Radical Consent

The commodity model easily divides sex into good and bad, based on the relative gains from the transaction, mapping closely to conservative Christian sexual mores. Under a performance model, the sexual interaction should be creative, positive, and respectful even in the most casual of circumstances, and without regard to what each partner seeks from it.

Our children take their conceptions of sex from their parents first, and from the wider culture. If our boys learn from their preadolescence that sex is a performance where enthusiastic participation is normal and pressure is aberrant, then the idea that consent is affirmative, rather than the absence of objection, will be ingrained. In such an environment, many kinds of rape that are accepted, tolerated, and routinely defended would lose their social license to operate.

By not speaking up or waiting until the other person can share their desires, we are simply guessing.

The prison-industrial complex, to which the mainstream rape crisis movement is intimately and often unquestioningly linked, is an embodiment of nonconsent used to reinforce race and class inequality. Prisons take away the rights of people, primarily poor people of color, to control their own lives and bodies.

Consent is a basic part of the sexual equation. If there’s any uncertainty, or you find that you’re using some power to coax someone into sex when they clearly aren’t that into it, you need to rethink what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.