might not. There is no way you can know unless you talk about it.
However you are negotiating, it is important to have a nonjudgmental attitude. If your partner really likes having sex on a trampoline while dressed as a clown, you do not have to have sex on a trampoline while dressed as a clown. You do, however, have to recognize that you’ve been privileged enough to learn your partner’s sexuality and that you respect and honor them telling you this. Also, you should refrain from calling their sexual turnons weird or gross or sick or slutty, because that is a really good way to keep them from ever telling you anything that turns them on ever again. (The same thing goes the other way, too: unlike Tiny Ozy, you should not call someone uncool or prudish because they really don’t have any kinks. Not having kinks is just as valid as having kinks.)
Some people think negotiation is not sexy! I do not quite understand those people. I am not sure what’s not sexy about “I really want to suck your cock,” or about an extensive discussion of all the things that turn your partner on. Personally, I think it’s because people are scared to talk about their sexuality– hell, I am. You’re making yourself vulnerable to someone else, you’re afraid that they’re going to reject you… negotiation is fucking scary. But it’s necessary.
A final note: in discussions of consent, we always hear about the Mythical Straight Ladies Who Want Men To Push Through Their Boundaries. Those ladies can do exactly what everyone else who’s into noncon play does: negotiate ahead of time and set up a safeword and boundaries first.
Trigger warning for discussion of rape, abuse and boundary violations.
Knowing Your Boundaries
This is the most important rule of boundaries: it is okay to set whatever boundaries you want.
IT IS OKAY TO SET WHATEVER BOUNDARIES YOU WANT.
Our culture (I blame rape culture) has a bunch of rules about what boundaries are the right boundaries. Kiss the cheek of your Aunt Mildred. Hug your friends. Have sex on the third date. Give him oral if he’s paid for your dinner. Eat women out or you’re a misogynist. But those rules are completely bullshit.
The only reason you ever have to have for not wanting to do something with your own damn body is “I don’t want to.” Period. End of story. And if anyone guilt-trips you about it, they’re the asshole here.
Every person has the right to boundaries. Men have the right to boundaries. Higher-libido partners have the right to boundaries. Doms have the right to boundaries. Everyone!
It is important to make your boundaries as clear as you can. Let me be clear: this is a “do what you can” situation. There are lots of reasons– being a survivor, being uncertain of your boundaries, shock in the moment, not wanting to make a fuss, being shy or socially awkward, being sexually inexperienced– why someone might have difficulty expressing their boundaries firmly, and that’s okay. People do not have the right to violate you just because you froze up instead of saying “stop that, I don’t like it.”
Nevertheless, it is generally easier for other people to respect your boundaries if you have expressed them clearly and firmly. Captain Awkward has a lot of advice for people wanting to learn how to express their boundaries better.
Respecting Your Partner’s Boundaries
The first step of boundary respect is very simple: no means no. All kinds of no mean no. “Maybe later” means no. “You’re too drunk” means no. “I’m not sure” means no. “I’m not ready” means no. Some people seem perfectly capable of understanding that “I dunno, I’m kind of busy” means no when they’re asking someone if they want to play GalCiv, but are completely unable to work out that anything means no in sexual situations except signed, notarized paperwork properly filled out in triplicate and crossfiled with the Department of Justice.
The corollary of no means no is that only yes means yes. Now, some people have interpreted this as saying that only all partners continually chanting “yes!” counts as consent. However, there’s lots of things that “yes” can be. “Yes” can be actively participation in the sex– taking off clothes and initiating sex acts. “Yes” can be a prearranged safeword. “Yes” can be the various sounds of enjoyment people give during sex. “Yes” can be “fuck me hard, you sexy stud.” Whatever.
Sometimes you might not be certain if your partner is saying “yes”– perhaps they’ve gotten quiet and you’re having trouble reading their body language. In those cases, it’s best (in my experience) to check in. I tend to say “hey, you okay, or do you want me to change something up?”, but there’s no set formula. Some people find that check-ins break the mood (…I don’t get those people either), in which case you should probably tell your partner that and accept that if you’re not enjoying what they’re doing you’ll have to speak up.
It can sometimes be hard to distinguish between negotiation and pressure that might lead someone to violate their boundaries, so I’ve written up two sample conversations to show the difference!
WRONG WAY
Pat: I really don’t want anal sex.
Robin: But whyyyyyy?
Pat: I just don’t.
Robin: That’s not a reason.
Pat: I think it might hurt.
Robin: Come on, anal sex doesn’t hurt.
Pat: I don’t know, I’m just not comfortable.
Robin: If you really loved me you’d have anal sex.
RIGHT WAY
Pat: I really don’t want anal sex.
Robin: Okay. Do you mind if I ask why?
Pat: It just doesn’t appeal to me.
Robin: Do you think if we go slowly it might make you more comfortable?
