Consent Isn’t The Stamp Of Approval We Think It Is

I took this knowledge with me when I became a sexual assault victims advocate, a nearly four-year career I left just months ago. I’ve presented not only to college panhellenic councils about the necessity of “safe sex education,” but to police departments, district attorney offices, and state assemblies about consent. It’s only recently that I’ve come to the realization that our understanding of consent as a postmodern concept is deeply flawed. I’m not alone in this realization, either.

Consent, as we know it today, enables harmful sexual behaviors in addition to the pornography industry and all of its significant cultural ramifications. It has even influenced public policy in the United Kingdom, which has a “rough sex” defense that can be used by vicious perpetrators as part of an official legal framework. Allowing consent to be used as a defense enables serious, violent crimes to go unpunished, but on a more fundamental level, it authorizes the everyday dehumanization of individuals, particularly women. Consent isn’t the stamp of approval we think it is, and unpacking the detrimental effects that have resulted from a consent-obsessed society is long overdue.

Consent Has Limits, and It’s Individualized

Consent is much more complicated than we think, and because of that, we often misrepresent it or fail to understand it. Planned Parenthood produced an infographic several years ago that many of us – myself included – have seen or heard so many times it makes our heads spin. (This infographic was used on my college campus and, I’m sure, on many throughout the country.) According to them, the largest purveyor of abortions in the nation, consent is as simple as FRIES: freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific.

This cute, trendy acronym does us a disservice by oversimplifying the concept. If you’re the conspiracy theorist type, it could even be argued that this oversimplification is on purpose. (If you consent to unprotected sex, for example, but don’t consent to the possibility of pregnancy or a sexually transmitted infection, well, that’s on you.) Consent, as we might define it in 2023, is an example of metaethics, or the metrics each of us uses to determine if something is inherently “good” or “bad,” and the significance of labeling certain things as such. Because each individual differs on these metrics to varying degrees – which is natural, to an extent – consent is already flawed.

Here’s one such example. An individual who is religious, traditional, and has conservative values probably has extremely different opinions on a topic like sadomasochistic or fetishistic sex than a person who would call themselves more “open-minded” or has more progressive, liberalized views. While the conservative individual might use the Bible or their own moral framework to conceptualize such an act as reprehensible and harmful, the progressive individual uses postmodern thought and egalitarianism along with the basic definition of consent to determine that the same act is ethically or morally sound.

Consent has limits because each individual has their own personal determination of what’s permissible and what isn’t. We’re taught the basic definition of consent, but we never learn to critically examine it. We each apply our own ethical framework to the issue at hand, and therefore, even something as harmful and societally corrosive as hookup culture is seen as innocuous, acceptable, and even encouraged by some. 

Consent nowadays is commonly used to justify degrading, disturbing violence against women.

“Consent” Enables Exploitation

Casual flings and meaningless sexual relationships have the cultural seal of approval already, but what’s even more disturbing is that acts that were once considered fringe deviancy now do as well. Remember, if everyone involved consents, it can’t possibly be negative. What’s significant is that this now normalizes the most violent acts we can possibly imagine – all in the name of pleasure, or domination and submission, or fulfilling a perverse, base desire.

The real misogyny at play nowadays is that women are, of course, usually the casualties of this kind of rhetoric. Even though the porn industry profits from degradation and humiliation, it’s still culturally acceptable because there are “consenting” players who use it as a profession. Even though sites like Onlyfans are a stain on humanity and operate by misleading young, impressionable people, those individuals don’t deserve sympathy or compassion because they consent to posting explicit content. Even though purely fetishistic, degrading, violent sex is disturbing and soul-eroding, as long as everyone involved consents, what’s the harm?

Cultural critic Louise Perry has written extensively about how consent damages women, specifically in normalizing hookup culture, and says, “[Consent] describes the legal status of an encounter; it doesn’t describe the moral status of an encounter, and there’s a lot of space between those two things.” Perry further clarifies that she doesn’t mean moral in the “old-fashioned, religious sense,” but in the underlying question, is serious harm being enacted upon the woman? Anyone can describe an extremely degrading, violent sexual encounter as consensual – but that qualifier doesn’t automatically mean that no irreparable trauma hasn’t been done to one or both individuals.

