A lot of feminists support ‘enthusiastic consent’ as a model for sex. If a person is not enthusiastic about the prospect of having sex, they argue, it is unethical. Sometimes this is expressed as “if it’s not fuck yes, it’s fuck no.”
First, I don’t think “enthusiastic consent” draws the lines properly around ethical and unethical sex. For instance, it’s possible that there’s a thirteen-year-old who’s very enthusiastically consenting to have sex with me. They’re horny and they want sex right now! However, I still think– knowing that the vast majority of thirteen-year-olds are not ready for sex, that early sexual initiation is correlated with a host of problems, and that there are serious power dynamics in relationships between adults and teenagers– that it is a terrible idea for me to have sex with a thirteen-year-old. Similarly, if someone who’s extraordinarily drunk is enthusiastically consenting to sex, and I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t want to have sex with me if they were sober, it behooves me not to have sex with them.
On the other hand, a lot of unenthusiastic sex is perfectly ethical. A couple that is trying hard to conceive a baby might not be feeling terribly erotic: “honey, my cervical mucus looks like an egg white!” is few people’s idea of dirty talk. Nevertheless, there’s nothing wrong with planning your sex around trying to conceive. Similarly, a sex worker may not feel terribly enthusiastic about sex with her clients, but that doesn’t mean that her or her clients are doing something wrong.
Second, enthusiastic consent is androcentric. Sexologists sometimes distinguish between responsive desire and spontaneous desire. Spontaneous desire is when you’re walking along, minding your own business, thinking about the grocery list, and suddenly you’re like “man, I really want to get laid right now.” Responsive desire is when you’re not really in the mood for sex, but your partner is, and you start kissing and cuddling and touching each other and wow now you really want to fuck. People can experience only responsive desire, only spontaneous desire, or both. However, there is a gender difference in how likely people are to experience responsive desire: a minority of men experience responsive desire, while the majority of women do, and a significant minority of women only experience responsive desire and never spontaneous.
Some people have a tendency to equate ‘good sex’ with ‘being similar to the average man’– another example is the bizarre instance by many people that vaginal orgasm is absolutely necessary for a woman to have good sex. ‘Enthusiastic consent’, I fear, is an example of this– it sounds a hell of a lot like “only have sex when you are experiencing spontaneous desire.” But for a lot of women, good sex doesn’t begin with spontaneous horniness: it begins with a willingness to have sex even though sex doesn’t sound super-appetizing yet. A lot of them feel broken or like they’re doomed to an unenjoyable sex life, when in reality they have a perfectly ordinary variation.
Third, I feel like ‘enthusiastic consent’ is sort of disrespectful of people’s agency. If it is someone’s own personal body and their own personal decision, I’m not sure why sex-positive feminism gets to have an opinion about whether their motivations for consenting to sex are pure enough. I do not mean to adopt the full “if I say I want it, you don’t get to say I don’t want it” position. As I mentioned above, it is perfectly reasonable to say “you might want it now, but I’m not convinced you’re going to want it later” to young teenagers and the very drunk. And if I’m in a close relationship with someone, I think there are times it’s okay for them to say “I think you’re having sex with me because you feel guilty (or whatever), and I don’t think that’s good for you, so we’re not going to have sex now.”
Nevertheless, if I am a sober adult, I think my decisions should prima facie be respected. Certainly by casual sex partners, who definitely do not know me well enough to have an opinion about whether I am doing something wrong. But also by feminism as a whole! If a person says “I had sex when I wasn’t enthusiastic about it, and it was a perfectly fine experience and I don’t think it was morally wrong”, we should respect that and incorporate it into our understanding of sexual ethics. At a certain point, one must switch from “okay, everyone needs to do these specific things” to “everyone needs to figure out what works for them and then do that”– and I think whether or not you choose to only have sex when you experience spontaneous desire is well past that line.
My preferred way of discussing ethical sex is ‘affirmative consent’ (which, fortunately for me, seems to be winning out over ‘enthusiastic’). Affirmative consent means that everyone involved in the sex agrees to it voluntarily, noncoerced, and for the entire time the sex is happening. There are various ways to convey such an agreement. The most obvious and the most common is both people actively participating in the sex. You might make an agreement to keep going until the person says “no” or safewords. Or a person might convey with their body language that they would like the sex to continue.
Thing of Things 
okay, I want to know how can it be that “enthusiastic consent” would be so deliberately androcentric given that most of the people doing the consent discourse are women?
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It’s accidentally androcentric.
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Yes, more precisely it’s spontaneous-centric, which happens to be androcentric. I think the argument is that the women pushing for enthusiastic consent as the standard are more spontaneous than the average woman.
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What the Lagrangian said, plus people are part of an androcentric society and thus develop androcentric ideas about sex. (See also the number of women who are convinced they’re low-libido when actually they are perfectly normal libido people who happen to primarily experience responsive desire.)
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No doubt Ozy has a better answer than I do, given that they’re better at this stuff, but one hypothesis I’d propose is that it’s basically patriarchal/sexist/etc. in terms of viewing a typically-male model of sexual pleasure as the better model of sexual pleasure, which’d make it a case of feminists not being feminist enough (or something like that?).
I wouldn’t insist that’s the right answer, but it seems plausible and at least worthy of consideration.