Pat: I don’t know. I just think it’ll hurt.
Robin: I understand that. But if we do decide to do it I’ll make sure to go slow and use lube, and we can stop whenever you feel pain.
Pat: Okay, but I still don’t really want to.
Robin: I’m not going to lie, that makes me kind of sad, but I’m happy to do what you want.
Finally, in some circumstances, even enthusiastic consent is not good consent. For instance, you should not have sex with someone you have power over. Although the age of consent is contentious, because it’s drawing a big red line through a whole lotta gray area and because some teenagers are capable of consenting to sex with adults, it’s still better to not have sex with someone under the age of consent. The only people worse than teenagers at deciding if they’re mature enough to have sex is the adults that want to sleep with them. You can wait until they’re legal. Finally, the whole “drunk sex” issue is contentious, and I feel hesitant to comment on it, because my experience with alcohol is only slightly greater than my experience with traveling to Mars. However, I’m willing to state that there is a point at which people are impaired enough not to give good consent, and you should probably not have sex with them then unless you’ve previously discussed that drunk sex is okay.
Dealing With A Partner That Disrespects Your Boundaries
Dump the motherfucker already.
…Damn, you mean I have to provide actually helpful advice? Okay. Sometimes people violate boundaries by accident, mistake, or miscommunication. You can tell those people because they apologize a lot (whatever “a lot” looks like for them), feel bad about it, and stop fucking doing it.
However, if a person systematically, flagrantly, or repeatedly violates your boundaries… that person is not a good person, no matter how much they claim to love you. There is no justification for someone touching, kissing, or doing sexual things to your body without your consent– no matter how “minor” they are. You are not overreacting, and it is not your fault.
Obviously, there are a lot of reasons why someone might stay in an abusive relationship (and any relationship where your boundaries are systematically, flagrantly, or repeatedly violated is abusive). But please, I encourage you to consider breaking up with your partner and to talk to RAINN’s online hotline, or another hotline you find comfortable, even if you don’t feel like a survivor.
Thing of Things 
I never liked this criticism. Usually it’s phrased as “What if they’re doing it just to make their partner happy, and they freely want to do so?”
Why, exactly, consent is given isn’t particularly important*: it could be that one wants to make their partner happy; one wants money in exchange; one is attempting to conceive; one is super horny; or one wants to just try sex in the hopes that they get more into it in situ.
Having a goal besides sex itself doesn’t mean that the consent given isn’t enthusiastic. I clean my home with enthusiasm, but I hate cleaning: I just want a clean home. I write these comments with enthusiasm, though I’m not partial to writing: I want to communicate, and writing is just a means to an end. I have sex to make my partner happy with enthusiasm, despite not being particularly into it at the time.
*Obvious caveat is obvious
That criticism only works if you ignore, like, everything else about consent that gets talked about. Enthusiastic consent supporters also discuss in depth about being in a capable mental state for the consent to be valid.
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CN for sexual abuse; rape
I think enthusiastic consent is best understood as a deliberate attempt at closing the Overton window of sexual behaviour: specifically, its an attempt to limit the range of behaviour we are willing to accept.
The past model allowed for acquiescence: badgering a partner into sex, wearing them down, throwing a fit get your way, etc, was all allowed. That’s what happens when it is sufficient to simply get a yes by means that fall short of clear rape: the failure mode is rape successfully obfuscated as something else, or malicious behaviour that is given in to.
Aiming for enthusiasm, however, does away with most of those problems. Badgering your partner isn’t aiming for enthusiasm; threatening to break up if they don’t give in isn’t aiming for enthusiasm; waiting until they’re too tired to fight about it isn’t aiming for enthusiasm; etc.
Any of these things might be legal (they’re certainly legal in practice), but its a really nasty failure mode for a system because the bar is so low. Raising the bar from getting a yes (or at least not being told no), to getting a yes from someone who wants it effectively deals with that problem. Its a very simple shift to make in terms of public mindset.
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I really must have a different experience of sex than other people. I have had an extremely large amount of sex where my consent was obtained via things like:
” badgering a partner into sex, wearing them down ”
Though my partner was never remotely violent. I found this process kind of annoying but I am not even sure like I feel I was morally in the right. Its not obvious to me why sex operates under different logic from other activities. For example imagine me playing League of Legends 3-4 times a week for an hour was very important to my partner. I did not always feel like playing LoL but it didn’t cause me great distress or Trauma. Would be really be wrong for my boyfriend to badger me into playing LoL?
Anyway by certain “enthusiastic consent” standards I have been raped at least 100 times (once a week for two years get you there). I personally feel like I have been raped zero times.
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If you consented because you knew it was very important to him, why did he have to badger you? If you consented solely because it was the only way to make him stop asking, that sounds like an unhealthy dynamic.
