Comment by Humdeee
4 years ago
This article reads like she did not say no as much as she did not say yes, which leaves the reader in a muddled, grey area and unsure of how to interpret anything. Is she consenting, or more specifically, is she explicitly claiming to not consent? It's a very awkward article, leaving readers with more questions than answers at the end, which is never what you want your readers to feel when garnering support.
Consent is unambiguous and enthusiastic yes. The default assumption is that no consent is given. Not saying yes is the same as saying no.
> Consent is unambiguous and enthusiastic yes.
No, “consent” is, like “intent” on the other side, a mental state rather than an action: it is the active desire for the act.
An ambiguous and enthusiastic yes is outward evidence of consent, though, and it tends to be the kind of evidence without which (or at least, some similarly very clear sign) we would tend not to infer consent to other acts where consent negates criminality, like battery.
I agree that this is morally correct but the law and the majority of real life intimate interactions don't reflect this. "Yes, I agree to have sex with you, and I am stating this without being under duress" or variations of that sentence is very rarely verbalized as such beforehand. Hence innocent until proven guilty and not vice versa, reasonable doubt, etc. and all the other law jargon applied.
This just leads to sill propositions and exclamations like "Now we all have to sign a contract before we kiss another!".
Human communication is complicated and complex and error prone. Combine it with sexuality and you have a mess.
There must be room for error and for dialogue. Humans are not binary machines. We're probabilistic ones.
> This article reads like she did not say no as much as she did not say yes
Yeah, if I beat someone up and they didn’t explicitly agree or explicitly ask me not to pummel them, no one is going to hem and haw about whether or not it was battery or whether it wasn’t because of secret unexpressed consent.
But no, when the issue is battery-that-involves-sexual-penetration, *which legally had the same basic “without consent” factor (except that there tend to be more factors which explicitly negate or make the alleged victim legally incapable of consent), suddenly lots of people have a radically different view.
Beating someone up and having sex with them are two very distinct things. And saying sex is "battery that involves sexual penetration" is no helping either.
Just painting this as a simplistic "powerful male predator abuses helpless little female" does not help to move society forward one bit.