This article contains references to sexual violence and rape.
In the past ten years, campaigns such as Everyday Sexism, #MeToo and Everyone’s Invited have created space for young people to share their experiences of rape culture.
The world feels like it’s becoming better, like a big, cultural zit has finally been squeezed. But the problem is that zits leave an open red sore that needs to heal. Or they simply return, bigger than before.
Academics like Katherine Angel have labelled this era ‘the age of consent’. In my own short lifetime, interest in consent has grown exponentially from the 2017 turbo-boost of the #MeToo moment. In Hansard, the official report of all Parliamentary debates, the usage of the term ‘sexual consent’ has increased consistently since the early 2010s. In the last few years, references in English-language books to ‘sexual consent’ have overtaken references to ‘breadmaking’. Talking about consent has suddenly felt urgent when in reality, that’s exactly what it’s always been.
We have always liked reading about sex; in fact, the word’s occurrence in the New York Times between 1970 and 2018 shows a stratospheric rise, in an almost direct contrast to the number of mentions of ‘church’. Loosening social mores has meant we can talk about sex more openly because most of us are having it more openly too – but those conversations did not rise in parallel with discussion about sexual consent. It’s as though there’s been a time lag: a delayed realisation that, as sexual liberation stretched out its arms, sexual ethics sat twiddling its thumbs in the cultural psyche.
Reflecting on my school years, I don’t remember ever being explicitly taught about consent, which either means that it was so dull that it made no impact on me, or that it was wholly absent. One of my friends thinks she can remember being told when to say yes and no, but can’t remember what the qualifying criteria were. What I do know is that it has always sounded scary.
There is something jargonistic about the word consent. Because of its connection to ideas such as the age of consent, rape and sexual assault, the mere mention of the word summons imagery of crime and punishment – of rights being abused, rather than upheld. When pressed to think about it, it makes us think more about what we can’t do, rather than what we can. One social scientist tells me that sex education in the UK has moved from moral abstinence messaging to anti-teenage pregnancy messaging and now onto consent messaging; it is a long history of can’ts, not cans. And the upshot of all this is that I’ve had to learn about the realities of consent myself – the hard way.
I learned it the hard way writing this book and encountering the word ‘consent withdrawal’ for the first time. I realised, ten years later, that my failed attempt to have first-time sex with someone who had no condom and didn’t pick up on my unspoken doubt largely happened because I didn’t know the concept of consent withdrawal.