Hmm, that came out more judgmental than I intended. There are some activities I sort of like being badgered into (e.g., exercise), but sex is different because it can be so important
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Nita I am pretty sure I would be overall happier if I got off the internet and walked to the gym (working out really helps me mood). If I delay too much more I may have to miss diner with my friends or not go to the gym. Yet there is a good chance I will sit on the internet for the next hour and screw myself over.
There is a very large disconnect between what I “want” to do and what I actually do. Or between what actions I think best fulfill my values and what actions I chose in practice.
(another good example is I hate my weight very badly. Yet I find it extremely difficult to avoid sweets. For example I ate Hershey’s chocolate yesterday).
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Because the brain is a highly parallel, therefor extremely compartmentalized and inconsistent device, and because monkeys are hysterical about sex.
That’s what happens when you expand the definition of a term to include things very far from the exemplar.
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I am not sure what the second section of your reply means. I have personally read posts from people describing standards for consent under which I have been raped. Unless you expect me to believe these people think sex without consent is not always rape (what?).
On the other hand maybe I am just misunderstanding your post.
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I was agreeing with you. Sorry if I was obtuse.
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This has been my experience, too. I’ve had sex plenty of times when I wasn’t into it, and my partners have obliged me with sex they weren’t thrilled about, too. It may not have been the greatest thing for the relationships, but no one came even close to traumatized.
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@ stargirlprincess
But-but-but-…! Lifting weights, running and not eating chocolate (when it’s within reach) are all hard, while having sex is (relatively) easy?
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My point was that particular behaviour doesn’t have to be rape for that sort of standard to enable rape.
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I also feel like we have different standards for being “worn down.” For me it means having little to no other feasible options: I generally think of my partner, who in a past relationship was subjected to months of emotional abuse until she gave in.
“Badgering” isn’t so severe for me, but for me it’s still a clear mistreatment to badger someone until they give in. “Asking repeatedly” isn’t sufficient for what I mean. If you and me mean the same thing by “badgering,” even if it wasn’t sufficient to make me leave, it would be a significant source of contention for me. I would not accept such treatment lightly.
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I really do not have a good sense for what you mean here: “For me it means having little to no other feasible options”
Before I respond I need a better sense of what this means. And why you think my standards enable this.
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@Nita
I am not really an expert in why humans do or do not want to have sex. But in practice lots of people often don’t feel like having sex. Even if they would not find the sex unpleasant or traumatic.
I am not sure if the concept of a “sex drive” is on firm psychological foundation. But I think the notion of a “sex drive” maybe makes sense. Anyway my sex drive is not super high. Or at least my BF’s sex drive was significantly higher than mine.
This does not strike me as a rare situation. Often one partner (male or female) seems to have a significantly higher desire for sex. Even in cases where there is no relevant trauma.
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Yeah, “sex drive” makes sense to me. But I don’t see the connection between the lack of physical arousal and the lack of mental enthusiasm.
I mean, I don’t have much of a TV-series-watching-drive, but when my partner says “Wanna watch something?”, I usually go “Sure!”
On the other hand, maybe we’re talking past each other. I interpret the word “want” very broadly — basically, I’d say I “want” to do something if some part of me vaguely agrees it might be a good idea if asked.
This leads to domestic conversations like this:
me: Do you want to take the trash out?
BF: No.
me: What? But why? It’s full!
BF: Sure, and I’ll do it. But I don’t want to do it.
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There are lots of failure modes for “don’t have sex with people you have power over”. People who work in law or government, for example, are capable of exerting institutional power over many people. Are they consigned to celibacy? I understand the instances you are trying to warn against, but I think it’s important to draw a clearer line.
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Hmm, actually that kind of explains some things about the more radical fringes of the Social Justice movement. Men, and especially straight white men, have power over everyone else in our society; thus (according to this logic), they should not have sex with anyone (besides other straight white men, somehow, I suppose).
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That makes sense. Too much sense.
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Hrm. Who’s good at making that decision, then?
My hypothesis is that approximately nobody is. Nobody can interview a person and give a definitive answer, or even lay out a coherent definition of what “mature enough” means, at least not one whose consequences they’re willing to live with. Which makes the question kind of meaningless.
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My experience has been that I really suck at modelling my own sexual desires – it’s happened often that things I thought would be hot were meh, and things I had never fantasized about were awesome.
IOW, spontaneity has been an important part of my sex life which explicit verbalization would kind of just… get in the way of. I kind of prefer just having a strong level of reciprocal trust in my partner that allows us to do things “in the moment.”
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And what if [things people want people to want] are ~normally distributed within each of the two sexes? That would create actual pressure (in people who don’t join a social group that selects very strongly for certain types of outlier status, like gender abolitionism) in people to like the One Right Thing To Want — not because society is evil, but because that strategy falls naturally out of the distribution of preferences.