The other factor that immediately springs to mind is that a lot of the “enthusiastic consent” stuff was proposed to draw a line in the sand against people who think it’s okay to basically harass other people into submission; the point there is to take “maybe” as a “no” (given how often a straight-up “no” can be met with hostility but with a “maybe” one can hopefully stall for time or something) and not try to push further. The androcentricity here would, I think, be *incidental* rather than a cause, intentionally or otherwise.
(Yet again, just throwing the ideas out there; I’m not sure enough on any of this to insist on either of these answers as correct.)
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Internalized misogyny. Trauma bonding. Stockholm syndrome. Sister punishing. You know, the typical Witchwind stuff.
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I’m assuming the reasoning is that men are having good sex, but women are not, so to have better sex, women must be more like men.
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This strikes me as a pretty succint explaination of a lot of similar dynamics, yeah. It\s still a patriarchal value system, not transvaluated but just remixed and rearranged.
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Good post! But I must point out:
Affirmative consent means that everyone involved in the sex agrees to it voluntarily, noncoerced, and for the entire time the sex is happening. There are various ways to convey such an agreement. The most obvious and the most common is both people actively participating in the sex.
I still think “affirmative consent” is a misleading term if that’s what you mean, as can be seen by all the other ways it’s been used/taken. I’m going to suggest saying “active participation” instead?
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I think you can give affirmative consent without actively participating if you say ahead of time that you would like someone to do X to you at a given time even if you’re not actively participating.
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OK, “affirmative consent or active participation”.
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I will add that it’s perfectly fine if *I* am horny but choose not to consent because my prospective partner is too drunk, even if all of the moral and legal requirements are satisfied.
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Are they not ready for sex, or are they not ready for the obscene amount of abuse the rest of society will hurl at them for having sex? What I understand of the literature, sex itself is harmless. The two ways children who have sex with adults get hurt are: non-sexual abuse/coercion used to extract the sex from a child who does not consent (i.e. rape), and then used to demand silence afterwards (more trauma); society shaming and abusing them for having sex (even if they consented and enjoyed it at the time).
By all accounts, letting children have sex as soon as they want, but with partners wise enough to handle their mistakes (i.e. don’t let the kids mess each-other up by accident) seems the optimal way to teach healthy sexuality. So long as we don’t, you know, tell them they’re evil for being horny. Don’t make them feel shame for getting laid. We need the Companions from Firefly to teach the next generation how to deal with their libidos healthily. We need good, healthy sex education, stat.
In general, enthusiastic consent seems objectively optimal. The thing is, it necessitates Ask Culture (also objectively optimal), which many feminists dislike because asking is harassment or some such nonsense. And, of course, once you add non-verbal communication to the mix, you can ask and receive enthusiastic consent without ever speaking a word. And, while starting in a position of lack of initial enthusiasm, the process of asking for increasing levels of intimacy to generate responsive desire is non-coercive, and enthusiastic consent. It’s seduction. It’s teasing someone who was uninterested until they’re overflowing with amorous desire. Don’t swallow the lie that because someone gently changed your mood, without ever transgressing your boundaries, that your new mood is somehow inauthentic. Desire is desire, regardless of its origin; enthusiastic responsive consent is still enthusiastic consent.
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When you say that enthusiastic consent seems “objectively optimal”, what exactly do you mean? Optimal for happiness? Optimal for babymaking? Optimal for appeasing feminists? Optimal for maximizing paperclips?
Ditto for ask culture being “objectively optimal”.
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Given the mean and standard deviation on human behavior and desires, intelligently implemented Ask Culture and carefully followed enthusiastic consent will empirically maximize happiness. I mean that enthusiastic consent reduces to making sure your partner enjoys the sex, which is objectively better than the alternative. That Ask Culture empirically minimizes uncertainty while doing the minimum of damage. Because asking and being turned down is significantly less harmful than guessing wrongly and either doing harm with the guessed action, or being harmed by the response.
I’m saying that I’ve started implementing Ask Culture in non-sexual contexts, and it fucking works. It’s the secret to networking. Ask firmly but nicely. Respect refusals. Be polite. Be good to people, and people will, statistically, be good back to you. Charisma matters, but the courage to ask for help unlocks so many goddamn doors.
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“Wow now you really want to fuck” sounds pretty enthusiastic to me! I think the key difference is whether the enthusiasm starts before or after the touching.
Please pardon the digression, but this set off my youth rights siren.
First, this seems at least as gynocentric as “enthusiastic consent” is androcentric. My understanding is that, although it’s fairly common for women to wish they’d waited longer before having sex and to experience a host of problems even from enthusiastic encounters, it’s quite rare for men. This shows up in studies of sexual abuse, as well as in high-profile cases of teenage students hooking up with their teachers.
Second, the assertion that “X-year-olds aren’t ready for Y” (where Y is anything our society restricts by age) is so common, and frustrating, that if I were a bingo-card-making type, I’d put it on the free space. I’ve never seen someone make that assertion who was prepared to articulate what they meant by “ready”. Over and over, I saw someone express a gut feeling that whatever The Readiness was, X-year-olds in general didn’t have it, and they were so confident that they’d dismiss everyone who argued differently from their own experience as an outlier — but they could never actually judge whether an individual had The Readiness, and so there was no way to test whether their generalization was accurate.
