SimonDoom
Kink Lord
- Joined
- Apr 9, 2015
- Posts
- 15,753
The definitions of positive consent I had read before the article was positive approval for every step every time. I couldn't find anything that described how that would work in real-life (i.e. on a date with someone you've been dating and have been sexually active for a while).
Again, that's not positive consent as I've seen it defined and something like "if you kiss me, I'm going to drag you off to bed" can easily turn disastrous.
I ended up making up how positive consent could work. Here's how Todd (the brother) described positive consent to Ashlynne (the sister):
The problem I have with this is that I can understand the role of positive consent in theory, sort of, but I don't see how it's applied in practice. The reality of sex is that it often doesn't happen this way. Two people meet at a party, they have some drinks, they hook up back at someone's place, and sex happens. Later, memories are fuzzy about who gave what consent to whom. I think the reality is that sex happens this way all the time and that in the great majorities of cases the participants believe at the time that it is consensual sex. So does the rule put the male at jeopardy of a rape charge? It would be a travesty if it did.
It's fine to advise young men that they need to take the role of consent more seriously and understand the risks of not doing so. But to impose a rule that potentially subjects one to a rape charge for behavior that was in fact at the time understood to be consensual and not a crime, if that's what this rule does, seems wrong to me. The defendant should never bear the burden of proof against any crime of having to disprove an element of the crime -- we should never presume that sex was nonconsensual because it happened and then put the burden on the man to prove there was consent. The presumption must be that one is innocent until the charging party proves all the elements of the crime -- including that the sex was nonconsensual.
The other problematic thing about it is that "positive consent" assumes that the man is always the aggressor and that the woman acts as a kind of gatekeeper, and for the man to get through each successive gate lawfully he's got to give the right password. But in fact sex often is something that just happens between two people -- what does it mean to require consent in such cases? Who is to give consent to whom? A rule that treats the man and woman as necessarily standing in very different positions every time sex happens is a regressive rule, in some ways, in its assumptions about men and women and their roles. That doesn't strike me as a good thing.
As long as positive consent doesn't mean that express verbal consent is required (because consent can, and is in the real world, given in many ways), as long as it isn't inflexible in its assumptions about men and women, and as long as it doesn't put the burden of proof on the man, then it seems reasonable to me, but I'm just not sure that's how it works in practice.