I hear, for example, that there are not many dominant women. (Which does not surprise me at all.) Apparently there aren’t enough for all the submissive men out there. So if you’re a submissive man — and this applies equally well to men who like drag and so on — you’re going to feel pressure to stop liking the things that it’s hard to find people who are into, and like things that it’s easier to find people who are into instead. And everyone who knows the relevant distributions will know that that pressure exists.
(Extensive self-modification doesn’t happen, of course — if it did, you’d get a market and everything would balance out, which doesn’t happen. And sometimes there are multiple solutions: in the case of submissive men, they seem to get less straight over time, which is the same solution that shows up in prison and Afghanistan. So *some* self-modification is possible.)
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Voluntary self-modification by individuals acting in their self-interest is morally different from non-voluntary modification of individuals by society “for their own good”.
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People who consciously seek to model their preferences after the norm generally are doing so out of perceived self-interest. Isn’t that why nonconformity is considered courageous?
“Society” is incapable of directly altering preference, unless literal, interpersonal coercion is involved. “Society”, in this context, is just a word for a complex set of incentives that can only be judged on an individual basis, not as a class.
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“If I do this, I’ll get laid more often” is different from “if I don’t do this, I will be shamed by family and friends”. More specifically, shaming people who haven’t done anything wrong is unethical.
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I agree, but “If I rape someone, I will be shamed by family and friends” is a social incentive that all of us would support. The question is never whether shaming per se is good or bad.
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Well, I did mention “people who haven’t done anything wrong”. I’ll specify it even more: people who haven’t caused harm or injustice.
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OK, so there’s a lot to like here! In particular, the concrete example of OK negotiation vs. bad pressuring. Given how often you see feminists make statements to the effect that any sort of persistence is bad, it’s refreshing to see one presenting an example to the contrary.
So now for the parts where I am not so on-board, which I will try to keep short. Ozy sort of implicitly makes the claim that consent here works like consent in ordinary everyday situations. Others make this claim much more explicitly, with the idea of “consent culture”.
In my experience, consent works only barely like this in ordinary situations, to the extent it’s a good abstraction at all. People don’t usually have predetermined intentions; whether someone will do something you ask them to has less to do with whether it matches up with some pre-existing desire, and more to do with noisy on-the-spot decision making.
There’s this common feminist notion of “If I said no the first time, you have all the information you need” — which makes sense if we imagine people have predetermined intentions and you’re just gathering information on these intentions. But in a lot of cases, people don’t act this way. If you ask if someone wants to do something, and they say no, and then you ask for comfirmation — “You sure?” — they often do change their mind, despite you not (I would claim, and I think most would agree) having done anything to pressure them. (The “false no” makes an appearance! Except it’s not false, because it doesn’t satisfy the assumptions that most feminists would use to judge it true or false.) On the other hand, generally after a second answer, the person has made a decision, and asking any further (without e.g. a very good reason or a change in the situation) will just annoy them; that’s something you really shouldn’t do, now you’re just badgering the person.
And then there’s a number of things outside of sexual situations, in everyday life, which are substantially less than consensual, but certainly not coerced either, and which I seriously doubt most people would condemn, including the people involved. (I’ll omit examples for purposes of length unless people care.) And plenty of ordinary cases where the line between “implicitly making a request” and “kind of pressuring the person” is not so clear, that we’re usually pretty OK with in ordinary situations but I think we would mostly say are really terrible in a sexual situation. (Those are places I think we can say our standards are honestly different between types of situations, and they really screw up analogies, which is why I’ve started avoiding such analogies.)
But, like, this sort of thing is why I say we really need a better model, redone from the ground up — one that acknowledges that yes, people can be influenced, but not all influence is evil.
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OK, how about this?
New rules:
1. Don’t say “no” unless you have made a final decision.
2. When someone says “no”, stop persuading them.
3. If someone keeps persuading you after you’ve said “no”, explain that you adhere to Rule 1.
4. If someone seems disappointed after you stop persuading them, explain that you adhere to Rule 2.
This should prevent 100% of cases of unwanted persuasion between the people who use the new rules, at the cost of some people missing out on some fun (which is, presumably, a lesser evil).
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Well, I mean, that seems to be more or less what a lot of feminists advocate! But I don’t think that’s the right tradeoff to be making. It’s also practically unworkable; abiding by rule 2 is doable, but training myself to follow rule 1 just sounds awful, and I expect many others people will have even more of a problem with it.
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Additional problem that just occurred to me: As you know, IRL, refusals are typically softened; unsoftened refusals are not exactly friendly. E.g. “I think I’ll pass”. How do I soften that further to make it unambiguous it’s a non-final refusal? “I think I think I’ll pass?” Or should final refusals be not softened to distinguish instead? I don’t think that would have pleasant results.