But if anyone can do it, Ozy, I think you might be the one.
Imagine a sort of Turing test in which you have to determine whether someone is “ready for sex”. You can talk to them as much as you want, but they can’t give any answers that would reveal their age. What would your approach be?
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To steelman the concept of “readiness”: a person is “ready” when they fully understand the potential ramifications (pregnancy, STIs) of sexual activity and have plans in place to account for such. For example: if you don’t know how to get birth control, if you haven’t thought about whether you would want to have an abortion (or would want your partner to have one), if you don’t know where to get tested for STIs, you are probably not prepared to have sex with another person.
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That’s sensible on its face, but it’s a standard that can be met by basically anyone who can read. A summary of what pregnancy and STIs are and the contact info for the local Planned Parenthood can fit on one sheet of paper; if you can remember “stop, drop, and roll”, you can remember what to do if the condom breaks.
That’s not the outcome most people seem to want from a definition of “readiness”, so sometimes they’ll challenge whether someone as young as X can “fully understand” the ramifications, presumably in some deeper sense than being able to explain what they are and how to deal with them.
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““ready” when they fully understand the potential ramifications (pregnancy, STIs) of sexual activity and have plans in place to account for such. For example: if you don’t know how to get birth control, if you haven’t thought about whether you would want to have an abortion (or would want your partner to have one), if you don’t know where to get tested for STIs, you are probably not prepared to have sex with another person”
By that standard many adults aren’t ready for sex.
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I’d agree with Ozy’s comment later in this thread that emotional readiness is a bigger concern for me. Disease prevention is something that many teenagers can easily understand. I certainly agree that inadequate knowledge about disease prevention is bad, but I don’t think that it’s automatically okay for an adult to have sex with a teenager given that neither of them has a disease and the adult has been sterilized such that a pregnancy won’t result from the union.
Admittedly, I’m not precisely sure what the emotional readiness really is. On the face of it, touching body parts after taking precautions against disease shouldn’t be all that fraught. There’s nothing ethically incorrect about an adult and a teenager playing patty cake after washing their hands. That said, I don’t think people are making mountains out of molehills when they say that sex is a big deal. I assume that they’re right. Perhaps it’s because many people experience intense emotions during sex, even physiologically from all the hormones?
Honestly, my position is probably colored by how I’m not personally ready for sex.
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@1angelette
I think that if “emotional readiness” has any useful meaning at all, it means something inside your mind that no one else is equipped to judge. You’re the only person who knows whether you’re “ready for sex”, and if you say you aren’t, then you aren’t.
On the other hand, if you say you are, and you’re enthusiastic about having sex, and just when you’re about to get down, someone butts in and says “Nope, see, there’s this thing called emotional readiness, and even though I can’t explain what it is and I don’t know how to tell if someone has it, I’m still pretty sure you don’t have it, so no sex for you”… then that seems awfully presumptuous of them.
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@taradinoc, I agree that a theory of emotional readiness completely absent of evidence would be very silly. However, I have read several accounts by adults to the effect that “I had sex as a teenager and totally thought it was a good idea, but just a little later I felt very sad about that, and I believe that was a result of insufficient emotional readiness, which I have now gained as an adult, and the emotionally prepared sex I’ve had as an adult does not make me sad.” Therefore I believe that there is some merit to the emotional readiness argument, even though I don’t have a rigorous definition personally.
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What if I don’t care about abstract and individualized Readiness For Sex, and just want an easy to apply heuristic that let’s the criminal justice system provide reliable and easily interpreted guidance to the general public on how to handle the issue of youths gradually growing from emotional immaturity to emotional maturity as they age?
From that perspective “under 18 no over 18 yes” has a lot to recommend it, it seems to me.
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Without some understanding of what The Readiness entails, it’s just an arbitrary rule, right? So you’d have no way to choose between such rules as:
– under 35 no, over 35 yes
– under 18 no, over 18 yes
– under 16 no, over 16 yes
– under 16 no, unless the other partner is within 5 years of age
– under 16 no, unless the other partner is also under 16
– under 13 no, over 13 yes
– under 5 no, over 5 yes
… most of which are actually law in one place or another.
Also, I think the goal is questionable. If we care about efficiency and bright lines more than justice, there are a lot of ways we can “streamline” the system at the cost of locking more people up for acts that don’t hurt anyone, but we aren’t doing those. It seems suspicious that age restrictions are the one area where people are most willing to make that tradeoff; my theory is that it’s because it’s the area where they least expect to be the ones paying the cost.
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“So you’d have no way to choose between such rules as:”
There is in fact a way, it is called the democratic process. Society collectively decides what arbitrary rule to select. In the U.S. we decide that the drinking age is 21; in much of Europe it is 18 or younger. If we or they wanted to change the drinking age, there are processes in place to do it.
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@itsabeast
There are arbitrary ways to choose between them, yes. You could also throw darts at a board.
But neither of those demonstrate that one rule is more effective than the other at “handl[ing] the issue of youths gradually growing from emotional immaturity to emotional maturity as they age”.
Putting it to a vote tells you something about voters’ gut feelings, but not about maturity, consent, or safe sex.
