The Too Weak “Yes”

It’s understandable that someone who graduated from college last year would believe that “legal sex” required affirmative consent. After all, it’s become the rule on college campuses, and they’ve been thoroughly indoctrinated into it be programs, plays, seminars, discussion groups, marches and powerpoint presentations.

So when Emma Camp “explains” what constitutes “legal sex,” she can hardly be blamed for believing it, even if she’s not a lawyer and knows absolutely nothing about law.* After all, this is what’s been beaten into her head over the last ten minutes when she’s been adulting.

Every year, thousands of American college students complete some form of training designed to avert campus sexual assault by educating students on consent: what it is, how to ask for it and under which circumstances it cannot be given. The wisdom goes that if people — particularly young straight men — understood consent, then there would be less sexual violence, and women could finally feel some real sense of sexual equality.

Put aside the fairly obvious omission of any duty on the part of women to seek consent, since this is only a burden on straight men. Forget if they’re both drunk, who rapes who. Forget if the woman makes the move, does she ask him for the okay. After all, this exists purely to protect fragile womanhood from the hormone-induced rapiness of straight men. Gay men don’t rape women, so who cares what they do?

To be sure, consent is a precursor for ethical sex. But, too often, consent education doesn’t teach us how to understand, and learn from, the sex that comes after we say “yes.” With instruction focused primarily on verbal yeses and nos, young people are stuck with a woefully limited, legal understanding of what sex is and ought to be, instead of gaining the broader ability to articulate our sexual desires in emotionally messy situations. We need a culture that does a better job of encouraging us to go beyond merely legal sex, and to prioritize emotionally satisfying sex, too.

Emma Camp can’t be blamed for being ignorant of the world when enthusiastic consent was first “invented” as the feminist solution when “no means no” was too much of a burden on strong, fierce, independent women to utter a syllable. So what if it was completely comprehensible? Affirmative consent shifted the burden off of fraught women and onto men in some fantasy notion of how the liturgy would play out.

Usually, we’ll be sitting on the floor of a dorm room or cheap apartment, drinking discount hard seltzer or boxed wine. As the night wears on, a little buzzed, we share the gory details of our fledgling romantic encounters. Between tales of bad Bumble dates, dance-floor make-outs and Olivia-Rodrigo-worthy breakups, almost all of us have had the same experience — a time we were asked explicitly for consent, and we wanted to say no, where we could have said no, and just didn’t.

Camp states that affirmative consent came into being after “a series of horrific, high-profile campus sexual assault allegations led to a discussion of sex that was suspicious of young men’s sexual desires.” I’m sure that’s what they told her, and she dutifully believed. But it’s a lie.

Affirmative Consent was part of the scheme involving the 2011 DoT OCR “Dear Colleague” letter by unelected bureaucrats to ram a new sexual regime down the throats of colleges that would create a minefield for men and allow women the opportunity to cry rape before, during or after sex, as there were a litany of excuses such that no sex could ever be sufficiently correct as to not be open to rape accusations. Andrea Dworkin would be so proud.

Affirmative consent was never a coherent concept. How many times per minute, per second, was explicit and enthusiastic consent required? How would it be shown? If a woman reaches down one’s drawers rather than utters “uh, YEAH,” was that a physical manifestation of consent or did she have an involuntary arm movement? And afterward, prove it. It’s easy to say no consent was given. How does one prove it was? And then there’s “believe the woman,” because that’s how the minefield was constructed.

But that’s not Camp’s issue.

Inevitably, someone will ask, “Well, did you say yes?” The answer is almost always that we did, but despite that, we’re left with an unshakable uneasiness. We said yes, but we don’t know why. These experiences are so confusing to talk about because, on paper, everything went perfectly. If you consent, you shouldn’t feel terrible after, right?

A flaw in the theory, perhaps?

The primary fear articulated by my friends in these situations is impoliteness — they often feel that enduring the awkwardness of turning someone down is ultimately worse than having unwanted sex. Being the source of someone’s disappointment should not be worth more than our dignity, yet it is a calculus that seems nearly ubiquitous among young women I know.

This, too, will be chalked up by activists to discrimination, where parents teach young women to be polite, accommodating, acquiescent to the sexual demands of horny straight men. It’s the parents fault. It’s society’s fault. And, of course, it’s the men’s fault for not empathetically feeling what is truly in their heart despite the enthusiastic yes that emits from their puckered lips.

There was recognition long ago that the way to prevent unwanted sexual contact was to say so. That was the point of “no means no,” which arose in response to men forcing themselves on women under the “she’s just playing hard to get” or if she doesn’t physically fight back, it’s all good. None of this was going to stop someone who was committing forcible rape, but It was a clear and sound way to communicate that the line should not be crossed for anyone who cared not to cross the line.

But now, as then, it requires someone to say no, whether by uttering the word or just not saying “yes.” There is no magic trick despite what the unduly passionate want to believe, that will make you feel good about your decision a day, month or year later. At some point, even little girls need to grow up and take responsibility for their conduct, just like little boys.  If they’re too weak to not say “yes” when they don’t mean it, they have no one to blame but themselves. If you don’t want sex, say no. And if someone says no, it means no.

*Some states (like California and New York) have enacted campus affirmative consent laws to mirror university policies. Very progressive legal academics have tried to get ALI with the ABA’s support to change the Model Penal Code to redefine rape as lack of affirmative consent. Thus far, their efforts have failed. Thus far.