Sloan cut an arresting figure—almost six feet tall, with cropped auburn hair and a pierced tongue. She sat down to our third (and final) interview with a coffee cup in her hand. She had three term papers to write that day, she explained, and so wanted to start caffeinating. As we spoke, she fiddled with the cup’s cardboard sleeve. She rolled it into a tube, then unfurled it and folded it into a tiny square. She folded the cardboard accordion-style, and set it on the table to watch it unfurl as she spoke. Her eyes welled up periodically, but she didn’t reach for a tissue until we pulled one from the box and laid it on top. Sloan had emailed us asking to be interviewed, and she wanted to tell her whole story. Like many students with whom we spoke, she seemed to experience our conversations as cathartic. She also conveyed that telling her story felt like a social responsibility, a way to help make a better future. Her busy hands—and, to be sure, the tears—communicated distress, and yet she laughed on her way out the door. Getting paid to talk about herself for six hours had been “a dream come true.” When she laughed, her dimples showed.1
Early in her first interview it was clear that one meeting would not be enough, and so those six hours were spread out over three interviews: she described four assaults altogether, three of them before she set foot on campus. She mentioned the assault at Columbia somewhat offhandedly during the second interview.
There was this guy who I had hooked up with drunk once—over, like, winter break or something—and then I had to crash in his room over the summer after freshman year, I forget why. And I woke up and he had his hand in my pants, and I was, like, I’m leaving, thank you. And I left, and I never talked to him about it.
Reflecting on what he might have been thinking in that moment, Sloan highlighted the disjuncture between what people know about consent, and what they actually do:
I mean, I honestly just think that he thought that because I was staying over in his apartment, it was consent to get involved in something even though I was asleep. Which I think was fairly common, that people were kind of like—“I know definitely what consent is, but let’s be real, you’re here, so you want this, obviously.” Which is horrifying, right, but unbelievably common. It’s shocking to me how often physical presence is consent in people’s eyes. Which is just so stupid, but so common. . . . Not just in men. I mean, women too have absolutely done the thing where, you know, you’re there with somebody who is very inebriated and should not be messed with and they are like, “Yeah, but you’re here, so like, you kind of want this.”
We often think of consensual sex as the opposite of assault. But sometimes people say “yes” because they are coerced. And people often consent to sex that they really enjoy and want without ever saying “yes.”2 In this chapter we describe how students practice consent, and examine what shapes those practices. There is an awful lot of consensual sex happening that is, as students say, “kind of rapey,” or hurtful, or not very enjoyable for one person, or sometimes even for both. The point is not to be the pleasure police. After all, people can consent to sex, and even want to have sex that isn’t that pleasurable physically, because they want to comfort a partner or reaffirm a relationship or have a new kind of experience.3 And pleasure can have lots of meanings, from physical, to emotionally satisfying, to achieving some desirable goal, like acquiring status or a new experience.
Some students do practice affirmative consent, but many others use a range of social cues to make sense of whether or not a sexual encounter was consensual or nonconsensual. They use space as a shorthand for consent in ways that highlight how campus sexual geography shapes what students do and how they understand it. Students frequently assume that someone else choosing to be alone in a room with them signifies consent. In dark basements, crowded parties, and bars where the din makes conversation impossible, students frequently touch each other’s bodies without seeking, much less securing, consent. This touching would be much more recognizable as problematic in the library reading room, or on the campus lawn, or in a classroom.
During the time of our fieldwork, a series of highly publicized cases involving accusations of sexual assault had recently rocked the campus. Consequently, students were acutely attuned to the importance of consent, and had received many messages about school policy emphasizing consent as the bright line marking the difference between sexual assault and sex. Men, as a performance of decency and to demonstrate their desirable masculinity, had even begun to talk publicly and loudly about the importance of consent and their commitment to it. In the interviews, to minimize social desirability bias—the fact that research subjects often tell you what they know to be socially desirable, rather than what they actually do—we therefore deliberately asked students to describe a sexual experience in minute detail before asking any questions about consent. Surprisingly, almost no student brought up consent in their initial descriptions of a sexual encounter. Interview subjects were taken aback when they realized, upon being asked to recount their stories a second time, but this time to be explicit about how consent worked, that affirmative consent was not a defining characteristic of their sexual encounters. Some even realized they may not have gotten consent within past sexual interactions—interactions which, until the moment of the interview, they had thought of as consensual.
Many students have absorbed the knowledge about the legal standard of affirmative consent, but this knowledge may not affect their behavior. Their words suggest a kind of cognitive dissonance, as they describe their own consent practices, which they know to be suboptimal. Heterosexual students overwhelmingly operate within an implicit framework in which men are the ones who move the sexual ball down to the field, and women are the blockers.4 For most of the heterosexual women we spoke to, their response to this dissonance rarely goes beyond bemusement. But for most heterosexual men, the fear of doing consent wrong and unintentionally assaulting someone is deeply held and part of their everyday experience of sex. Some men have socially specific reasons—racial inequality, but also physical unattractiveness or less social desirability as partners—to fear that their consent practices are more likely to be judged as falling short. It’s not how they have sex or do consent, but instead who they are that makes sexual contact “unwanted.” This is part of what we mean by consent being socially produced. And it’s more than space and time—sexual geographies—that form the social shorthand for consent. Peers play a crucial role in consent—defining appropriate partners, setting up consensual sexual interactions, processing sexual experiences and helping those involved categorize them as hilarious, sketchy, gross, rapey, or assault.
