![]() ![]() Amia Srinivasan makes a similar point when she asks, “how do we formulate a regulation that prohibits the sort of sex that is produced by patriarchy?” There’s good reason to believe that we don’t: regulations such as the Duke sexual misconduct policy are not adequate solutions, and consent is too crude a tool. The consent discourse casts men as incapable of controlling their sex drive and makes it an imperative for women to express their sexuality, which are themselves myths about sex that do considerable disservice to the marginalized. The fundamental issue is that the emphasis on consent fails to elucidate how the conceptualization of consent, too, is shaped by cultural norms and structural factors. ![]() Suffice to say, women are punished in one way or another no matter how they act. They are admonished to become confident, assertive, and sex-positive when the expression of their sexuality on one occasion can and often will be used against them if they are assaulted or raped in the future. They are urged to use their self-expression as armor when they are already in a vulnerable position in dynamics of unequal power. Women are told that they must be able to articulate their sexual desire even though it is often opaque, responsive in nature and slow to emerge. As Joseph Fischel points out eloquently in Screw Consent, “we can haphazardly or ambivalently consent to sex that is fantastic, and consent fantastically to sex that is resolutely unfun.”Įnthusiastic consent also puts women in a bind, as Katherine Angel shrewdly observes. For starters, even enthusiastic consent does not guarantee creative, fulfilling and pleasurable sex – it can nevertheless be dull and immiserating. We must therefore resist thinking of consent, and for that matter enthusiastic consent, as the criterion for desirable sex and the locus for the transformation of our sexual culture. ![]() However, more than a decade after the publication of Yes Means Yes, the disparity in sexual pleasure is still alive and well. They also believe that more women should speak up about their sexual desires (indeed, they frame it as a duty) and that men should be more attentive to what their female partners want and why. They think consent is only given when it is given enthusiastically, unequivocally, and without hesitation. Many feminist thinkers have attempted to raise the bar of consent through the Yes Means Yes slogan. ![]()
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