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taradinoc: I wasn’t talking about legality, I was talking about ethics. I don’t have an opinion about age-of-consent law, I haven’t looked into it thoroughly. However, the vast majority of thirteen-year-olds of my acquaintance are nowhere near capable of dealing with the emotional ramifications of sex; I certainly wasn’t at that age.
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@ozy
How do you know they aren’t, or that other people are?
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While I mostly agree with the ethics expressed in your post, I do not think you are accurately characterizing what people mean by affirmative consent.
Traditional rape law focuses on issues like force and coercion. It presumes that if a competent adult under no impairment save modest voluntary impairment (perhaps due to alcohol) is being neither forced nor coerced, their sexual choices are their own and they are not being rapes.
Feminism has been challenging this for some time. My law school course on rape and sexual consent law was a long stream of McKinnon quotes and hypotheticals in which one party ceased wanting sex in the midst of a sexual encounter, but then declined to communicate that fact, leaving the other party to continue, at least for a few moments, before realizing that their partner wasn’t into it. The question was invariably whether, if those few moments included some form of penetration, that person could be charged with rape even if a reasonable person in their shoes had no means of instantly recognizing their partners shift in internal mental status.
Affirmative consent responds directly to this issue by arguing that we should cease to concern ourselves with whether the accused knew or should have known their partner didn’t want the continuation of the sexual encounter (if they knew or should have known but continued anyway that’s force), and towards a paradigm in which each step of a sexual encounter is automatically wrongful unless an affirmative indication of consent has been given to that specific step of the overall encounter on that specific occasion.
That’s what affirmative consent codes of conduct invariably require.
The problems with that should be clear to anyone who’s ever had a long term romantic relationship. Sexual encounters are not granular turn based video games with discrete moments of action where everyone has an objective understanding of exactly what constitutes an individual action, nor do they completely reset in between encounters such that you magically forget that there are certain things your wife likes and certain things she doesn’t, and have to recreate all your knowledge from scratch instead of enthusiastically diving into the things you know she loves.
The traditional rule of concerning ourselves with what people know or should have known under the totality of the circumstances is far superior.
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I think they tried the affirmative consent at every microstage thing on some campuses in the 80’s too. Colleges swing between neglect of the issue and overreaction.
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I am talking about ethics, not about law. My opinion on the law is that if it’s a case where affirmative consent vs. no-means-no is relevant, then it’s already a he-said-she-said case and will be decided based on however we already decided to deal with he-said-she-said cases.
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nor do they completely reset in between encounters such that you magically forget that there are certain things your wife likes and certain things she doesn’t
And before someone says, “Nobody would take internet feminism so seriously to the point of actually making this mistake, surely?”, man, I totally have. (OK, excluding the bit about “your wife”.)
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I feel like enthusiastic consent arose in reaction to The Discourse regarding consent and a specific class of conversations. Basically, when feminists talked about standards for what should legally count as consent, and standards for what should count as ethical behavior, some people wanted to ask, basically, “where do we draw the line?”
I think some feminists were creeped out by this — what kind of sleazebag asks if his (or less likely but possibly her) sexual behavior is *just barely* on the right side of legality, or *just barely* on the right side of ethics? Some of the people asking these questions might have been sleazy; some might just have wanted to work out a more detailed concept of the ideas expressed, but a lot of feminists may not have really wanted to get too deeply into the details (maybe they hadn’t worked out how all of the detailed implications of their ideas of consent, ethics, etc, themselves. I mean, it’s not as if Peter Singer worked out every detail of effective altruism, charity evaluation, etc, just as he published “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” in 1972.)
(Then, of course, there’s the class of memes in certain feminist circles which treat a lot of questions and dissenting thoughts as derailment, JAQing off, etc)
Anyway, I think of enthusiastic consent as arising in an attempt to create a maximal stringent standard for consent-oriented ethical sexual behavior (although I don’t think any (many?) feminists have proposed it as a legal standard), in response to “where do we draw the line?” conversations: drawing the line as high as possible, to have an effective standard for dealing with JAQers inquiring about things like whether a woman who has unenthusiastic sex with her husband if she’s afraid of divorce is really consenting.
(I realize EC has some areas where it isn’t necessarily maximally stringent, as with the enthusiastic 13-year old example, but I’m talking about its origins (as I perceive them), not necessarily all of the implications.)
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I haven’t looked into this in any detail, so maybe I’m wrong but I’m very much under the impression that what “affirmative consent” means is that only an explicitly verbalized “yes” can possibly mean yes, and certainly not that participation or body language mean yes.
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Affirmative consent codes do not typically require an explicit verbal yes at any stage of a sexual encounter. What they do is effectively impose a burden on each party to be able to articulate the clear and affirmative act that they were given expressly and specifically consenting to the each specific sexual act that occurs across the course of the entire sexual encounter, prior to their engaging in that act, under penalty of academic discipline if they cannot do so.
With all that in mind, you can perhaps see why some people interpret that as meaning that only direct and explicit verbal consent will do.
But technically it doesn’t require anything specific, it just requires something that meets certain criteria and suggests you work out what counts on your ow . It’s just that it’s hard to see what else counts. Your partner screaming “yes, yes!” isn’t going to do it because that’s something people do during sexual acts, not prior, and virtually everyone (correctly) agrees that retroactive consent isn’t a thing. Claiming that you sort of leaned in and gestured and your partner shifted in a way that seemed inviting isn’t going to do you any good in an actual dispute because it’s certainly not going to look sufficiently clear or explicit once you’re both explaining your side of the story to a dean.