Our analysis of consent lays the groundwork for the remainder of our argument about how the campus context produces sexual assault. It also points to the urgency of rendering visible and helping students critique the power dynamics at play in sex, which are about gender but also about race, year in school, and other forms of privilege—or precariousness. And it shows how consent is much more than a verbal transaction between two individuals: what students bring to that moment, in terms of what can be safely taken for granted and whose job it is to be sure that the sex is consensual, is inseparable from their broader college stories. Sexual geography, sexual citizenship, and sexual projects help us see the dense network of power relations present when a hot senior guy sporting a shirt with a logo from his team, fraternity, or summer finance job invites a first-generation, first-year, sexually inexperienced freshman back to his room with a soaring view over Manhattan.5
One of the biggest challenges for Sloan in navigating consent is one shared by many students, but wealthier white students in particular. It’s not that she and her peers don’t know about consent, and the problems of consent when drinking. As we’ve seen, drunk sex is so much a part of the landscape they navigate that knowledge alone—or even the experience of being assaulted—may not change their actual behavior.6 As Sloan said:
I mean I’ve actually had the conversation with a lot of my female friends where they are like, man, I got assaulted, and I started thinking, there have absolutely been situations where I did not get sufficient consent from people that I was sleeping with. . . . Friends of mine who are survivors, who got really into discussing what consent looks like, and realized that there were times that they absolutely had not received it. And not so much situations in which they violently force themselves on people, but situations where they were, like, that person was not sober enough to consent to what happened, and, like, nobody’s feelings were hurt afterwards. . . . Being, like, well, we both probably want it, “It’s a Hollywood movie, we don’t need to talk about, everybody’s happy,” is a very dangerous thing to let slide. And everybody does, especially freshman year of college. Especially in groups where you just get drunk to hook up. . . . Like, you don’t have to feel like you were assaulted every time you have sex when you’re incredibly drunk and couldn’t really legally consent, but letting stuff like that happen means that the stuff where people really do get hurt, and where it’s really not okay and where people really are severely harmed . . . you don’t know how the person’s going to respond to the fact that they’ve done this thing that they couldn’t consent to. Or that this thing has been done to them. Sometimes it’s totally fine. And sometimes it’s really not.
Sloan’s own consent practices reflected her social commitment to “self-protection, but also protection of the other person. . . . Like, I’m not going to go out and sexually assault people, but I also don’t want to have sex with someone who maybe regrets it in the morning, or wasn’t super interested, or doesn’t know how they feel.” For her, that means trying not to have sex while she’s drunk. Except that she still has a fair amount of drunk sex. She had done her hardest partying in high school, and so her orientation week stories were about taking care of peers who partied a little too hard for the first time. But her wide-ranging narrative made clear that drinking was such an integral part of socializing for her that a more attainable goal was having an initial conversation about consent “entirely sober.”
She recounted the story of one guy she met on Tinder. She’d been chatting for a couple of weeks with him, and he “seemed like a sane person.” She laughed again as she explained that that meant that he “probably did not have a bag of dead cats under his bed.” Their first in-person meet-up included some “delightful reciprocated oral sex. . . . I was like, oh, this is nice, this is exciting, you are a champion of the female orgasm.” Then we asked her to reflect back on how consent had worked in that interaction. She responded:
We had a very clear conversation before we got drunk. I was like, “Hey, so you’re attractive, we’ve had a lot of conversations, and realistically, I’m probably going to sleep with you tonight. If you’re down with that.” He was like “Cool, yes, me too.” I really don’t like to be drunk the first time I sleep with someone. And I’m very blunt. Mostly because I’ve had a lot of nonconsensual sex. And so at a certain point you’re just, like, let’s just everybody be clear here. Get this out of the way. Because I don’t fuck with that anymore. But also, I’ve just found that you have better sex if you’re open.
She was a little drunk when that “delightfully reciprocated oral sex” took place. A lot of students told us that sober sex was “serious sex”—meaning it typically happened in relationship contexts. And sometimes people avoid this kind of sex because it can convey a seriousness that young people aren’t ready for yet, or aren’t ready to convey.7
Sloan’s comments underline how deeply rooted her consent practices are in her life story. She’s learned that “you have better sex if you’re open.” Talking about sex is part of her broader sexual project of structuring sexual interactions so that her preferences and desires, and her partner’s, are made explicit. Sloan’s practices reflect her identity as a survivor who has decided that she “doesn’t fuck with” vague consent practices. She is a bisexual woman whose critical thinking on gender and sexuality helps her to identify her own boundaries, and to think in a nuanced way about the boundaries of others. She is also a child of privilege who knew dozens of other freshmen from having rowed on her high school’s crew team—and whose operative assumption, in social interactions, is that she should be heard.