(And, like, it seems silly to change a working system just because some people can’t account for why it works.)
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So, do you really like to reject suggestions and invitations out of hand, and then be talked into them? That seems so odd to me.
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I think “No, thanks” is soft enough. Sometimes I add an explanation.
Instead of “non-final refusal”, I meant that we should use non-refusal, e.g., “Hmm, let me think. What’s so good about that place?”
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I would personally consider these rules a deal-breaker for me. They are just way too strange and different from how I normally interact.
I really think your attitude in these things assume people are fairly rational and understand their preferences. Even that they are able to correctly model the trade-offs between their desires and their desires to please their partners. This is a very different model from how I understand myself.
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@ stargirlprincess
Well, I’m not a big fan of hard rules in soft matters, but Sniffnoy keeps demanding rules, so I decided to give it a try 🙂
I don’t assume perfection, that’s why the rules err on the safe side. If you regret not doing something, you can usually do it later. If you regret doing something, you usually can’t un-do it.
This is not a huge problem in healthy intimate relationships, I think. Both a bit of occasional self-sacrifice and a bit of leaning on your partner is expected.
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Nita: OK, so, evidently, I’ve been typical-minding! I should be more careful, I guess.
I wonder how much of this though is not “typical mind” but “typical typical situation”. It seems a lot of these sorts of things depend on a lot of little variables (e.g. are we dealing with friends or with strangers?) that people rarely set the value of, but just assume based on what’s typical for them. For instance, I was thinking mostly about situations in which pretty much everything’s a known quantity, so there isn’t much point in me trying to gather more information.
Regardless of my own mistakes, though, my point that it’s a mistake to try to force everything through the “consent” abstraction and its associated concepts stands.
Because yeah, I frequently change my mind about things after having said no. This doesn’t necessarily require any sort of persuasion and usually doesn’t involve any. A lot of times it’s just “well, the person asked twice, so evidently they care a bit more”. Now, of course, if everyone always asked twice about everything, this would become a worthless signal, but they don’t, so it’s fine.
Here’s another one for you: Used to be, if you asked me if I wanted to do pretty much anything at some future time, and I had a headache in the present, I would almost certainly say no. Eventually I recognized this and can now “correct” for it some. But, like, the point is, my answer is going to be influenced by things that to other people must be thought of as random noise — why should people not treat me as noisy?
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Could you clarify some examples of nonsexual situations that are “substantially less than consensual but certainly not coerced either”? Unless you’re taking consensual to mean “something I want to do, of my own volition,” I’m not seeing any room between consensual and coerced. Or at least, the examples in my life of being persuaded to do something I don’t want to do typically look like Ozy’s good negotiation example.
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So, I’m not talking about persuasion, or at least not explicit persuasion. OK — it’s possible I’m really talking about several different phenomena, and it’s possible should take more trouble to separate them. But let’s start with one example anyway.
Actually, another clarification I should make — I think maybe there’s something of a calibration mismatch between what I’m talking about when I talk about wanting/not wanting to do things, and what other people are talking about. I get the impression that other people are largely talking about things you don’t want to do at all; and I mean I certainly have plenty of those too, where there is pretty much nothing you can do outside of A. explicit persuasion or B. unfairly pressuring me that will get me to change my mind. Of course, people learn not to ask so much about those, you know? I’m more talking about things I don’t want to do on net — for instance, because I’m doing something else at the moment and I don’t want to task-switch, or because it would require too much an effort in too short a time, or whatever. Things that are close to neutral and which therefore can be affected by random brain noise.
Maybe other people are just way less neutral than I am about most things, and thus this comes up a lot less? To my mind, these sorts of things that are on the border are not only the common cases but also exactly the interesting cases, the hard cases; but if for most people they rarely come up I can see why they would create abstractions that ignore them.
Anyway — one example of the sort of thing (or one of the sorts of things) I’m talking about. Suppose a friend of mine is coming over. Suppose when they arrive I’m playing a video game — let’s say it’s Worms. (Also suppose this is someone I play Worms with a bunch.) When they arrive, I don’t ask if they want to play Worms, I just toss them a controller and grin.
I don’t think you can say, in this particular situation, that I am really unfairly pressuring the person, unless this person is known to be particularly weak-willed or something. On the other hand, I’m definitely putting a pretty strong “We are going to play Worms now” expectation on them; this is the sort of example that caused me to say above that the line between “implicit request” and “pressuring” can be somewhat fuzzy. I think this falls on the OK side of the line (again, in the typical case; cannot account for every situation). I also think this is the sort of thing where if we took the analogue for a sexual situation, we’d probably say that is creepy and really not OK, because we (for good reason) have stronger standards of consensuality for that sort of thing.