It’s predators, namely men, who take full advantage of this. Just one illustration is John Broadhurst, a British multi-millionaire and former real estate tycoon who was sentenced to just four years in prison for murdering his partner, 26-year-old Natalie Connolly. When her body was recovered, she had sustained over 40 injuries from Broadhurst, including extensive vaginal trauma and a fractured eye socket. His defense? He and Connolly had a consensual “rough sex” relationship, and she died as a result of sustained injuries. Prosecutors were in fact so hesitant to charge him with murder that his charge was significantly reduced to manslaughter, and he effectively pleaded guilty to not calling an ambulance in a timely manner, not to murdering Connolly.

In response, the UK-based legal campaign We Can’t Consent To This was founded to eradicate the rough-sex legal defense and to bring awareness to the countless women and girls who have been killed under the umbrella of “consensual” violent sex. Their thorough, extensive documentation of the victims whose murderers use this exact defense is both eye-opening and extremely chilling.

We Need To Change Our Standards

If this changes everything we know about consent, it should also change everything we know about hookup culture and casual sex in general. The popular position of today is that if two adults consent to sex, there is no allowance for misjudgment, trauma, harm, pain, injury, or emotional suffering. But as millions of women know, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

It’s this very contradiction that leads to situations we saw unfold during the height of #MeToo’s popularity. As women came forward with genuine experiences of abuse and assault, you also had women trying to insinuate that their consensual sexual encounters deserved the same recognition. In 2018, an anonymous woman accused comedian Aziz Ansari of sexual misconduct. The two had gone out on a date and engaged in sex, which she later said was coerced, but Ansari said was consensual. Three years before that, pornographic entertainer Danica Dillon disclosed to Entertainment Tonight a violent sexual encounter she had with convicted sex offender and former reality star, Josh Duggar. Dillon said, “In all honesty, though it was consensual, it more or less felt like I was being raped.”

Our collective delusion lies in thinking we have a very specified amount of control over the natural order of things – which we don’t. 

The notion that consent by default legitimizes an act or a profession like sex work is both willfully ignorant and intellectually vacuous. It has no bearing on reality and operates on a theory, not realistic consequences that everyday people live with for the rest of their lives. But because we live in a progressive society, where consent is the highest possible standard that can be attained, we’re told otherwise. 

Our collective delusion lies in thinking we have a very specified amount of control over the natural order of things – which we don’t. You might consent to unprotected sex but feel you can’t consent to the biological outcome of a potential pregnancy. You might consent to participating in hookup culture, but not consent to the perhaps inevitable feelings of self-loathing or poor self-esteem. You might consent to posting pornographic photos or videos of yourself online for money, but not consent to the possibility of judgment from strangers, or your family or employer seeing those posts. We feign outrage when our given consent results in unwanted outcomes. That’s because we misunderstand it and misrepresent it as a concept entirely, to our own detriment. 

We deserve better than a stranger or acquaintance merely agreeing to have sex with us. We deserve a man who passionately, overwhelmingly makes love to us within the bonds of dedication and commitment. We deserve emotional fulfillment in addition to sex, not just resentment and situationships. We deserve better than feeling as though we have to say yes to sex with someone who has no interest in us outside our capacity as a sexual being. We deserve better than fulfilling natural human desires through watching other bodies make a mockery of human sexuality because they do it for money. We deserve so much more than the bare, perverse minimum.

Closing Thoughts

Consent has merit as a legal defense, but as an ideological campaign, it’s done a poor job of educating young individuals on healthy sexual behaviors. Consent is still necessary during sex, obviously. But we deserve it in addition to mutual understanding, compatibility, respect, and dignity. Consent nowadays is commonly used to justify degrading, disturbing violence against women, and if we’re not fully educated on how damaging that is, we risk becoming victims or proponents of that ourselves.

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