Policing Intimacy

Affirmative Consent Campaign Leads to The De-Moralisation of Intimacy

Affirmative Consent Campaign Leads to The De-Moralisation of Intimacy

Photo by Pablo Heimplatz on Unsplash

‘I am asking for it’ is a new campaign that aims to change the law on consent in England and Wales. The aim of this campaign is to get the British Parliament to introduce a law based on the affirmative consent model[i]. The campaign is the brainchild of the advertising agency CPB London and the non-profit Right to Equality. They want Britain’s legal definition of sexual consent to be changed, so that “anything less than a clear, uncoerced, and informed confirmation of consent like ‘Yes’ cannot qualify as consent in the eyes of the law”[ii]. 

The idea of affirmative consent is underpinned by a profound sense of suspicion of spontaneity in sexual relation. It wishes to formalise the conduct of intimate relationships. Its effect would be to turn sexual relations into a formal transaction underpinned by what would be in effect a verbal transaction.

Advocates of affirmative consent communicate a sense of mistrust towards the sphere of informal relations. The assumption that, unless an individual states ‘yes I am asking for it’, sex becomes coercive infantilises people. Forcing individuals to conduct their intimate affairs in accordance with the objective of this campaign deprives them of the freedom to decide for themselves how to go about that most intimate and private activity of making love.

Real, genuine consent has nothing to do with a precise form of words, but about the mutual understanding of intention and context.

The essay below is based on an article I wrote on the killing of intimacy for Spiked back in 2015 - https://www.spiked-online.com/2015/10/27/teaching-consent-policing-intimacy/

Until recently the idea of consent was associated with an act that is freely given and is not the product of coercion or compulsion. The classical definition of consent is one that emphasises this act as a voluntary one. According to the Oxford English Dictionary consent is a ‘voluntary agreement to or acquiescence in what another proposes or desires’ and so it is something of a paradox that, in many universities, advocates of consent workshops wish to make them compulsory for all students. ‘Colleges at Cambridge have taken a big step by introducing consent talks and workshops – but I’d like to see these made compulsory in all universities across the UK’, argues one advocate[iii]. ‘It's crucial they're compulsory or the people who need to go won't go’ declared another supporter of compulsory workshops[iv]. Forcing people to attend such classes indicates that their advocates are selective about their adherence to the principle of consent.

The coupling of compulsion with consent suggests that these workshops have little to do with attributes associated with ‘voluntary agreement’ or freely expressed desire. Rather these workshops seem more concerned with the re-moralisation and policing of intimacy than they are with providing an opportunity for considering ing the meaning of consent.

Although the NUS Consent Workshop Facilitator Guide promises to provide a

‘safer space where people feel comfortable to explore topics, definitions and myths’, the discussion it advocates is anything but exploratory. The Guide promotes a rigid "party line" and anything that deviates from it is castigated as a myth or as a ‘problematic’ view of consent that must be corrected. That is why the NUS’ Guide insists that the role of the facilitator includes ‘challenging myths and rectifying problematic perspectives on consent’ as well as ‘encouraging a healthy view of consent’. Although healthy is outwardly a medical term, its usage in this case is an intrinsically moralistic one, the moral opposite of an unhealthy sentiment.

Although advocates of consent classes use the vocabulary of openness and exploration, they are anything but tolerant of alternative or dissident views. From the perspective of the consent crusader, anyone who deviates from the script is ‘problematic’. The need to adopt a firm and inflexible line is justified on the grounds that the stakes are far too high to tolerate different views about consent. Why? Because the principal aim of consent workshops is to re-socialise their participants and alter their behaviour. The target of workshop facilitators is the prevailing social and moral norms and conventions that are said to legitimate oppressive and violent practices- particularly against women. The aim of the workshop is to raise awareness about what is variously described as rape culture or lad culture or the culture of victimisation.