Yet more worrisome: What if it’s more than one person asking? Let’s take a case that actually happened, where I was sitting in my office with several of my friends (grad school, we shared an office), and they decided they wanted to play Bridge, but I didn’t really want to play, and then they just started dealing out cards anyway, making comments like “Why aren’t you picking up your hand, [Sniffnoy]”. Now, in this case, due to the particular manner of it, I found it funny enough that I wasn’t too bothered and joined in anyway, but absent that we are really now in potentially bad territory, you know?
OK, those are pretty overt, close-to-the-line examples — things we either maybe or definitely want to avoid, depending on context. What about far-from-the-line examples, that I really think we don’t want to condemn, even when standards are stricter? Which is what I’m really worried about — not that people will do these things and cause problems but that people will avoid these things out of scrupulosity as I have. I’m going to quote myself from the “On Creepiness” thread here:
More generally, as I mentioned back on Scott Aaronson’s blog, there’s a fundamental tension here — it’s hard to make a request totally neutral. It’s hard to make it so that either one of a negative or affirmative answer would sound natural. Trying to make an affirmative answer sound natural risks making a negative answer sound unnatural, i.e., pressuring. Conversely, trying to make a negative answer sound natural risks reducing their agency in the other direction, if we’re taking this threat seriously.
This is what I’m worrying about — making sure we’re not banning requests just because they put a nonzero positive expectation on the other person. Things like saying “So, you’re coming to trivia tonight, right?” I seriously doubt anyone can condemn that as pressuring, but of course it is going to have some influence, and it is putting a nonzero positive expectation on the person. Or asking for confirmation — “You sure?” — in a tone that suggests “Well, your loss!”. Is that going to push someone over the line and get someone to do something they really don’t want to do at all? I certainly hope not. Could it push someone over the line into getting something they previously didn’t want to do on net? Probably, yeah.
(Although note that I’m just using that last distinction there as illustration — it’s not the actual distinction between OK and unfairly pressuring. E.g. the Bridge example above; that was hardly something I didn’t want to do at all, but with only slightly different circumstances I would have certainly called it unfairly pressuring.)
(You can even put positive expectation with words of negative expectation. With the right grin and tone of voice, the apparently negative expectation “I don’t suppose you’d be up for a game of Worms?” becomes positive expectation.)
This is especially worth noting when we do port this over into sexual/romantic situations, where — at least according to the standard picture — men have to be “confident” to be attractive. As I understand it, this is going to involve putting a nonzero positive expectation on the other person. I mean, it’s very possible I’m misunderstanding. But again, note that I’m not saying that according to my understanding you have to pressure anyone (in the sense of committing some violation against them); just that you’re going to have to put an expectation on them that’s more than zero. I hope I’ve made it clear above how small “more than zero” can be (and it can be even smaller, certainly; I had to make it large enough above to make the examples clear).
Of course, maybe I’m wrong, and this sort of thing really is a problem, and my earlier scrupulosity was largely right. But in that case I’m very confused as to where the line is.
…and now I’m realizing I left out at least one possibly entirely different sort of ordinary “neither totally consensual nor coerced” interaction I haven’t provided any examples of here, and which I think more people would agree would fall under that label. (I get the impression the sort of thing I’m talking about here, most people would just be like “That’s clearly consensual” or “That’s clearly not consensual”, depending on example, because they’re incorporating common sense into their notion of consent. 😛 ) But this is long enough, and this is probably the main thing I’m focused on when I talk about this, so I’ll leave it at this for now. I hope this makes clearer what I’m talking about.
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>>I also think this is the sort of thing where if we took the analogue for a sexual situation, we’d probably say that is creepy and really not OK, because we (for good reason) have stronger standards of consensuality for that sort of thing.
I actually kind of disagree with you here. You’ve described the situation such that “I frequently play Worms with this person” is part of the social context of the situation. The sexual analogue, therefore, seems to assume a preexisting, ongoing sexual relationship (whether SO or fuckbuddy or whatever). Lots of people have, implicitly or explicitly, negotiated how their ongoing sexual partners should obtain consent, and lots of those negotiations include things like, “It is okay for you to kiss me when I walk into the room and you do not have to explicitly ask before doing so.” (Which seems to be the analogue here.) I don’t think that this is bad consent (assuming that the initiating partner backs off if the other isn’t into it)–I think it’s representative of the way that people often have different boundaries with people close to them than with strangers.
The issue of requests not being totally value-neutral seems, in most of the cases you described, like kind of an instance of scrupulosity. The bridge example, I guess, sounds fairly irritating, and seems like the best candidate for “thing that would sound pretty coercive if you mapped it onto a sexual situation.” But then, most people have stronger feelings about sex than about bridge.
