Enthusiastic, Willing, Unwilling, Coerced
Consent, in the context of sex worth having
Trigger warning for discussion of non-consensual sex.
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As research for my new book, I was rereading Angela Chen’s book, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, in which I was surprised to be reminded about a blog post I wrote more than ten years ago, about evolving ideas about consent, ideas that tried to make space for responsive desire, which is an idea that feels helpful to many asexual, graysexual, and demisexual folks. (For more on asexuality, check out my conversation with Aubri Lancaster.)
At that time, I had a student who…
Pause.
That phrase, “I had a student who…,” indicates a quantity of work and thought and conversation and reading by both me and the student that I can never adequately express. “I have a student who” means that we were both deep in the throes of radical new thinking.
Unpause.
I had a student who spent a lot of time thinking about consent, and she frequently used the term “enthusiastic consent,” which I *love* but which I find… not problematic but… complicated due to the issue of responsive desire.
“Willingness,” as sex therapist Suzanne Iasenza calls it, or “agreeing to” as a long-ago blog reader once mentioned, without active wanting, is what I’m talking about here.
I live at an intellectual/professional crossroads between promoting active consent (“Yes means yes!”) and encouraging people to recognize responsive desire and not feel broken if they don’t just want sex out of the blue (“Willing can mean yes!”).
So I developed some different language, an alternative to “enthusiastic consent” or even just plain old “consent.” Willing Consent. Yes when you’re willing.
It’s a difficult idea. Under what circumstances is a person willing, though not necessarily wanting? I’ve tried thinking about it this way:
Enthusiastic consent:
When I want you.
When I don’t fear the consequences of saying yes OR saying no.
When saying no means missing out on something I want.
Willing consent:
When I care about you, though I may not desire you (right now).
When I fear or dread the consequences of saying no and I don’t fear the consequences of saying yes. (E.g., “If I say no, it will hurt their feelings, and if I say yes, they’ll be happy and the sex will be just fine.”)
When I expect that desire will begin after I say yes.
Beyond willing consent, I think there are some more problematic experiences of consent, which I’ll describe, to help differentiate them from this thing I want to call “willing consent.”
Unwilling consent:
When I fear the consequences of saying no more than I fear the consequences of saying yes. (E.g, “If I say no, their feelings will be hurt, and if I say yes they’ll be glad… though the sex will not be something I’m comfortable with, physically and/or emotionally… but I’m used to prioritizing my partner’s comfort and convenience over mine, so…”)
When I feel not just an absence of desire but an absence of desire for desire.
When I hope that by saying yes, you will stop bothering me, or that if I say no you’ll only keep on trying to persuade me—i.e., when I’m exhausted from trying to defend my “no.”
I would call unwilling consent “consent in name only.” It’s consent because the person says “yes,” and so technically, legally, somebody could make a case that it was “consensual.”
But is this the kind of sex you want to be having? Do you want your partner drag themselves unwillingly to the bed because they’d rather say yes rather than keep fighting to protect their no? In short, is that really sex worth having? Why not just masturbate on your own and then snuggle with your certain special someone, rather than pressure them into something they’re really not interested in doing? I ask these questions of the person whose partner is unwilling.
Coerced consent:
When you threaten me with harmful consequences if I say no.
When I feel I’ll be hurt if I say yes, but I’ll be hurt more if I say no
When saying yes means experiencing something I actively dread.
Now it’s perfectly legitimate to say that coerced consent is no consent at all. And yet I personally know of a case where the jury had to decide whether or not it constituted “consent” that a woman who had been raped had asked the perpetrator at least to use a condom.
“Of course that’s not consent,” you think, but it is a complicated question, legally. And I think a lot of consent education is more or less instructions in how to “get consent” from someone—“make sure you get consent,” the sex educator says. And so you pester the person and plead and emotionally bribe and eventually threaten them until they say yes. So you “got consent.”
Welcome to the difference between a legalistic approach to consent versus a real-world “sex worth having” consent. What kind of sex partner do you want to be? What kind of sex do you want in your life? Despite the seemingly obvious problems with unwilling and coerced consent, they are consent that people give, in bad circumstances, often to protect themselves from consequences worse than sex they actively do not want. But it’s not the kind of sex people imagine for themselves, when they imagine their ideal sexual future.
And I wonder about the edginess of willing consent. So often people – especially young or relatively inexperienced people – say yes to things when they’re not sure what they want, and from my way of thinking here it seems that a great deal of the difference between “willing” and “unwilling” as to do with anticipated consequences, which can never be known until after the fact, rather than the desire felt in the moment.
In the decade or so since I started thinking about consent this way, I have landed here:
Consent, in the context of sex worth having, is when everyone involved is glad to be there and free to leave with no unwanted consequences. “Glad to be there” doesn’t have to mean “totally panting to get my mouth on your mouth” (though it certainly can mean that!); it can also be, “I like you and this is something I’m curious to experience.”
And “no unwanted consequences” means no unwanted consequences—no physical consequences, no emotional manipulation or guilt-tripping, and no relational consequences, no fight or threats of someone leaving the relationship or anything of that kind. Nothing should be contingent on having sex. Sex to prevent unwanted consequences is not the kind of sex for which people are glad to be there.
Overall, I’ve been excited to see a gradual—very gradual—shift in consent education away from definitions of what counts as consent to a presentation of consent as the very lowest bar a sexual experience can cross. Consent is table stakes. Consent is admission to the party. Everything else is the sex part.
And what kind of sex do you want to be having? Pleasurable, right? Joyful, even. Connected. Erotic. Curious, exploring, interested, adventurous, comforting, there are so many ways to be sexual. All of them are consensual. Not all of them have to start with enthusiasm, but they do all have to start with everyone involved being glad to be there and free to leave with no unwanted consequences.
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