Consent is a Surprisingly Easy Concept to Wrap Your Head Around...Really

Last night while eagerly awaiting my CTscan, Lauren and I ended up talking about consent, and wondered why it is SUCH a tricky issue. I mean, knowing whether the person you were sexing up the night before wanted you to be sexing them up in the first place just seems sort of...obvious/easy/doable to me.
The Mirriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines Consent as, "1 : to give assent or approval : AGREE ; 2 : agreement as to action or opinion." So, consent is the giving approval to an action or opinion, in this case, sexual activity with someone.
So why is so hard to "get," and why do people disagree about whether or not it was given?
A passed out individual is not giving consent; they're immobile and incapable of saying "yes" in any way, shape or form, period. That scenario seems the most obvious of all.
It seems to me that consent is as simple as one person saying, "Do you want to do this?," and another replying, "Yes." It's not like those seven words are a complete mood killer, and it's not like signing an affidavit was involved. It would take about 30 seconds to actually have that conversation. That's pretty simple. Right?

Then how do so many people make the mistake of saying, "they were asking for it?" David Cox, a blogger for Comment is Free, echoed this sentiment in a recent post, Feminism's Rape Fallacy.

Yet, why shouldn't women be encouraged to think twice before visiting footballer's hotel rooms late at night? Why shouldn't they be advised that to get themselves into a drunken stupor in the company of a frisky male could carry risks? Whatever the polite classes may feel, a large proportion of the population continues to see sense in such admonitions.

No offense Mr. Cox, but Women's Suffrage and the Civil Rights movement weren't exactly "popular" with a large percent of the population, many of whom "saw the sense" in segregation and limiting a woman's rights. When you really consider the issue, it all comes down to an individual's right NOT to be raped, not their choice to be in a situation that may or may not be "risky." Even if a woman is tipsy or drunk and visits a football player's hotel room late at night, she still maintains her basic right as a human being to physically "be" somewhere, and not have someone's penis forced into her, and a large group of Americans who fail to see the situation that way will not change the logic or rights of one of my fellow human beings. Perhaps if women were not raped in countries where they are not allowed to walk alone at night and forced to wear clothing that completely conceals their body, I would see their pseudo-logic. Unfortunately, that simply isn't the case. A staggeringly large number of women are raped every year, regardless of where they were, who they were with, or what they were wearing. Rape has nothing to do with those details of circumstance, and everything to do with the presence of a rapist. "Feminists object that even to mention such things constitutes a shift of blame from perpetrator to victim. Yet, when we fit window locks, does this make burglary our fault?," David Cox writes. Such logic does shift the blame from the perpetrator to the victim - it frames the rape as the consequence of their decisions, not as the rapist's, despite the fact that the victim did not seek or ask to be raped, nor did they desire to be. If you didn't desire it, it isn't consensual, period, all the time, every time, and a large proportion of the .population thinking differently won't change that.

In closing, I'd like to quote something from Melissa McEwan's post on Shakesville:
The whole rape-burglary comparison ("We keep our valuables out of sight") needs to die a swift and preferably painful death. As I've said before, as charming as it is to see the wanton and unwanted abuse of my body compared to property theft, I honestly can't even begin to convey how much you don't get it if you can construe a woman just existing with "keeping valuables in plain sight." That defenders of the "rape aversion advice rooted in women's behavior restriction" inevitably rely on the "getting robbed" comparison tells us two things. One: It shows how deeply ingrained the notion of women's bodies as property is. Comparing a woman's genitals to "unhidden valuables" is laughable in both practical and intrinsic ways, and yet such associations are routinely cited with not a hint of awareness at their patent absurdity. Two: It illustrates how far removed men are from the real threat of rape. Invoking property theft is evidently the closest thing many men can imagine to being forcibly subjected to an assault on one's sex organs, which has got to be a lovely world in which to live.