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Bem: Good point! I assume others would know better than me. I did elsewhere suggest maybe we can summarize much of this whole big mess as “Use the same ethics you would for anyone else”; I’m uncertain that’s strictly correct, but it seems a good starting point. (Of course, it has the drawback that it’s unhelpful if your ethics elsewhere are bad as well! 😛 )
The point about the importance of backing off is worth restating as well. So much of this becomes substantially less of a problem if you allow trying things and backing off, rather than everything always having to be guaranteed OK in advance. I mean, there are some obvious cases where backing off (and apologizing if appropriate) *won’t* suffice, and we really do want to guarantee things are OK in advance; but when we’re talking about the low end of things, like just, y’know, expressing interest, this is pretty important. The fact that the very first thing you do would seem to be required to be guaranteed OK in advance, while this also being fundamentally impossible, is a big part of the problem of “feminist scrupulosity”.
But all this is seeming like less and less central examples of “consent”. I’m reminded of something Ashley Yakeley once wrote. Basically, we’ve made the mistake of identifying “ethical” with “consensual”, which leads to two problems: the simple features of consent get ported onto ethics, and the complex feature of ethics get ported onto consent. Consent was supposed to provide an explanation, a reduction, of sexual ethics. But as more and more complexity gets ported into it, it becomes vacuous, question-begging, a false explanation.
Indeed, you’ll notice Ozy explicitly puts the word “good” back in! Now it’s not about consent but “good consent”, and it’s made explicit that the problem hasn’t been reduced at all. I can’t help but get the impression that consent is what one might be called an “eccentric category” — one whose intension is a bit off-center from what it’s really supposed to capture.
Anyway — point is, worrying that the way you asked about something maybe puts too much expectation on someone may indeed be silly; but it’s exactly the sort of thing one should do if one takes stated feminist principles absolutely seriously. I find it disappointing that so few have realized this and made any attempt to ward off this line of thinking in others. Like, they’re talking about violation of “macro-agency”, what you get if you take existing human behavior as a given and fit the agency abstraction onto it; they don’t notice that anyone might care about “micro-agency”, if you start with the agency abstraction and try to fit humans into it, not having a good idea of their high-level behavior.
You can’t assume everyone has this knowledge of human mating behavior, you know? And people keep saying, oh, it’s social stuff, it can’t be described; but that’s evidently not the case, given the existence of (for instance) PUAs. Now I mean they’re a pretty flawed example, both less accurate and less ethical than we’d like, but the point is, they are a demonstration of possibility. Nobody’s saying it’s totally describable — the PUAs certainly don’t, they place quite a bit of emphasis on that indescribable stuff. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t commonalities that can be described and factored out. I get the impression the people saying it’s indescribable are just taking too high-level view; they assume the describable stuff as already known, as already factored out, as trivial and not needing saying. But it does!
In particular, that (ordinarily, absent other considerations which might cause it to be so) asking about things in a way that puts (an ordinary amount of) positive expectation on the other person does not constitute “pressuring” and is OK? Needs saying.
(I had originally started a much longer reply continuing these themes, but now I’m thinking I’d be better off just writing that as an independent thing somewhere. So, more on all this later! If I get around to it, anyway.)
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I think Robin sounds pressuring and unpleasant in both scenarios. Obviously the first one is much worse, but the second one would be enough to make me decide that I wasn’t going to sleep with them again.
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I would be fine with the second if not for, “I’m not going to lie, that makes me kind of sad”. My response to that would be something along the lines of “lol fuck off”. It feels like that’s in the same vein as “If you really loved me…” If a partner refuses, I don’t think it’s a good idea to immediately say how it makes you feel. Maybe after some time has passed (e.g., next day, “Hey, it makes me kinda sad that we can’t have anal. Could we talk about things we might mutually enjoy?” etc.), but /immediately/ after sounds too much like guilt tripping — and even if it’s not intended, I think that’s how most recipients would read it.
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In the second situation, I was wondering why Robin thought if they and Pat did have anal sex, Robin would be the one performing it on Pat? If Robin is so certain anal sex is great fun, they should be willing to volunteer to demonstrate that to Pat by letting Pat try it out on them, first 🙂
More seriously, I agree that Robin in the second example is as pressuring as Robin in the first example. Actually, I think I’d prefer to deal with First Robin – they’re being a dick about it and the old ‘if you really loved me you’d do it’ arm-twisting is asking for a smack round the chops, but I’d feel a lot more comfortable telling them “I said ‘no’, you tosser, and if you don’t like it, there’s the door”.
Second Robin is making a show of being more understanding, but they’re still pushing – ‘but why don’t you? what if I said I’d stop?’ and to crown it all ‘that makes me sad’.
Particularly “if we do decide to do it” – whoa, whoa, whoa – what is this ‘we’, white man? Pat said no, Pat said they didn’t want to do it and it didn’t appeal to them, what in that sounds like “But sure, this time next week we’ll be at it like crazed mink!”