The whole thing is effectively unworkable. It’s pretty much just a shibboleth, and nothing more. The real sexual ethic it encourages is Ye olde “if no one complains afterward then don’t worry about technical compliance with sexual consent rules,” which you’d think would be really problematic for those advocating for these rules, but… c’est la vie.
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Does ‘enthusiasm’ really mean ‘lust’ or ‘arousal’? To me it doesn’t.
When my partner hints at sex, and I say, “Ooh, I know what you’re hinting at — great idea!” — I’m being (and feeling) enthusiastic, whether I’m already aroused or not. On the other hand, when a Christian girl says to her boyfriend, “I really think we should stop now,” she is being apprehensive, not enthusiastic, no matter how horny she feels.
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My problem with the enthusiastic consent model is that it ignores the nuances of human sexuality. A person can want to have sex for reasons other than mindless animal lust. For example a person may have sex out of curiosity or they find it relaxing or because it makes them lots of money. But the possibility of wanting sex for pragmatic rational reasons is dismissed especially if that person is a woman. This is especially obvious for Sex workers. Sex workers are seen as either having sex out of lust or desperation. The idea that a woman could rationally choose to use her sexuality to make lots of money is inconceivable to anti-sex work activist.
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Interestingly — and, sorry, but I’m going to have to go all “I don’t have any examples on hand but I swear I’ve seen it” — I’ve seen feminist writing that would seem to suggest that the only legitimate reason to have sex is that one anticipates liking it, thereby implicitly excluding that possibility that one simply wants it. Presumably whoever was writing this failed to realize the distinction…
(This should obviously not be taken as representative of feminism, etc. Just an interesting example.)
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I think it’s worth noting that the enthusiastic consent standard is inconsistent with another common claim, namely, that consent wrt sex works exactly the same as consent in other ordinary social situations.
(Unless you’re Nita or one of her friends, I guess, going based on previous comment threads. 😛 )
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Well, I guess you’re right about me, at least. Perhaps I live in an Enthusiastic Consent bubble 😛
I’ve had people reassure me that “it’s OK to refuse if you don’t want to” when I failed to express a sufficient amount of enthusiasm for some (non-sexual) activity. Although I didn’t need the reassurance at the time, I do appreciate their concern for my interests. So I don’t see what’s so terrible about a norm of having a similar attitude when it comes to sex.
(Note: As I said upthread, I don’t agree that ‘enthusiasm’ has anything to do with lust. To put it crudely, the consent should come from the person, not from their genitals.)
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I’m just confused as to how you ever manage to get anyone together for anything. Perhaps you’re just using a much weaker notion of “enthusiasm” than I am and we’re not really disagreeing? But that doesn’t sound like it’s the case based on previous comments. And if you’d actually endorse the statement “if it’s not fuck yes, it’s fuck no”, then I’m definitely confused how you manage to get anyone together for anything.
My experience with most things is, there’s at most one to three people who are really enthusiastic about it (and my experience is it’s usually just one), and a bunch of others who basically just say “Sure, I’d be up for that.” The enthusiastic people are the ones who will actually go around knocking on doors and such trying to gather people; including, obviously, the person who initially suggested it. (If everyone were equally enthusiastic, there wouldn’t be a first person to suggest it!)
Well, I guess you’re right about me, at least. Perhaps I live in an Enthusiastic Consent bubble😛
I’ve had people reassure me that “it’s OK to refuse if you don’t want to” when I failed to express a sufficient amount of enthusiasm for some (non-sexual) activity. Although I didn’t need the reassurance at the time, I do appreciate their concern for my interests.
See, unless I was being, like, actually grudging, as opposed to merely not enthusiastic, I’d take that as pretty insulting/condescending.
Now if you don’t mind as I stop replying to your actual comment and just soapbox for a bit: 😛
Basically — I’ve said all this before, but I’m hoping to make it a little more coherent this time — I take issue with the common feminist model of social interaction where everybody has coherent, pre-existing desires and this determines what everybody does (people do the things they want to and don’t do the things they don’t want to).
This model fails in multiple ways. There’s all sorts of things we see (or at least I see, I dunno about Nita 😛 ) that just don’t make sense according to this model. Here’s a basic one: One person suggests something, another person enthusiastically says “Oh! Yes! We should do that!” Well why did one person suggest it and not the other? This model can’t explain that. In reality, the desire didn’t exist beforehand. Nobody can hold an entire set of coherent desires in their heads any more than they can hold a probability distribution over all possible worlds. People frequently have to be reminded of things that they like, or else they just fail to think of them; this could be by somebody else suggesting it, them wandering by someone else doing it, or whatever.
Another thing it can’t explain: Asking twice and getting different results. Like, there’s a common feminist line out there, if I said no the first time, why do you expect other times would be any different? And, like, now I know enough to realize that the correct lesson that one should draw from such complaints is really just “don’t badger people”. But for a long time I took this as serious — never ask a second time, ever; you already know the answer, so to do so is obnoxious. Not even a “You sure?” Which is, y’know, the logical conclusion from that model.
