Although they are often comparable at the language level — the government fucks you over, you get screwed by the system — political and sexual consent are not analogous, they are correlative. They feed one another. The search for a more human understanding of power and consent is not simply stage-dressing for a bigger fight. It is the big fight. It’s all about the grabby old men, and it always has been. […]

We know the world doesn’t work the way most of us want it to. We watch a bunch of badly-fitted suits stuffed with self-satisfied swagger frogmarch our nations down the road to economic calamity and climate destruction, and we try to tell ourselves that we chose this, that we have some sort of control, that there is a thing called democracy that is working more or less as it was designed to. We want to believe that some of this is our fault, because if it isn’t, then maybe we can’t do anything to stop it. This is more or less the experience of being a citizen of a notionally liberal, notionally democratic country these days. And if we ever actually speak about it honestly we can count on being dismissed as crazy or bullied into silence, so it’s easier to swallow our rage, to bear up and make the best of things and try not to start drinking before noon every day. Being as furious as we want feels like it might be fatal, so we try not to be too angry. Or we direct our anger elsewhere. Or we turn it inwards. Or we check out altogether. Sound familiar? That’s about how most women experience sexuality. […]

What happens when enough people stop believing that they ever wanted a world like this? What might happen to us as a society — hell, as a species — if enough of us begin to take consent seriously? What might happen if enough of us stood up together and refused to spend another second watching rich old white men do whatever the fuck they want to our bodies and call it freedom? Well, we might be about to find out. My guess is that it will be exhilarating, but first, it’ll be frightening as hell. Freedom always is.

The Consent of the (un)-governed

https://longreads.com/2017/12/05/the-consent-of-the-ungoverned/