Aubrey, a Latina from the West Coast who is the first in her family to attend college, was keenly aware of how her background differed from Sloan’s. Although her family’s southwestern roots may have predated Sloan’s ancestors’ Mayflower-era arrival, she felt like an immigrant in the urban Northeast. Class president, straight-A student, and captain of her debate team, Aubrey was a high achiever in high school, and yet still she recalled being taken aback freshman year by people like Sloan—“people who’ve gone to private school, who know Latin and Greek literature.” She shook her long curls and laughed, recalling her bemusement, upon arriving, at seeing guys wearing “Vineyard Vines and pastel shorts and Sperry’s. I’m like, ‘What the fuck is this? If you wore this in California, people would make fun of you.’” Like Sloan, she had experienced intimate partner violence before coming to campus, in her case a boyfriend who had threatened to shoot her. He had fired his gun at her pet bird to show that he was not joking. Aubrey had been through a lot on her way to the Ivy League.
Like Sloan, she understood consent spatially: “If I didn’t feel comfortable with what was going to happen, I wouldn’t put myself in a situation where I think this person’s trying to have sex with me, and I’m going to be alone with them, like, there’d be no one to support me or save me if something happened. . . . So if I am sitting on their bed with them, I kind of know that’s where it’s going to go.” But just being in bed with someone, Aubrey is clear, does not obligate her to have sex. One night, she was in bed with a rugby player she’d been hooking up with for some time. They’d already had sex once, but in his drunken state he “was continuing to try to have sex” and either not noticing or not caring about her unresponsiveness. “I was just over it, and so I was just like, ‘No, I don’t want to have sex with you.’ Like, I actually said those words.” She did not typically “say those words”; ordinarily, she conveyed consent “by going with them to a private place, and as the night continues, by taking off my clothes myself.”8 When we asked her how consent works, Aubrey was emphatic—“I’ve never done it if I didn’t want to”—but also began to reflect on her own practices.
Also I haven’t asked them, I just kind of assume, which is bad on my part. . . . Now that I look back at all the instances I’ve hooked up with someone, I’ve never asked, or considered if they were granting consent, I just assumed that they initiated it, so if I reciprocated, then they were okay with it. . . . But I feel like I haven’t really thought about consent as much as I should have.
The rugby player’s drunk pushiness to have sex a second time, his obliviousness to her lack of interest, and her description that she actually had to state out loud “No, I don’t want to have sex with you” illustrate how, for many students, explicit verbal articulation of sexual desires—not just that you want to have sex, but what you want to do—is the exception rather than the rule. This rugby player wasn’t, as Aubrey tells it, a “bad guy.” He just thought that if he wanted sex a second time that night it was cool. He was somewhat drunk, and likely less able to read how she was feeling—either that, or he didn’t care to and figured he could power through. He stopped when Aubrey was clear about her “no.”
In both the focus groups and individual interviews, we found that students had absorbed the information provided by the university about what constituted consent. They knew that affirmative consent, under New York State law, means an explicit indication of a desire to have sex, and not just the absence of a “no.”9 And yet, as Sloan made clear, “It’s shocking to me how often physical presence is consent in people’s eyes.” Her words—as a student who’d experienced multiple assaults, and who worked hard to hold herself and her peers to a higher standard—remind us how important it is to look at how students actually navigate consent, rather than how we wish they’d do it. The words also underline just how cognizant many students are of that gap between ideal and actual. And it’s not just that they’re aware of that gap—some actively question affirmative consent’s emphasis on explicit verbal agreement. As one woman put it:
I think it’s also weird to be like, every time you have sex, “Hey, do you wanna have sex?” or like, “Are you all right with this?” . . . ’cause I think that sex is a natural thing, and to have to ask for consent every single time would be sort of weird, and make it almost seem not so natural, almost seem forced.
Or, in the words of another,
I almost never have a sexual experience where it’s like, “Do you want to have sex?” and then the other person is like, “Yes.” . . . I guess it’s more communicated in body language, or physical action, like, if someone pulls away, or something.
The students we spoke with rarely use direct language to elicit or grant consent.10 Rather, they use a variety of strategies to navigate sexual encounters that they experience as consensual. These include indirect language like “Do you want to go back to my room?” or “Do you want to get out of here?” They text to meet up for sex, but don’t mention that word: sex. Even the most explicit language—“Should I get a condom?”—avoids explicit mention of sex itself. And then there’s the classic text, “U up?” In four characters, students check whether someone’s awake, imply an interest in sex, and inquire as to the other person’s willingness.
Strategies other than explicit talk help assess and evaluate consent.11 Some students pay careful attention to whether kisses are enthusiastically reciprocated, if a person pulls away or pulls in closer, or if they are unresponsive. They listen for moans and other sounds expressing pleasure. It’s not that students never talk during sex. Most, though certainly not all, do listen for “no.” In some contexts, neither women nor men feel entitled to say “no.” And yet sometimes they have no such discomfort. The most definitive examples of clarity communicating sexual boundaries involve the anus. Several heterosexual men recounted emphatic rejection of their women partner’s attempts at anal touching. Similarly, one woman, in response to her boyfriend’s desire to go there, unmistakably communicated that she didn’t consent to what he was trying to do when she exclaimed, “Whoa there, buddy!”
