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.
Holly 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.
“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.”
Co-signed. Very important for explorations of gender as well as sexuality.
@RocketFrog, I said: In [a nationally famous consent educator’s] world, people inching their faces together, turning their heads to opposite sides, with parted lips and eyes half-closed are just being “ambiguous.” You said: If that is the case, then apparently I live in a similar world. If someone inched their face close to me in such a way, in context I would probably have no clue what was happening and get freaked out over having my personal space invaded. Hmm, I think you’re talking about a related advance, but slightly different from what I was getting at. I was claiming… Read more »
Certainly, but that wasn’t exactly my quibble. I’m effectively asking if you consider self-denial to ever be a positive thing. The way I read that paragraph in the op, I got the impression that while such self-denial must be allowed, it is a bad thing that we wish didn’t exist in the world. When you say “I think the most important question to ask yourself is how you feel about it.” you seem to exclude a whole lot of very important things.
D3: Well, if you don’t want to do it then you shouldn’t do it. If your reasoning is “it will make me a worse potential husband,” that is exactly as valid as “it doesn’t turn me on,” because any reason to not want to do something is a valid reason!
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. There are a lot of things that “turn me on” that I think will make me a worse potential husband, and thus I will avoid doing under any circumstance. It seems that you are suggesting… Read more »
@ f
I’m late to the game but thank you for the Louis C.K. link. It was new to me and I’ve totally been there. More than once! So crazy.
This was a really good post. I’m very fond of the “Enthusiastic Consent” concept as a way to eliminate the spurious loopholes some people create and exploit in the “No Means No,” concept, and as a way to encourage people to actively communicate consent. Speak up about what you want; someone frozen in fear isn’t consenting just because there’s not a ‘no’- those are faults in the no means no concept that were well addressed. Then, some people totally did take that, flip it, and started implying it wasn’t up to anyone to start talking more, but that the definition… Read more »
“… when your partner thinks it’s a good idea to, without asking, bite your clit (this happened).”
I… But… Why?
(I’m sorry for not having a more insightful contribution. I’m busy being horrified and pressing my legs together.)
humbition: What I do is to always think carefully about my words and actions and try to cope analytically with my lack of “instinctive empathy” by rigorously applying a code of ethics (based primarily on the categorical imperative, which I find easiest to work with precisely because it attempts to focus on reason rather than empathic intuition). I have had professionals tell me that this is a form of benign “fake empathy” (because I do not “share others’ feelings” – I cannot look at a happy person and feel happiness myself, for instance), and others saying that it is meaningless… Read more »
Shock and scare tactics almost inevitably backfire. Consider the “war on drugs” (which really needs to go into rehab, that war has been on drugs for DECADES by now). Rather than informing honestly about both the attraction and dangers of drugs, drug information for young people focus tries to manipulate using shock and terror. When someone has been told that smoking a single puff of a joint will instantly turn you into a drug-frenzied addict monster, and that people only use drugs because they are terrible, contemptible losers, only to discover that people they actually respect do use drugs, and… Read more »
Schala, I’m not saying culture = tradition = good, FFS. I’m saying that culture is a name for the shared contexts on the basis of which people communicate and act. There is no outside-of-culture, culture is always present. But our actions also change culture, it is never static. There is no fully nonambiguous communication, verbal or nonverbal. All communication presumes some shared background and understanding; sometimes this fails. Actually it always fails to some degree. This is why communication, culture, and life is endless negotiation, verbal and nonverbal. There is never total certainty. Nonverbal negotiation can IMO be ethical, if… Read more »
There was a cultural anthropologist a few years back who articulated the job of the cultural anthropologist as being able to provide the manual for how to behave in whatever culture was studied — what is it you would need to know to navigate in that environment. As if you could get that in a one or two year field study for a Ph.D! But it is an interesting conceit. I’m wondering if those who go against that current, who consciously or unconsciously shun culture stuff, because it’s not useful, because it’s damaging, because it’s unnecessary, are the people who… Read more »
RocketFrog: Thanks for that. There is a lot of back talk on aspie web sites, not that I go on them very much, about how wrong the general Asperger’s diagnosis is about “lack of empathy” and, I believe also, lack of understanding of nonverbal communication in general. I find the school of Baron-Cohen in general very hard to believe. On the other hand, your description of yourself admits of absolutely no doubt whatsoever. By the way, you’re one of the most empathetic folks around. Speaking of empathy, note how much better a basis empathy can be for teaching the reasons… Read more »
@RocketFrog, I think that your condition is terribly unfair and I believe that we should all be prepared to make special accommodations to someone like that. However, I think that it would also be unfair for other people to use their “pre-processor” to understand the environment around them. It’s a tough call for me, but I think that a “nationally famous consent educator” is flat out wrong when they set the standard for everybody this way. First of all, I doubt that they’re thinking about you at all, I think that they are just being sex-negative. Second of all, as… Read more »