But of course this model is false, and asking a second time — and getting a different answer — is commonplace. If we take this model seriously, the conclusion would be that asking someone a second time about something constitutes badgering them.
I mean, I think it’s a decent model when people are far from neutral on a matter. If “If it’s not fuck yes, it’s fuck no” holds true, you can essentially act like people have fixed pre-existing desires. But it’s not a good model when people are close to neutral. And my experience is that on matters that actually come up, people are close to neutral most of the time. “If it’s not ‘sure, I’d be up for that’ it’s ‘eh, I think I’ll pass”, we might say. 😛
And when people are close to neutral, that means small things can push them over the line in one direction or the other most of the time. Rather than fixed desires, I find it more useful to think in terms of whims which are then crystallized into decisions. My experience is, when someone says no the first time — assuming it’s a matter they’re close to neutral on, rather than something they seriously dislike — they probably haven’t actually made a “no” decision yet. (And speaking just for myself, if you ask me to do something new, my immediate reaction is always probably going to be “no” until I’ve had some time to turn it over in my head for a bit.) My experience is that it’s usually not until the second “no” that it’s been crystallized into an actual decision. Decisions are how we simulate proper agents, the sort that have actual preferences about everything. People’s decisions you have to respect, or else everything breaks down.
And so a lot of social decision-making is determined by, well, small things. Trivial inconveniences, for one thing. Literally having to get up from the couch is a negative and it can tip things. A lot of getting people to join you for something is making it easy for them to do so. Somebody’s more likely to join me for a game of Worms, say, if I’m already playing by myself and they can wander by and just ask to join next game, vs. if I have to go knock on their door, turn the system on, wait for the game to start…
(I’ve, uh, spent a lot of time living in co-op houses.)
And a lot of it involves various types of influence. Which includes, yes, small amounts of social pressure. The fact of the matter is that if you want to reject that, then you end up in “It’s morally wrong to attempt to make a good first impression on someone”-type extreme nerd territory where you can’t get anything done; and is not how anybody, virtuous people and nerds included, actually acts.
Which is why I get a little antsy when I see feminists talking about how it’s bad to “pressure” people, because that could be read as meaning zero pressure, zero influence (as, y’know, I actually read it for a long time), which is just untenable and makes it impossible to do anything. (Asking in slightly the wrong tone of voice could be pressuring! Asking for confirmation could be pressuring! Explaining before asking could be pressuring! Not explaining before asking could be pressuring! There must be some way of asking that’s not pressuring… right? Right?? Wrong approach.) These days I have a better idea of what they actually mean; but I would prefer a less ambiguous term, like, say, “strongarming”. Because people are constantly deploying small amounts of social pressure on each other, and it just isn’t a problem. Done properly, it’s a tool for tipping people to your side of the line when they’re already close to neutral, not for getting people to do things they really don’t want to do. Yes, it’s possible to screw up and put too much pressure on someone, but one learns where the line is and such incidents are rare. (Well, most people do, anyway. I can think of some people I know who haven’t.
) And just where is that? Uh, that’s a hard question and I’m just going to punt on it for now, and trust that most people’s social instincts, given enough experience, can sort it out for themselves. Hopefully somebody will be able to answer the question for those who can’t, but that someone is not me, at least not right now.
Of course there’s another context where the “people have fixed pre-existing desires” model works pretty well, and that’s when you zoom out a bit. Because people do kind of simulate such agents. But if you want to get more micro, and talk about consent and social decision-making, well, you’re going to hit the point where that model breaks down. What do we replace it with? I don’t really know! It’s a hard problem. But filling it in with something that just doesn’t work is not the way.
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Well, perhaps I’ve been cajoled, harangued and guilt-tripped too much in my earlier life, and that makes me appreciate it when someone affirms their willingness to respect my autonomy. And that seems like a common issue when it comes to sex? I mean, the average adult is more likely to pester people into sex than any other activity — arousal is an altered state of mind, sort of like being drunk. So, if everyone reassured their potential partners with something like* “it’s not fun for me if it’s not fun for you,” I believe we would get a net improvement.
(* Some guy in SSC comments said that he could never rape anyone because he would get nauseous if she violently fought back. I don’t think that’s quite as reassuring as my suggestion.)
There are a few people who are “allowed” to cajole me without disclaimers, like my husband and my oldest friend. It’s OK when they do that because 1) they know me very well, which helps them pick good suggestions at the right times, 2) they care about my interests, so they are not motivated to trade off my fun against theirs, and 3) since we are very close, I feel free to be very blunt if necessary. Even so, they very rarely use this “privilege” because they don’t want to risk dragging me into something I’ll regret.
But when I talk to people online about sexual consent, I frequently see an alarming lack of such concern. Folks get outright belligerent about their right to sex that the other person will regret! I just can’t make any ethical sense of that mindset, and I would like these people to move away from “I got away with it fair and square!” and get closer to “I care about you, let’s have fun together.”