Sometimes students were in no state to really know or be able to act on what they wanted. And most frequently this is because they were drunk; frequently their partner was too.12 In the interviews, students dutifully recounted their strategies for assessing if another person was too intoxicated to give consent, and most clearly understood that there is a level of drunkenness in which sex is not okay:
If, like, the other person is just, like, so inebriated, so drunk, that they can’t walk straight and you can’t have a proper conversation with them. Then yeah, you shouldn’t—probably shouldn’t—have sex, or you shouldn’t even, like, hook up.
But strategies for avoiding dangerous drunk sex tend to focus on the most extreme physical manifestations of intoxication—not having sex if they are too drunk to sustain an erection or if they are literally vomiting at that specific moment. Students aware that a person can be blackout drunk and yet seem able to speak and walk give themselves moral cover, recounting incidents of drunk sex, by describing themselves or the other person as “brownout” drunk.
What we saw in talking to young people and in seeing them interact at bars, clubs, suites, and parties was that many rely upon tacit signals and contextual knowledge, using touch, sight, and hearing, rather than waiting for positive verbal affirmation, to ascertain a partner’s desires. This shouldn’t be shocking to most of us. Critically, students consider these to be ways to indicate their own consent: not saying “no”; agreeing to meet up somewhere; going back to someone’s room with them; taking off their own or a partner’s clothes; or writhing, moaning, or pulling the person closer. These were all ways that students described consenting to a sexual advance.13 Consent is important to students, and they think about it a lot. But their behavior generally falls far short of the increasingly adopted standard of affirmative consent. And given how frequently students encounter unwanted and nonconsensual sexual touching, which was the most frequently experienced form of sexual assault in the SHIFT survey, it is noteworthy that when students do reflect on consent, they focus almost entirely on securing consent for intercourse.14
Cheong’s short-sleeved polo shirt, which showed off his well-defined arm muscles, was neatly tucked into his khaki pants. Crisp white sneakers and very short hair completed the picture of someone who cared about the impression he made—further conveyed by his mentioning that he’d stopped smoking when he started college because, unlike people in Hong Kong, his home, “Americans don’t smoke.” His story illustrates how students’ sexual projects frequently shift from impressing their friends and accumulating experience to finding intimacy during the college years. But it also shows how men’s uncritical acceptance of a gendered sexual script where their job is to pursue sex and women’s job is to convey agreement or not renders them susceptible to sexually assaulting someone. Cheong navigates intimate relationships now with same intentionality he exhibits in his dress. He admits that “over the years, my concept of dating and intimacy has changed. Right now, I’ve been looking for an emotional connection. Before that’s established I wouldn’t get into anything physical. I would much rather have a good conversation with someone, getting to know someone, than engaging in physical behavior just to satisfy my desires . . . I think more in terms of the long run.”
Like a lot of the men we interviewed, Cheong is a bit of a romantic. When asked about his best sexual experience, he spoke about the care and thoughtfulness that went into producing a moment of intimacy, rather than the physical satisfaction of the sex itself. First, he invited a young woman he’d been seeing on a swan boat ride in Central Park, followed by a picnic; on the top layer of the picnic basket he’d lugged along were a dozen roses and a card, asking her formally to be his girlfriend. Later that day was the first time they had sex—which he was surprised to learn was her first time ever having intercourse. “I was, like, ‘Let me know how you feel, do you want me to continue, or if you feel pain, let me know. . . . ’ It was really hard at first, because she had never done anything like that, so it was painful . . . so we went really slowly.” Cheong cared about being an attentive sexual partner; when asked what he worries about when having sex, he responded: “not being able to pleasure my partner as much as I would like.”
He assessed his early attractions and interactions as “very superficial.” Looking back on his very first sexual encounter, he smiled: “I had my first kiss in high school. It was a triple dare. I was stupid.” He described seeking out his first sexual experience while he was away on a school trip. He said of one young woman, “My friends thought she was attractive so that rubbed off on me and I just started talking to her. . . . I don’t think I genuinely liked her as a person, I don’t think I knew enough about her to actually be fond of her.” The desire in those initial sexual encounters was to impress his friends. Even his first girlfriend at Columbia was someone selected by his “big” in his fraternity: “We have a banquet every year and I didn’t have a date, I wasn’t going to bring anyone.” Cheong stopped, and then repeated himself, making clear just how much this was driven by his fraternity mentor. “I wasn’t going to ask anyone but he wanted me to bring this girl.”
Cheong’s shift to a focus on “the long run,” to wanting sex in the context of a relationship of mutual care, emerged against the backdrop of several distinctly unpleasant experiences. One involved disentangling himself from an ongoing hookup in a way that, upon reflection, he felt was unnecessarily cruel. There was another experience he regretted—not because of anything he did, but because the “random hookup” led him to realize that he was uncomfortable sharing his bed with a stranger, so much so that he lied about having a stomachache, and left his own bed to go curl up and sleep alone on his suite’s couch. Cheong grew into a sexual project that links emotional and physical intimacy; his story provides glimpses into how sexual interactions that cause distress—things that he has done, and things done to him—have led him to think more deeply about the kinds of sexual interactions that he values. Like a lot of the men with whom we spoke, he seemed kind. But kindness, and a sexual project focused on intimacy, are not a guarantee that an assault won’t occur.