The project of raising awareness is inherently a moralising mission. It is the secular equivalent of the religious duty to help people ‘see the light’. As is the case with all moral enterprise it assumes that the world is divided into two groups; those who are ‘aware’ and those who need to be made ‘aware’. It is the moral imperative of raising awareness that leads these zealous missionaries to embrace the oxymoron of compulsory consent classes. Since those who are not aware are a threat to themselves and others, they must be forced to alter or modify their views and behaviour. The guidelines followed by facilitators of consent classes resemble a quasi-religious text which assumes the followers are in possession of a Truth that must be revealed to the ignorant.

Whatever one thinks of the content of the doctrine promoted in these workshops, it is difficult not to feel uneasy at the breath-taking arrogance of its organisers. It is far from evident who gave them the authority to play God and what is the foundation for their expertise. The presumption that those in attendance need to have their perceptions challenged and freed from the myths that dominates their imagination is usually associated with the most dogmatic of religious movements. That universities are now complicit in the policing of the moral values and intimate thoughts of young people is an alarming development.

The Devaluation of Personhood

Critics of consent workshops often mistakenly assume that the main problem with these initiatives is that they implicitly cast men into the role of potential rapists from whom women should be made safe.  While the classes do tend to inflate the pervasiveness of male violence, the doctrine informing them possesses a far more insidious dimension. It devalues the capacity for exercising moral responsibility of both men and women. Both men and women are perceived, and represented as, individuals who cannot be expected to conduct their intimate affairs on their own.

Consent classes, and the doctrines they advocate, assume that intimate relationships, especially those involving sex cannot be left to the spontaneous interaction of those involved. This belief represents a fundamental departure from the conviction that since people possess the capacity for autonomy – self-determination – they have the right to make choices about matters that affect their lives. That is why, since the rise of modernity, it was presumed that adults possessed the moral resources necessary for consenting to acts proposed to them by others. The saying ‘that what went on between consenting adults behind closed doors is nobody else’s concern’ was based on the presumption that autonomous individuals should be left to find their own way of forging a relationship of intimacy.

The really disturbing feature of the promotion of consent classes, and its ideology of affirmative consent, is its devaluation of personhood and of individual autonomy. It assumes that young men and women cannot be expected to work out and negotiate their sexual relationship in accordance with their own experience and desires. Consequently, the lobby for consent education aims to target relations of spontaneity and the principle of autonomy associated with choice-making. The main instrument for accomplishing this objective is the "formalisation of consent". So rather than rely on choices arrived at by autonomous individuals, consent educators prescribe rules of conduct.

In recent decades the formalisation of consent is most clearly expressed through the concept of "affirmative consent". Affirmative consent explicitly targets tacit or informal communication in sexual relations. Codified in America as ‘yes means yes’ laws, consent must be explicitly expressed at every stage of a sexual encounter. From this perspective, the usual interactions associated with romantic and sexual encounters -body language, communication through the eye, the reading of non-verbal signals – are no longer valid means for signalling consent. Instead, affirmative consent is arrived at through the forms of negotiation usually associated with the public sphere, such as ones practiced at job interviews or business transactions.

It is important to understand that affirmative consent negates the very premise on which intimacy is founded. Through the displacement of spontaneous informality with formal rules, what was once a relationship is transformed into a transaction. The attributes associated with a transaction are those usually associated with the market – which is why some advocates of consent education support the codification of consent through contracts and pledges. ‘Students could create and sign personal, or group pledges’ is the advice offered to workshop facilitators by the NUS.

In passing it is worth noting that the ‘yes means yes’ contract mimics the religious right’s ‘Just Say No’ pledges. In both cases the performance of a ritual of pledging has as its aim the moral policing of intimacy.

Anyone who has attempted to practice affirmative consent will discover that what was once a relation of intimacy has been transformed into a performance dictated by a script not of their own making. Loving in accordance with a formal process disempowers people from conducting their affairs in accordance with their own temperament and inclinations.

The main purpose of the codification of affirmative consent is to make it easier to convict people for rape. This project is fuelled by a campaign that aims to equate all forms of ‘non-consensual’ sex with rape. Through the criminalisation of the so-called non-consensual, the invention of the idea of affirmative consent plays an important role in justifying the narrative of rape culture.