[end of soapboxing, start of engagement]
This is basically how I interpret it. However, you’ll note that it would make a terrible slogan 🙂
Aha! Clearly, people like you are the source of the problem. If your “no” doesn’t mean “no”, it’s no wonder some folks don’t take “no” for an answer 😛
More seriously, though… My solution to social interaction is to interpret things pragmatically, not literally. “Do you want to do X?” doesn’t mean “Are you currently experiencing a desire to do X?” Most of the time, other people don’t request reports of your internal state out of sheer curiosity. So, it’s very likely that they mean either “I would like to do X,” or “I suspect that you might enjoy X. What do you think about my idea?” — which one it is depends on the context.
The same goes for the enthusiastic consent model. I don’t see how it implies fixed, pre-existing desires at all. It tries to shift mindsets (from “what can I get them to do?” to “what can we do together?”), and that has to be more poetry than science at this point.
With all due respect, I’d say that people like you are quite rare. If you replaced “pressuring” with “strongarming”, you would get a lot of “well, I didn’t violently force them or threaten to kill their grandma, so there was no strongarming.” What you call “pressure” is usually called “influence”.
You’re right that “pressure” is a slippery term, but it does come with negative connotations, so I suppose the idea is to make you think, “Am I doing something that I would find unpleasant in a different context? Am I acting like a dishonest salesman or a selfish friend?” Since most psychologically healthy people (and some crazy folks as well) are biased in favour of their own actions, it shouldn’t drive them into anxiety spirals.
This can only happen if there are some negative consequences to getting it wrong. If the only consequence is “yay, I got laid,” they are not likely to improve over time.
[end of engagement, start of summary]
To sum up, I think the problem is that there are a lot of people who view sex as an adversarial game where you are supposed to “get away with” things or bypass your potential partner’s defenses, while not breaking some set of rules imposed by society. And the enthusiastic consent norm tries to be a rule that would prevent the players of this “game” from harming anyone. So, it’s a crude solution, but what is the alternative? We can’t simply make them care about other people.
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Aha! Clearly, people like you are the source of the problem. If your “no” doesn’t mean “no”, it’s no wonder some folks don’t take “no” for an answer😛
More seriously, though… My solution to social interaction is to interpret things pragmatically, not literally. “Do you want to do X?” doesn’t mean “Are you currently experiencing a desire to do X?” Most of the time, other people don’t request reports of your internal state out of sheer curiosity. So, it’s very likely that they mean either “I would like to do X,” or “I suspect that you might enjoy X. What do you think about my idea?” — which one it is depends on the context.
So, hm, rather than engage directly with this I’m just going to sort of contradict it, because I think that will be easier.
The thing is that coming to a decision requires thinking. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect people to come to a thought-out decision the first time they’re asked something. I don’t, and I don’t think most people I know don’t either. The substitution is automatic — if you’re asked whether you want to do X, and you haven’t thought about it, either you can A. think about it, or B. just say how you’re feeling about it right now. B is easier. Whether “Do you want to do X?” is interpreted as “What’s your decision?” or “How are you feeling about X right now” is, like, a matter of what information you have available to report. There are other things, actually, that are easier than thinking, and that can also substitute instead! Like cached responses, for instance.
(Although, now that I think about it, I can think of at least one person I know who does seem to give actual decisions on first response, and so whom I don’t bother asking twice. Hm.)
(Also, there’s some asymmetry here; except in rare cases — you seem grudging about it, they have good reason to think you wouldn’t enjoy it — nobody’s going to question if you say yes to something, so what would be an immediate yes answer if it were symmetric is replaced by actually thinking about it and then giving a decision.)
But yeah, I wouldn’t call that “no doesn’t mean no”; it’s just, y’know, answering a different implicit question, as you say. By contrast you have, like, infamously rapey conventions where one is required to deny interest in sex to an arbitrary degree; those, I think, can fairly be described that way.
If you replaced “pressuring” with “strongarming”, you would get a lot of “well, I didn’t violently force them or threaten to kill their grandma, so there was no strongarming.” What you call “pressure” is usually called “influence”.
Ah, that’s true. I’m not sure that we currently have a good, generally-accepted vocabulary for getting at the distinctions between (1) de minimis social pressure / influence (2) unfair social pressure / strongarming (3) straight-up coercion. It’s a problem. But I do think that (1) and (2) can shade into each other; they’re importantly different, but there’s an underlying question of degree that they are both regions on the scale of. A lot of influence is low-grade social pressure.
With all due respect, I’d say that people like you are quite rare.
Oh, sure. But we do seem to be finally coming out of the woodwork these days. 😛
More seriously, it’s just, like, a matter of correctness. Yes, it’s good to have a simplified message that’s easier to spread, and relies on the listener’s common sense; but somewhere in the back, you should be working on finding the actual literal truth, you know? The sort that explains the common sense. Otherwise you end up spouting nonsense. Which looks to me like what we see most of the time.
(Note, by the way, how I’ve basically avoided the question of sexual situations, which possibly make the question more difficult! Basically my point is, the fixed-desires model already breaks down even without any of the complicating factors that might add, but it looks to me like most feminists discussing this, at least where I’ve seen, are not even able to handle this easier case, because they’re not willing to abandon the fixed-desires model and get more micro.)
(OK, there is actually an alternative, more charitable explanation I can think of, but I’m skipping it because A. this is long enough already, and B. I don’t actually believe this more charitable explanation. Well, I do kind of. It’s a mess. It still doesn’t reflect well on them, IMO. Not going to bother going into it unless you care.)