Cheong’s belief that securing consent was a man’s job trapped him in a framework which placed him at risk for making unwelcome advances and left him without a language to fully consider being the object of women’s unwelcome advances. Within a framework of gendered sexual agency, interpreting a woman’s lack of resistance as consent makes perfect sense. And so with his high school girlfriend, as well as the women he’d been with at Columbia, he was emphatic that consent did not require a verbal exchange:
You can see that she’s reciprocating, then I would move on to the next step. . . . Like if she’s willing to take off her clothes, like if she touches me certain ways, to me, those are nonverbal cues that tell you that you can move forward. I don’t think I’ve ever asked, “Can I have sex with you?” ’cause that would be pretty awkward, but it’s pretty obvious that it was consensual.
Cheong is not alone in seeing it as his job to act, and his partner’s to resist or to acquiesce: “It’s like when, for example, I’m removing her clothes and she doesn’t stop me, then to me, that’s consent.” But when asked how he conveys consent, he says, “I’m the one that takes the initiative most of the time, so consent is on her side.” “Sexual scripts” denote shared ideas about how a sexual scene is supposed to unfold. Cheong described this “slow process” with his girlfriend eventually leading to intercourse, but without there ever being an actual conversation about it: “making out first, and then moving on to, like, I don’t know, second base, whatever that is, and then finally, after a period of time, we tried [sex].”15 In his view, this was the “real” way people manage consent. When we asked Karen, whose experience of being assaulted we recounted in the first chapter, how she got consent from the men she’d had sex with, she paused and said, “It’s implied consent, I think. . . . I don’t think I have ever asked for consent.” Then she turned the conversation around, asking us, “I think guys ask you for consent, right?”16
Michelle Fine’s classic 1988 article about high school sex education described the “missing discourse of desire”—the ways that an earlier generation of programming was grounded in (and reproduced) the assumption that sex is something that boys want, but not girls.17 In heterosexual students’ consent practices, this discourse of desire is still missing; sexual interactions reflect the widely shared and largely unexamined assumption that men seek sex and women grant access.18 Heterosexual students in our study frequently either laughed or were a little taken aback when asked how women sought or ascertained men’s consent. And consent education frequently misses an opportunity to challenge this gendered responsibility for consent, using scenarios with gender-neutral names and pronouns out of a desire to be inclusive to LGBT, queer, and gender-nonconforming experiences. Unquestionably, that inclusivity is vital, yet it should not come at the cost of critical discussions about gendered sexual agency, power, and the gendered practice of consent. These conversations are the first step toward undoing the equation of masculinity with sexual agency.
Women can be charitable in evaluating men’s struggle with how to move things to the next level. Rosa was distraught throughout the course of her interview; she nervously agreed when we offered her a cup of coffee, then dropped it when we handed it to her. Her eyes welled up as she mopped frantically at the coffee, beaded up on the rug. But our research team had seen her out and about, and she was generally like that—high strung and a little sad. She was recovering from an eating disorder, and not on speaking terms with her father. Freshman year was not off to a good start. So Rosa did not want to make a big deal of what happened on a Saturday, several weeks before she was interviewed, when she went back to a guy’s room with him. They had been in the library, and he suggested that they pick up the handle of vodka in his fridge so they could go drink in her room with her suite mates. It had been a hard week, and what he proposed seemed like it could be fun. She bent down to get the vodka out of his minifridge, and as she turned back around he “swooped down” and stuck his tongue down her throat. She said, “Like, whoa, buddy, sorry but not sorry, I was not expecting this.” He stopped, she reported—“he ‘got it’” that she was not interested. Yet in the ensuing weeks he followed her around at parties and texted her daily. “I don’t want to, like, put him down as a person just because of that, he didn’t rape me, he just thought that I was down to do something I was not down to do.” But her concerns about him grew: “I don’t think he’s totally healthy the way he’s going about trying to have sex, he’s kind of—being kind of forceful.”
An analysis of the SHIFT ethnographic data led by Matthew Chin examined how consent was intimately tied up with different notions of time, noting differences in student practices depending on the time of year (some events, like the big spring party “Bacchanal,” are particularly sexualized), the amount of time people are in a relationship, the time of day, and the ways in which students and their peers interpret events before, during, and after the sexual encounter to make sense of consent.19 The young man in Rosa’s story may have read her willingness to go back to his room as an indication of sexual interest, or understood the room late on a Saturday night to be a sexual space in a way that it would not be if she were stopping by Tuesday morning to compare notes from their Humanities class. He may have read the signals really incorrectly, or just literally not have been able to imagine any other way to produce a sexual scene than to just go for it and see if she said no. He was a freshman, too—awkward, perhaps without a lot of experience, still trying to find his “game.” Those are explanations, of course, not justifications. As parents tell young children who hit when they are angry instead of talking, or who grab toys they want instead of asking, he needed to learn to use his words, or at the very least get more explicit positive feedback from her before putting his mouth on hers—particularly since, moments before, she was not longingly looking into his eyes, but instead, had her back to him.
