You Can Take It Back: Consent as a Felt Sense

queeranarchism:

This is a repost of this vital post on Bandana blog that I’m sharing on Tumblr again so it shows up on my blog and in all the tags again because the content is so so important. 

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Did you ever consent to something, but still came away feeling violated? Ever said “yes” to someone and then wished you could take it back? Well, you can.

Here’s the thing: it is possible to consent to having some experience and then, sometime in the future, not consent to having had that experience.

Put another way, you have “the right to retroactively withdraw consent” from any encounters you had, at any point in the past, that no longer feel good or safe to you.

Currently, the way we talk about consent leaves no space for people to re-evaluate their own experiences. Nevertheless, people frequently do re-evaluate their experiences—including and perhaps even especially their sexual experiences—based on a variety of factors. Newly learned information, changing circumstances, or the way they themselves have changed are all things that can and do alter people’s feelings about the past. Discourses about consent that don’t make space for such after-the-fact evaluations are flawed.

There’s a better way to think and talk about consent, one that honors peoples’ entire experience of a situation—past, present, and future—not just the tiny time-slices of that experience during which they were asked, “Is this cool with you?” Instead of understanding consent as “giving someone permission to do a thing,” we can and should talk about it as “being okay with a thing happening.”

In this essay, we begin an exploration into how current mainstream and even progressive feminist discourses about (specifically) sexual consent fail to address the lived experience of navigating consent within rape culture. We point out that a legalistic framing of consent as expressed rather than experienced ultimately centers the needs of would-be rapists over the needs of rape survivors. We also consider how our relationship to consent changes when we acknowledge that whether a person actually feels violated is more important than whether they expected to feel violated.

Toward an Ethical Model of Consent

How does our relationship to consent change if we think of “consent” as a real experience people have of feeling that what happened to them was okay, and “violation” as more nuanced than simply committing an un-permitted action?

In such a model, if Bob and Andy have sex, and Andy says, “Yes,” “Sure,” “Okay, fine, whatever,” or even, “Ooh baby, do it to me!” but still wakes up the next morning feeling like he was raped, that means Andy was raped. Conversely, if Andy and François have a steamy make-out session in which no words are exchanged but they both go home feeling great about it, and they keep feeling great about it, that experience was consensual.

If our concern is with not violating a person, rather than not violating a rule, then “a violation” is defined by what happens when a person processes and continually re-processes their feelings about an experience. Likewise, if our concern is about behaving ethically and with integrity, rather than making sure we are not held accountable for coercive actions, then we should respect consent as an experience people have, not a commitment people make.

Consent does not equal permission; it is a felt sense.

Of course, this understanding of consent fucking terrifies people (mostly men and sadomasochistic “Dominants”), because it implies that consent (as they understand it) can be “revoked” retroactively. But this is only a problem for someone whose desire to understand consent is primarily focused on how to not get in trouble for violating consent, or at the very least on how not to feel bad about themselves for violating consent, rather than on how to not violate consent.

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