The Politics of Affirmative Consent: Considerations from a Gender and Sexuality Studies Perspective

While "no means no" considers sex as consensual until someone says no, "yes means yes" defines sex only then as consensual when all parties have explicitly agreed. Consent is thus positively determined by the presence of a yes and no longer negatively determined by the absence of a no. "Yes means yes" thus not only sets the limit as to when sex becomes sexual violence, it also tells us how morally "correct" sex should look like. In the first part I will give an insight into debates about affirmative consent in the US and Germany. In the following, I will work out how affirmative consent misjudges the subjectifying functioning of sexual power relations. I will show that the understanding of affirmative consent is based on a gendered giver-receiver grammar of consent, which stabilizes heteronormative notions of female sexuality as passive and male sexuality as active. Based on the results of conversational analytical studies on sexual communication, I will argue that the politics of affirmative consent underestimates the internalization of heteronormative discourses in sexual subjects.

The Behavioural View

This chapter argues that we should reject the Mental View in favour of the Behavioural View on the grounds that consent must be public. Like promises, consent modifies the demands that we can make of each other, and these demands structure the ways that we hold each other accountable. To the extent that duties are public, duties are better suited to structure how we hold each other accountable. Since consent changes which duties people have, this provides us with a rationale for why consent requires public behaviour. While an advocate of the Behavioural View will hold that consent requires behaviour, they should also allow that someone must have a mental attitude to consent. Accordingly, they should adopt a graded approach to sexual offence policies, according to which acting merely without someone’s affirmative consent is a less grave offence than acting against someone’s will.

The Epistemology of Consent

Philosophers spend a lot of time discussing what consent is. In this chapter, Alexander Guerrero suggests that there are also hard and important epistemological questions about consent and that debates about consent often mistake epistemological issues for metaphysical ones. People who defend so-called “affirmative consent” views sometimes are accused of, or even take themselves to be, offering a new, controversial view about the nature of consent. Guerrero argues that this is a mistake. The right way of understanding “affirmative consent” is as a view about what is required, epistemically, before one can justifiably believe that another person has consented. This view will be justified, if it is, because of background views about epistemic justification and the way epistemic justification interacts with moral norms governing action. Guerrero concludes by discussing the implications of this view for the morality and law regarding consent.

Exposing Flaws of Affirmative Consent through Contemporary American Teen Films

The discursive shift during the twenty-first century from “no means no” to “yes means yes” clearly had an impact on contemporary American teen films. While teen films of the 1970s and 1980s often epitomized rape culture, teen films of the 2010s and later adopted consent culture actively. Such films now routinely highlight how obtaining a girl’s “yes” is equally important to respecting her “no.” However, the framework of affirmative consent is not without its flaws. In this article, I highlight how recent teen movies expose some of these shortcomings, in particular how affirmative consent remains a highly gendered discourse that prioritizes verbal consent over desire.

"Next Time" Means "No": Sexual Consent and the Structure of Refusals

This paper emphasizes a need to recognize sexual refusals both in public discourse and in the context of particular interactions. I draw on sociolinguistic work on the structure of refusals to illuminate a much-discussed case of alleged sexual violence as well as to inform how we ought to think and talk about sexual consent and refusal more generally. I argue on empirical and ideological grounds that we ought to impute the same significance to refusals uttered in sexual contexts as we do to those uttered in nonsexual contexts. Finally, I propose an amendment to the definition of affirmative consent that would put it in line with the conclusions drawn in the rest of the paper.