Consent doesn’t guarantee healthy sex
As a woman, can you confidently say that all your consensual sexual experiences were ones you fully, 100 percent, whole-heartedly wanted to experience?
No persuading involved, no ‘sige na’, and more importantly – no voice in the back of your mind pushed away in fear of an unwanted reaction.
If yes, then congratulations: you’ve got boundaries down, and God knows we could definitely use more of that around here. But if not, then here’s a disturbingly comforting assurance: know that you’re not alone.
In her book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent, Katherine Angel points out that the current consent culture posits that it is the “locus for transforming the ills of our sexual culture,” – a one-stop solution to healthy sexual experiences.
When we first start having sex, we’re made to believe that consent is all we truly need to have a good time, when often, it really isn’t.
In reality, consent is and always has been just the bare minimum of sex. It’s like the welcoming mat of someone’s home: the first of many steps you take before you’re actually welcomed inside.
This false portrayal of consent as absolute clarity burdens women with the key to good sexual encounters; women must know exactly what they want at any given time, and this disregard for ambivalence can be harmful. Like in many other areas of life, settling for the bare minimum alone will never truly suffice.
To argue that a simple “yes” guarantees women healthy, fulfilling sex negates any possibility of the weight behind a woman’s decision to agree in the first place.
Unfortunately, there will usually be bigger factors at play behind a woman’s “yes”: consent, to avoid any unwanted violent reactions from men who can’t handle rejection; consent, to avoid a ‘no’ that could trigger a long fight later on.
For as long as women have been alive, we have been raised to always consider men’s well-being and the unpredictability of their feelings. We’re taught, as Angel argues, that if we ‘give signals’ then it is our utmost responsibility to see them through, and if we change our minds, then the consequences are on us.
‘In urging women to be clear and confident about expressing their sexual desire,’ Angel writes, ‘consent culture risks denying, wishfully, the fact that women are often punished for the very sexually assertive positions they are urged to embody.’
It is a completely different conversation, of course, to have fully consensual sex that can still turn out to be regretful – bad sex can happen under many different circumstances that don’t necessarily involve dancing around boundaries. But if we continue to keep equating healthy sex to a binary formula of yes/no, we fail to create space that holds accountable the people who force women into situations where “no” doesn’t seem like a safe option, and where “yes” frees them from the consequences after the fact.
At the rate our current conversations on consent are going, what are we supposed to tell women who were coerced into sex, yet battle with the feelings of guilt and self-gaslighting when all’s said and done, because at the end of the day, they did say yes anyway?
As Angel asserts in her intriguing analysis on consent and confidence, ‘We need a robust critique of consent, not in order to vilify young women supposedly attached to victimhood, but out of solidarity with all women for whom sex can turn into an unhappy bargaining point, a false choice or an economic necessity for survival.’
In questioning our tendency to sell the idea that consent is the end-all-be-all to good sex, we open up more space for society to realize that sex, as thrilling as it can be, is a process of mutual self-discovery, and no one should be rushed into decisions as quickly as we’ve grown to expect them to.
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Source: we the pvblic
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