One young woman said that the man she has sex with “always asks.” But she was startled to realize, in response to our question, that she’d never asked in return. Another woman said that eliciting consent from her boyfriend had occurred to her but “he thinks it’s dumb that I ask.” Young men also point to the inconceivability of men’s consent: “No one’s ever asked me, like, let’s kiss now. Like, that’s weird.” In heterosexual couples, almost no one imagines that men don’t want it. This places great demands upon women to be capable of sexual management, and potentially blames them for being ineffective in this social task if they are assaulted. It also invalidates moments where men don’t want sex.20 Most heterosexual students approach sexual encounters with this implicit understanding about the gendered unilateral responsibility for consent. At best, such a script normalizes men’s sexual aggression. At worst, it lays the groundwork for sexual assault.
For students who use their words, that comfort with talking about sex reflects a sexual project focused on pleasure and emotional intimacy, coupled with an expansive understanding of one’s own sexual citizenship. Lydia, born in Taiwan and educated at an elite English-language boarding school in Southeast Asia, is into kink. She describes herself as “switchy”—comfortable playing both submissive and dominant roles—so that “the best sex that I’ve had is usually when those roles just, like, transition seamlessly, one into the other.” We asked her to recount a specific interaction, and she paused:
With my most recent ex-boyfriend, I think our sex was really good on an erotic level because I use my words a lot, and I’m very picky with my words and so is he. . . . The second time we hooked up after we broke up . . . we did a little bit of switchy—like, switchy power play, but during the middle, we just stopped and I was, like, you’re really beautiful. And he said, “I don’t—I don’t—” I was, like, “You don’t believe me, do you?” And he was, like, “It’s kinda hard to.” So we just spent the next 20 minutes, like—I spent ten minutes just running my hands down his body and telling him, “You’re really beautiful, I really like this part of your body because of this,” and then he did the same for me. And it’s just the seamless interrelation of both intimacy and of, I guess, passion, erotic sex that I really like.
Lydia evaluated her own practices as meeting the spirit of affirmative consent:
Saying consent is implied sounds really, really terrible because then it’s, like, that’s not really affirming the consent. But I think that, after having established a lot of boundaries within our relationship itself I guess we didn’t really have to ask each other if this was okay or if this was okay, we were largely doing things that we’ve done before. So even though it wasn’t in a relationship, neither of us felt like it was necessary to explicitly ask, um, “is this okay” unless it’s something we haven’t done before. And I usually tend to gauge the reaction based on nonverbal, body language cues. For example, if I’m doing something, I say “Does this feel good, is this okay, tell me if it doesn’t.” And I think that when you already have an established level of trust, that that person will tell you if it’s not comfortable. For example, I move my hand down their body, it’s, like, “Is this okay?” Or, “Does this feel good, is there anything else you would like for me to do?” I’m usually quite responsive, and my partner usually tends to ask as well if he’s doing something new. For example, does this feel good. I’ll be, like, yes. I think body language is very important for both of us, so things like moans, squirming, arching of the body. I think they’re very easy signs to tell. Usually if they’re not responding with enthusiasm, I’m just, like, okay, I have to change something up because I don’t—I don’t like mediocre.
Lydia was describing her general approach to sex—what she usually does, how she usually listens, how she “changes something up” if her partner is not responding with enthusiasm. And she contrasted that with a specific sexual interaction where the standard of verbal affirmation was met, but nonetheless the encounter was something she would not choose to repeat. The prior summer, she had had sex with one of her close male friends. They’d talked about sex before, comparing notes, and she knew that he found it a real turn-on to have his head massaged. So she made her move: “It’s like a proposition. I knew that about him beforehand, it was pretty obvious.” But she describes the actual sex as unsatisfying: “He says, like, can I fuck you, I was, like, okay, yes. Then that’s the extent of the way that consent would work. But, I mean, personally it wasn’t too satisfying. I mean, it was good, but because we didn’t talk about, okay, so this is what I like to do and this is the erotic kind of things that turn me on.”
Lydia’s exceptional ease in talking about sex—not just with her partners, but in the interview itself—reflected her underlying comfort with sex itself.21 When we asked her “What is sex for?” she answered immediately, indicating that it was a question she’d previously considered:
Actually, it’s been shifting for a while because when I first started having sex, it turns out I was pretty good at pleasing other people, but, despite having done a lot of research into it, I don’t really know what people can do to please me. So for me, at university, it’s increasingly important for me to be in a relationship where it’s very much sexually mutual . . . and maybe it’s only because, my first couple boyfriends were both virgins, so they didn’t really know what they were doing, and I knew a little bit more than they did just because I would look it up on the internet. And so that left me feeling like, you know, this is great, this is really fun—but what can make it better? So I guess maybe that’s my goal. I mean, obviously I love to please my partner, but I’m also very interested in seeing what I like and what they can do to make me feel good.
