http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXFKTekTUxo
Lessons learned:
- People who choose not to drink on a first date must have some dark and horrible reason for doing so, whereas people who order “one of everything” at the bar are good to go, even when it comes to sex later in the evening.
- Negotiations over contraception may be responsibly delayed until the heat of the moment, when one or both parties are already aroused, naked, and drunk. There is no problem whatsoever with this approach.
- If a man expresses discomfort about having sex on a woman’s terms, he should be privately shamed and even publicly ridiculed for doing so. Real men don’t harbor such doubts, they should just “pick a pony and bet it.”
None of these seem like good lessons to me, and they are all problematic for basically the same reason, that is, they run the risk of muddling consent.
Here is how consent ought to work, ideally, according to everydayfeminism.com:
True consent is enthusiastic consent—a deliberate and thoughtful process—not something that can be interpreted.
Think of enthusiastic consent as an active and ongoing process of willingly and freely choosing to participate in any act of sex with someone else.
Each person involved equally participates in the process and feels comfortable to make and communicate any choice or feelings without feeling pressured, manipulated, or afraid.
All three of the takeaways from the video, if taken seriously, would run the risk of impairing the “deliberate and thoughtful process” which may result in two people coming to a clear meeting of the minds about what should happen next.
At least we can say that the story has a happy ending, as the attractive ex-Mormon is expelled from the premises instead of being pressured into a sexual performance which he would quite likely have regretted, given his personal fears about the possibility of conception. Whether those fears are rational or not is a wholly separate scientific separate question, worth addressing in and of itself, but with no impact on the matter of enthusiastic consent. In the moment, you must take your potential partner’s fears as they are, rather than brushing them aside. Each person must be “comfortable to make and communicate any choice or feelings” without fear of facing public humiliation for doing so.