I do understand that anyone wanting to try something new needs to find out ‘is your objection because you don’t understand what I’m asking or what is actually involved, or is it because you really don’t want to do it?’ But when someone says “It doesn’t appeal to me, I don’t want to do it”, that should be enough.
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I find that my evaluation of second Robin changes a lot depending on what sort of tone and body language I imagine zir using. There’s a detached, soothing, psychotherapisty version which I think seems pretty kind and acceptable (trying to figure out the contours around the boundary, figuring out if there could be ways to mitigate the problems which it’s designed to address, ultimately accepting zir partner’s decision peacefully), and a passive-aggressive jerk version whose presentation is laced with condemnation. I definitely think that past!Ozy could have done a much better job of writing the conversation here. Here’s what might be a slightly better, albeit slapdash version?:
Robin: Hey, I would like to try anal sex sometime.
Pat: I don’t feel quite comfortable with that.
Robin: That’s reasonable. Are you worried that it would hurt? We might be able to find some ways around that. Go more slowly, use lots of lube…
Pat: No, it’s more just that butt stuff squicks me out on like, a hygiene level.
Robin: Ah, okay, that’s cool. Thanks for talking to me about it!
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Frankly, i am getting a bit tired with all that consent analysis. Maybe i just got old or something, but in the end, i stopped considering whether my partner is consenting or not. Its their job to make sure they are, i mean, i am not holding them down or anything. Well, i mean, when they are not bound and gagged, obviously 😉
Unfortunately, thats not true, because i find my partner being into sex with me a huge if not main turn on, so i sort of check it anyway, but my motivation is specifically not about whether they are consenting or not. Thats not my business.
Sorry for a random comment by almost a stranger to your blog.
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“The only reason you ever have to have for not wanting to do something with your own damn body is “I don’t want to.” Period. End of story. And if anyone guilt-trips you about it, they’re the asshole here”
Does that apply to sex only or everything? If it’s the latter, we might have a problem with anti-anti-vaccination movement, as well as anti-treating-cancer-with-homeopathy.
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The anti-vaxxers tend to want people to not vaccinate their children. I would be totally okay with them refusing vaccination for themselves, but their decision endangers another person, particularly when that person is a helpless child. Similarly, a person making arguments in public space for treating cancer with homeopathy is possibly endangering other people with their rhetoric– so, in fact, their behaviors involves bodies other than their own. Wanting to do things with your own body is one thing, endangering other people’s bodies is quite another.
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I am not okay with people refusing vaccination for transmissible diseases for themselves, because they may then transmit those diseases to other people. I am okay with people refusing vaccination for non-transmissible diseases for themselves (although the only vaccine that I know of that is exclusively for non-transmissible disease is the anthrax vaccine(s); tetanus would also count, but it’s generally combined with diphtheria and pertussis), but not for their children.
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That’s a good point– I was forgetting that there are people who, for immunological reasons, can’t have vaccines at all, so people who refuse to get vaccinated for transmissible diseases endanger those people as well. It’s important to note again that the immediate danger to others continues to be what makes anti-vaxxing unethical.
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Of course.
Also, it’s not just that some people can’t get vaccines, it’s also that many vaccines are good, but imperfect, so that even people who have been vaccinated can still be at risk of developing the disease if exposed, albeit much less so. Influenza vaccines, in particular, tend to have efficacies around 50% or so, although it varies from year to year.
This is why the “if your vaccines are so good, why do you care if my kid is unvaccinated” argument is so stupid (apart from, you know, the fact that I care about people other than my immediate kin).
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Totally! The central example of vaccines in my head was the standard set of childhood immunizations rather than things like the flu shot, but you’re totally right about this.
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I wanted to talk about responsive desire when this post was published and forgot, then found this article by Emily Nagoski, which gives interesting information (with sources and links) on sex drive and responsive (vs spontaneous) desire. This should be relevant to this discussion (and to the discussions on consent paranoia).
If you know that for you (or for your partner), l’appétit vient en mangeant (appetite comes with eating), the relationship between consenting to sexual activity and actually desiring sexual activity gets more complicated. How do we define “enthusiastic consent” (which is now enshrined in common discourse) in this context? If one thinks “that could be nice but I’ll know if I’m in the mood only after we start”, can we qualify their willingness to try as enthusiastic?
Also, knowing that desire works like that is one more reason to stress that one should be able to stop sexual activity at any time (“well, I thought I would respond to this but in fact I don’t feel it”). Oh, and it’s one more reason for establishing good communication, and better social norms around talking about sex and desire.
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I believe Emily Nagoski also had an article where she suggested something like “curious consent”–e.g. “I’m interested in what’s going on now, and I maybe want to do a little bit more, and after that I might know whether I want to do a little bit more than that, too…” et cetera. It seemed to me like a reasonable model for people whose desire tends to be more responsive.
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