Lydia’s life before college may not seem to be predictive of her expansive sense of her own sexual citizenship, or of her evolving sexual project. Her first introduction to information of any kind about sex, when she was about ten, was leafing through a magazine in the dentist’s office and coming upon a description of sexual assault. In sixth grade, her mother’s response to learning that sex education would be taught in her school was “Okay, you can go, but don’t think about it.” Lydia described herself as curious about sex, not discouraged by two middle-school years of “abstinence-only education where it’s, like, it is bad, don’t do it, that is the red zone, do not let people touch you in the red zone.” Then in her third year of middle school, “it suddenly changed. We got this really cool sex educator—this group of university students who present situations in which things like consent would come up.” But largely she is self-taught, in a process that is ongoing and supported by the internet: “I’d look up websites like Scarlet Teen just to see what—see what it’s like. People around me were, like, oh my gosh, sex is so gross, but for me, I’m just, like, no, it seems interesting. I wanna know more.” Lydia lauded the generally “sex-positive” climate of the university—“you have organizations that will hand out condoms, so I think people get the message that sex is okay”—but also noted that existing resources may not reach those who need them the most; in her experience,
people who are likely to go seek out resources regarding sex are people who already know quite a bit and who have a pretty positive idea of sex. And I feel not everybody comes in with the same amount of knowledge, not just of sex and the physiology, but also of consent and of how to make it pleasurable and fun. Maybe it would be weird to have a workshop. How to Have Sex 101 treats everybody like a kindergartner. But at the same time, it would be nice to have a baseline.
It would be a mistake to talk about “the experience” of LGBTQ students, because there is not one singular experience; the experiences of cisgender gay men, for example, can be as different from transgender gay men as they are from cisgender heterosexual men. As we analyzed how LGBTQ students practiced consent, we began to see new possibilities for interventions, and new ways to understand why assaults were happening. In part, these insights emerged because of a puzzle we encountered as we dug into our data. As we’ve noted, research (including our own) has found that LGBTQ students experience far higher rates of assault than heterosexuals and those within the gender binary. Yet when we interviewed this diverse population, we also found that their consent practices generally (although not universally) were much closer to the ideal of affirmative consent. How could it be that people who were more likely to practice affirmative consent were also more likely to experience assault?22
One of our first realizations was that for LGBTQ students, the experience of sexual assault is not limited to sexual situations. It is true more generally, of course, that sexual assaults also occur in nonsexual situations, but we heard many stories of assault experienced by LGBTQ students in heterosexual contexts, where they were hoping to socialize and were not looking for sex. It wasn’t that they were necessarily targeted by straight people, but instead, that what heterosexuals experienced as “normal” sexual activity, LGBTQ students experienced, and were more willing to label, as assault.
This pattern was clearest among queer women of color, like Michaela, who described a freshman-year fraternity party. She wasn’t there to meet men or women. These parties are a big part of the social scene, and she simply wanted to share in her floormates’ experience. What she experienced, however, was something quite different.
It was just like people are grabbing you, touching you, extremely drunk, loud, screaming, and . . . it’s an aggressive atmosphere. . . . And [men are] telling people to drink more when they obviously shouldn’t be . . . telling women to drink more. I was there with a girlfriend and I was felt up ten different ways. . . . Women would have drinks spilled on them, or someone would say, “Take off your shirt!” or something. It’s egregious and it’s laughed off because “Ha, ha, Charlie was drunk,” . . . but it’s very on the edge of like just playing and violent. . . . When people grab me I’m like, “Okay, so you grabbed the wrong person ’cause I’m gonna make the loudest scene. I’m gonna shame you, I’m gonna make sure you remember that like this is not what you need to do.” Usually they’re like, “Oh, oh, I’m sorry.” I’m like, “Sorry about what?” And it becomes this like thing, the situation that grabs the attention of other people, and in nearly all the cases they felt embarrassed and be like, “Ugh. Bye.” And I’m just like, “Oh, I ruined the experience for you? Great. That’s what you did to me. Um, hope you enjoy your party now ’cause everyone knows what you did. . . .” It’s just, it’s like, it’s frustrating not to be able to say no.
What stands out is not the uniqueness of being grabbed in a party space packed with people, but instead, Michaela’s refusal to accept this as “normal.” We offer here a partial explanation of the high rates of assault found among LGBTQ students, which is their greater willingness to label as “nonconsensual” what heterosexual students (women in particular) experience as “normal.” The high rates of assault among LGBTQ people may in part reflect their refusal to accept heterosexual students’ normalization of sexual aggression. Most LGBTQ students arrive on campus having experienced a lifetime of verbal erasure; misgendering, assumptions about heterosexuality, and a social context in which at every turn—the locker room, the bathroom, the prom—they are forced to navigate a world that fails to recognize them for who they are. So it’s understandable that they would be a little quicker to denounce assaults that their peers, sheltered in the gender binary and by heterosexuality, are more willing to endure.
When it came to consent, we also saw significant differences among the practices of LGBTQ students. For some kinds of sex, gay men’s consent practices were similar to their heterosexual peers. Major, a white gay man, echoed themes that we heard from straight men, who typically thought of consent as happening through informal rather than explicit communication. When asked about his consent practices, Major told us that it was “much more kind of like body language of—you know, you can tell when someone’s, if someone’s okay with something or if they feel very uncomfortable with it.” Yet such implicit consent had limits. Major noted that this kind of “body language” consent did not extend to all sexual practices, particularly when he and his partner had anal sex, “Especially during actual anal penetration and all, I think that that [consent]’s usually something that um—there’s a lot of checking like, you know, ‘Are you okay? . . . ’ Yeah, I just think that’s part of the deal and even—actually I would even say if it’s not the first few times but like any time I’m doing that [anal sex] with someone, [there] is usually a lot of checking, like. ‘Is this okay?’”