 Some critics of affirmative consent argue that proving that the word ‘yes’ was uttered is almost impossible and it places those accused of not acting with consent in a very difficult position. The codification of affirmative consent does undermine due process. But what is even worse is that it limits the space open for the exercise of autonomy.

The codification of consent calls into question the validity of the choices that people on their own account. Yet the making of choices, including choosing to consent plays an important role in human development. Following rules and custom does very little to cultivate people’s moral and intellectual development. As J.S. Mill argued”

“The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom makes no choice”[v]

Allowing people to make choices and to live with the consequences of their decisions is one the defining features of a civilised society. This is why the mistrust of informal choice making is invariably a symptom of misanthropic sentiments.

The policing of consent presumes that in many circumstances people are not able to give consent. For example, it is frequently argued in many cases an individual is unable to give or withhold consent freely because they consumed alcohol or taken drugs. Some go further and claim that in a predominantly heterosexual culture women are pressured to have sex to the point that their consent is rarely given freely.

There is little doubt that people interact in circumstances not of their own making. The pressures to which they are subjected invariably influences their decision-making. But the claim that the consumption of alcohol undermines the capacity to consent to a sexual act fails to understand the choice making behaviour of individuals. If society would insist that only sober men and women are able to give valid consent to sex, this activity would diminish significantly. In the real world many women and men choose to get drunk and have sex. Such behaviour may offend the puritanical advocates of affirmative consent but most human beings desire experiences that are free of the limits imposed by moralist rule makers.

Sex and consent

In sex even when consent is given it is rarely communicated through an explicit statement. Consent classes advocate that people talk to one another about their feelings and emotions. That may work in a seminar situation or after people had sex. In sexual encounters human beings do not talk about their desires they express them through an essentially physical manner- through touching and feeling and body language. In such circumstances what people want, and desire fluctuates and changes through the course of interacting with one another.

There is a body of research that suggests that how people feel about sexual relationship s is often complicated by mixed emotions an ambivalence. Individuals interviewed about their experiences quite freely report that what they wanted is not always what they said or consented to.

Paradoxically, just as non-consensual sex can be wanted, in many cases consensual sex may be unwanted. Studies indicate that a significant proportion of women and men reported consenting to unwanted sex. They may even initiate a sex to reassure or please their partners. Avoiding tension in a relationship, promoting intimacy, not wanting to hurt a partner’s feelings were some of the reasons cited for consenting to unwanted sex.[vi] Moreover how people feel about their partners, the experience of sex and the trajectory of their relationship influences and sometimes alters how they define and recollect what happened in bed. The relation between consent, desire and behaviour is not one that can be adequately understood or captured by rule making.

Unlike the very reasonable ‘no means no campaigns’ of the 1990s, the ‘yes means yes’ initiatives are devoted to subjecting sex to the micromanagement of those who are supposedly Aware.

The codification of affirmative consent simply fuels suspicion and mistrust. Its accomplishment is to increase and expand the number of acts that can be designated as non-consensual sex and rape and endow the narrative of rape culture with a semblance of legitimacy. Its prurient obsession with spontaneous human interaction makes old fashioned puritans seem positively restrained.

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[i] https://www.creativebrief.com/bite/voices/im-asking-it-campaign-strives-change-consent-law

[ii] https://www.newstatesman.com/comment/2024/03/affirmative-consent-no-one-asked-for-it

[iii] Jinan Younis ‘Why all students need sexual consent classes’, 18 July 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/18/all-students-need-sexual-consent-education-british-universities

[iv] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-29503973

[v] Cited in Williams, G.L. (1989) ‘Mill’s Principle of Liberty’, Lively, J. & Reeve, A. (1989) (eds) Modern Political Theory from Hobbes To Marx, Routledge: London, p.256.

[vi] Cited in Conceptualizing the "Wontedness" of Women's Consensual and Non-consensual Sexual Experiences: Implications for How Women Label Their Experiences with Rape Author(s): Zoë D. Peterson and Charlene L. Muehlenhard Source: The Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Feb. 2007), p.73.