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.

One year later, these are the things I miss about Denmark:

The kakao maelk:







And King's cigaret (Photo courtesy of The House of Prince site - and yes, that really is the name of the premiere cigarette manufacturer in Denmark):
and why do I love them so? I think it's because the filters are the size of the nail on my pinky finger. And also because they have the best warning slogans - "Smoking can hurt," and "Smoking is maybe harmful for you and a fetus."

While wasting my time on The House of Prince site, I found this marvelous gem under "View of Smoking":
We know that many people find it difficult to quit smoking. Some may use the expression that they have become addicted to smoking. We believe that everybody can quit smoking. Millions of people all over the world quit every year, simply because they decide to do so and add will power to their decision.
Smoking is a choice that should be left with adults only. In our opinion nobody under the age of 18 should smoke."

Really? My first memory on Danish soil is of a middle-aged Danish woman lighting a cigarette in the airport at baggage claim, and then giving it to her 12-year-old son. 18 my ass.













And I probably miss this most of all. I tried making some myself, but I had to use Svensk vodka and Hall's cough drops, and...it was miserable. It just tasted like shots of vodka that smelled like sickness. It was sort of tragic. And chunky...not all of the cough drops dissolved all the way.










I'm pretty sure that a lack of mentholated vodka is the source of my bad health. And the red King's. And not enough chocolate milk. Screw all natural foods...I miss the Danish diet.



I miss the school-sponsored alcoholism, the non-stop haze of cigarette smoke, and The Danish Film Institute. Too bad they only get 4 hours of sunlight.

Thanks for nothing, Cosmo!

In their new September issue, Cosmo published an article called, "A New Kind of Date Rape." Essentially, all that the article posits that much non-consensual "sex" is not rape, but gray rape, Never mind that non-consensual sex is the definition of rape itself. The term was coined by Laura Sessions Stepp. She defines gray-rape as "sex that falls somewhere between consensual and denial." "Gray rape" is not a concept supported by experts or those working in the field of sexual assault and abuse. All of the women interviewed in the article were clearly forced into sex, each said no, and each one was physically overcome, with the exception of a woman who was unconscious. Call me old fashioned, but that sure sounds like "rape" to me, not "sex," not "gray rape."
I wrote a letter to Cosmo, expressing my concern over the article, and my fear that all a term like "gray rape" really does it let the rapist off the hook and force the blame onto the victim. I mentioned that I feel that it's significant that most states include sex in an altered state (read: drugs, alcohol) as rape, whether or not that legal definition is enforced properly. I received this response yesterday afternoon:

Dear Reader,
We received your letter of concern regarding our September story “A New Kind of Date Rape” and want to address what seems to be a misunderstanding. Cosmopolitan did not invent the term gray rape. The phrase emerged when the author of our article, Laura Sessions Stepp, was researching a book on today’s hookup culture.
In fact, the words were used by women who were left confused after a sexual encounter they were not one hundred percent sure they had consented to and by women who had known friends who were similarly confused. The confusion, many of these women admitted, was the result of having been under the influence of alcohol at the time of the encounter. Our article endeavored to help victims in these situations make sense of their ordeal, explain their avenues of recourse, and offer advice on how women can prevent so-called gray rapes from happening.
Cosmopolitan has a long history of covering the topic of sexual assault and, more important, of being an advocate for victims. Linda Fairstein, a former Manhattan sex-crimes prosecutor of 25 years, is a regular contributor to our pages. She and other rape experts applaud Cosmopolitan’s efforts to keep our readers educated about such difficult issues as sexual assault.
Sincerely,
The Editors of Cosmopolitan

So thanks for setting me straight Cosmo. Thanks for letting me know that the term "emerged," and that you know women, some of whom know people who have been raped, since that changes everything. Thanks for telling me that I simply misunderstood the entire article, and missed it's point. I don't feel insulted at all. Thank you for addressing my concerns by insinuating that I just don't understand the complexity of an issue like rape. It's not like I have any experience relating to such a complex topic, and it certainly isn't possible that I might actually know anyone who has ever been raped, which i suppose makes you the expert.
So fine Cosmo. I guess I just don't get it - but I'm inclined to think that I do get it, and I am further inclined to believe that you seem unable to claim any responsibility for publishing an article that is misleading when confronted with it.