This can only happen if there are some negative consequences to getting it wrong. If the only consequence is “yay, I got laid,” they are not likely to improve over time.
Right, what I said is basically a non-solution; its only advantage is that it’s better than spreading falsehoods. 😛
To sum up, I think the problem is that there are a lot of people who view sex as an adversarial game where you are supposed to “get away with” things or bypass your potential partner’s defenses, while not breaking some set of rules imposed by society. And the enthusiastic consent norm tries to be a rule that would prevent the players of this “game” from harming anyone. So, it’s a crude solution, but what is the alternative? We can’t simply make them care about other people.
I mean, affirmative consent — of the sort Ozy describes rather than, y’know, the ridiculous sort Patrick describes and which is unfortunately also out there — seems pretty good? Although given the extent to which you seem to have defined-down “enthusiasm”, I’m not sure how different that really is.
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Oh yes, I agree completely. And 90% of the time, the way I’m feeling is “Maybe?” or “Uh — I dunno,” so that’s literally what I say. Or sometimes I ask for more information while I turn the suggestion over in my mind, e.g., Q: Wanna go to X? –> A: What shall we do there?
It’s a natural language conversation, not a trolley problem. You’re not limited to exactly two options — you can say or do almost anything in response.
And occasionally I do have a pre-existing desire or a clear decision already in mind, and then I say, “Yes!” or “No,” and I would like those answers to count. Having to repeat everything twice would get pretty annoying.
Also, I know from past experiences that giving in to persistent persuasion is in itself a negative experience for me. Even if the activity they’ve managed to drag me into is fine, the potential implication that my preferences are weird and therefore invalid brings up bad memories and angry feelings, which tend to substantially dampen the fun.
So, personally, I would rather regret my own negative decision than resent the other person for disregarding it. After all, I will have other opportunities to do stuff, but good relationships are not so easy to find.
Obviously, there is a difference. The problem is, after my first “No” is ignored, I honestly don’t know which one it’s going to be — especially if I’m interacting with someone I don’t know well.
Are they just trying to give me more time to decide, or should I be looking for escape routes and preparing to yell and fight? It adds more stress to the already stressful (for me) process of social interaction.
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I feel like this post deals with three different things. First there’s a sort of “only sound minds can consent properly” argument involving the drunk and children as examples. I feel like the majority of enthusiastic consent proponents are in favor of a heuristic like this, though they advocate for it in separate discussions, which I can definitely see as disingenuous.
The second concept is about enthusiasm as an emotional state. And I agree that the attempt to read minds and say YOUR SEX PARTNER SHOULDN’T BE FROWNING!!! That’s silly. Different people express emotions different ways, and different people have different emotions in reaction to their ethical and mature decisions.
However, none of this has convinced me of a third, separate argument. That is, literally just asking your partner “do you want to have sex?” Especially specific acts, “do you want to have oral sex?” And they’re like, “yes.” While I acknowledge that this should be combined with a sound mind standard, and I certainly don’t want to brand everyone who doesn’t use this standard as a rapist (not least because of other commenters’ concerns about reaction time and granularity), I definitely don’t see this kind of verbal exchange system as harmful in any way, in practice individually or as an idea to proliferate, and I don’t know if there’s anything in the post at odds with this opinion. Perhaps that’s a variation on what is meant by the final paragraph about affirmative consent.
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Good post, as usual. People differ, and convenient as it would be, one size fits all solutions don’t really exist. I consider it part of the purpose of friends to pressure me into doing things I’m uncomfortable with and not adventurous enough to do on my own. When friends have done this, it has sometimes been pleasant, sometimes unpleasant, but on the whole I wish it had happened more rather than less. Perhaps partly because I am able to stand up for myself when something is unacceptable and not merely uncomfortable, and because I have friends with sufficient respect for that, the results have never been traumatic. But obviously there are lots of ways this model can and often does go wrong with people who are not like myself and those I’ve known. Still, I think that I can be and have been pressured into things without that constituting anything going wrong, which would seem to commit me to rejecting the enthusiastic consent model.
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I would argue “enthusiasm” in this context just means any sort of reciprocity. If she is never “enthused” enough to kiss back or put a hand on you, that is not enthusiasm enough to pursue sex. Whereas, affirmative consent means she only has to nod, but have no other indications of being interested in sex, for it to be consent. It is a distinction designed to prevent coersion from being consent. Being hassled until you give in and then going limp to avoid what you don’t want to do even though you said yes. Sometimes women are afraid to say no, and enthusiastic consent is aimed at the bullies who can get a yes, but their partners are clearly unwilling. And this applies to women as well. Plenty of boozy women pester men until they give in to “unenthusiastic” sex. If we could apply these rules evenly. I think men would relate easily, since I know few attractive men who haven’t been pressured into sex with a woman.
What I have the most problem with is the notion that drunken enthusiastic consent is not consent. That is not fair. No one should be drugged or coerced into becoming altered, but if I get drunk, just so I can have the guts to proposition someone wearing beer goggles, now neither of us can be allowed to have sex, because we are no longer consenting? I am so glad I am older and had my twenties before this was a thing. I would have never gotten laid if I and my partner had to be sober to do so. Too shy, and not very pretty equals thank god for liquor.
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