First of all, I am sorry if I am conflating “disabled issues” with “men’s issues”. I probably do that a lot, but I have no experience being anything but disabled and male. I know that neither humbition, Rae nor Hugh Ristik are trying to deliberately ridicule anyone. However, things like: In [a nationally famous consent educator’s] world, people inching their faces together, turning their heads to opposite sides, with parted lips and eyes half-closed are just being “ambiguous.” If that is the case, then apparently I live in a similar world. If someone inched their face close to me in… Read more »
@Flyingkal, This is very much my experience as well, and not just by Sex Ed but by society at large. I think that even the most progressive sex ed program ever created will still adopt the attitude that boys don’t need to have sex, anyway, or that they have too much of it as it is. So what possible harm can come out of destroying their psyche? When I went through it they told us that they really didn’t want us having sex, but they knew that we “weren’t going to listen anyway,” which is why we might as well… Read more »
@AB (January 11, 2012 at 7:30 pm) That’s tough. I have to say, I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with having convenient sex. I didn’t mean to say that “convenient sex” is wrong by definition. I was just waxing philosophically around the terms “good” vs. “enthusiastic” consent in the light of a person rarely if ever getting “I want to fuck you right now”-sex. Have you ever turned your girlfriend down for sex? Simply told her that you’re not in the mood, and that she should try again later. Or that she could try to get you in the… Read more »
@Dungone:
This is very much my experience as well, and not just by Sex Ed but by society at large.
@Hugh Tipping Ristik: “In his world, people inching their faces together, turning their heads to opposite sides, with parted lips and eyes half-closed are just being “ambiguous.” Yet I think many people would find such body language perfectly clear, and exemplifying “good consent.””
Yes, this is pretty much the universally accepted sign for I want a kiss. If you are really paranoid*, though just make the other person complete the last inch or so. Then you were kissed and any wrong-badness is really the other persons fault.
*Okay actually paranoia not really required.
@RocketFrog, I agreed with humbition, and I didn’t mean to be ridiculing people who communicate with explicit words either. (In fact, I like to be explicitly asked about my desires, with words. It makes me feel respected.) I think nonverbal communication only works when both people feel able to step in with actual words when they’re not clear on the other person’s signals, or when the other person’s failed to get the message. I really liked humbition’s point about hazy or unclear communication being the problem–and the point that verbal communication as well as nonverbal can be unclear.
@humbition: AB: Ozy’s Law, in action! Most definitely. But for once, unfortunately, not in a way in which it seems like the interests of the sexes (or approacher/approached) are aligned. @f.: This is why I kinda don’t do dinner dates and stuff like that in the early courtship phases very often. Or if I do, I make sure to plan and pay for the next date myself, so the quid pro quo is I get dinner, you get dinner and not I get dinner, you get… ummm… something other than dinner. Personally I am REALLY uncomfortable with unspoken assumptions about… Read more »
@humbition “You may be right though, that a lot of people have more confidence in their interpretations than is warrante” I actually think I read a study which indicated that when it came to men interpreting whether a woman was interested or not, their interpretation was overwhelmingly based on their own experiences when it came to relationships – to the point where the women’s self-reported interest level took a back seat to how much experience the guy had. Basically, a guys perception of how interested a woman was in him was far more strongly tried to his experience with relationships… Read more »
@f, you have my deepest sympathy, but I think we live in the same place because that’s exactly what women think where I live, too. And I think that those women are really prude and 100% passive for thinking that. Those women are the ones that I was thinking of when I said, “So you might have this policy that says “my default answer is no… so this was never about sex.””. To be fair, I’m not a native of this culture and as such, I’ve always had an outsiders perspective and I have experienced other cultures as well. You… Read more »
@RocketFrog, my initial opinion on this has actually been very much aligned with yours. I think humbition and Hugh Ristik made good points, though. @Hugh Tipping RistiK: This sort of rhetoric is typical of the consent education I received in high school and college. Perhaps it will help people see why, for some of us, it’s hard to separate consent definitions from criminality. It’s because my earliest education about consent was about authority figures speaking to women as potential victims and men as potential perpetrators, threatening me with prison or social stigmas unless I followed their idiosyncratic notions of consent… Read more »
RocketFrog: I have great respect for you, which I have perhaps not expressed enough in these threads. I do not mean to ridicule the actual obtaining of verbal consent by anyone at all, for anything at all. Far from it. I think that people should welcome this as a sign of respect and good intent. I may mean to ridicule the kind of person who can invent a new Moral Imperative for the entire human race in around 1990 and then propagandize it by shaming arguments. I think the mentality behind this is, what is a good word… prescientific. Personally… Read more »