Some of this was practical—negotiating who would be the “top” and who would “bottom,” or, making sure that the person bottoming wasn’t concerned about their anal cavity having fecal matter. But it also had to do with not wanting to cause a partner physical pain. Jacob, an Asian bisexual man, reflected on the kindness of the first man with whom he had anal sex. “It kind of hurt. I bottomed, and so of course I hurt in the beginning. But he was understanding, and so eventually it was pleasurable. . . .” As we listened to stories like this, it became clear that the lack of sexual scripts and prescribed modes of interacting meant that consent often had to be more intentional. In part this reflects the lack of cultural representations of sexual intimacy for these students; only in the past decade, and very tentatively, have mainstream American films and television shows begun to depict lesbian, gay, or bisexual adolescent romance. And even those generally shy away from characters that do not fit neatly into the gender binary. There are sex education curricula that are LGBTQ-inclusive, but every single queer or trans student we talked to said the sex education they received was “not applicable” to their sex lives. The unintended consequences of this denial of their sexual citizenship is that, for trans and queer students in particular, affirmative consent becomes the framework for their improvisation. As one genderqueer student described their first sexual experience with their current partner, “Yeah, it was like, ‘I’m not sure what’s going on here, but—’ I was like, ‘I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to be doing’ . . . ’cause we knew that we hadn’t had sex—like a same-sex relationship before. . . . So I was like, ‘I don’t know but we can try.’” Explicit communication was an almost necessary feature of sexual interactions.
We didn’t find evidence that this was driven by identity; instead, the particular experiences of having sex really mattered. So bisexual and queer-identifying women who only had experienced heterosexual sexual contact tended to describe their consent practices in ways that were very similar to heterosexual women. But those who had had non-heteronormative sex, like Clarice, a bisexual woman we interviewed, described fundamentally different consent practices.
Clarice noted that when she had sex with other bisexual women, or lesbians or queer people, she had to talk to them about what they wanted. “It’s not gonna be like butch/femme or anything . . . it’s just a little bit blurry.” And once she started engaging in these kinds of discussions with her partners—not relying on gendered sexual scripts—her sexual practices with cisgender men also began to change.
In one encounter . . . he was really vague. He was like, “Oh, is it cool if I take my shirt off?” and I was like, “Do you wanna have sex?” [Laughs] I was just like, “I don’t like really vagueness with sex” . . . and he was like, “Yeah.” ’Cause I personally think when you’re really direct, it spurs self-confidence when someone says, “Yes, I’m attracted to you. I want to have sex with you.” That’s great, and so that’s how I view it, and so whether—if I was asking for consent, I would say “Do you wanna have sex?”
This provides some evidence that practicing consent matters. Actions aren’t just the result of deliberate decisions; they are shaped by habits that we rely and fall back upon.23 In analyzing queer experiences, we began to see important things about the heterosexual experience, particularly the ways in which heterosexual sexual scripts may create habits of consent that rely considerably on nonverbal communication. But for those who can’t rely on such scripts—who have gay, lesbian, or queer sex that requires them to communicate desire in more explicit terms—such habits are either never developed, or may become unsettled. We found that this would spill over into how bisexual and queer people had heterosexual sex. Learning about consent is not enough; it’s something people have to experience and practice. These insights are critical for potential interventions that seek to promote affirmative consent.
Sloan never worried about belonging at Columbia; she answered the questions about the transition to college by talking about how easy it was for her, given her previous schooling, and the fact that her parents both went to college, as did everyone else in her family. For other students, regardless of what they might have known or not known about sex, their consent practices reflected their feelings of precariousness at college—not so much whether they had a right to have sex as whether they had a right to be at Columbia at all.24 Malachi, a Black student and a senior, talked about the hard academic adjustment to Columbia and how lucky he felt to be there. Throughout the story of his time at Columbia, he repeatedly conveyed a feeling of being on the margins, of teachers who “make snarky comments” about student athletes, of a core curriculum that lacks “representation of different minority groups,” of finding the academic adjustment grueling: “Even being pretty near the top of class in high school . . . when I got here, I would take something that was beginner level, like calc for example, and I sat in there and it was like, ‘I know nothing.’ And this was apparently stuff that everybody else around me learned in high school.” And yet he reveled in what he saw as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity . . . to get this level of education”: “People here are geniuses. . . . It was the best part of being here, hearing all this stuff that I’ve never heard before—how are we the same age and you know all this stuff that I never even knew existed?” Freshman fall he considered leaving (something he never told his parents), but ultimately he talked himself out of it. This was his big break, being in the Ivy League, “and I feel like a lot of people who may be a lot smarter than I am didn’t get that break. So I just felt bad, like I took somebody’s spot getting in here, and then I’m going to give it up?”
Part of his settling-in process involved finding spaces where he’d be welcome and supported; he found the church that was most like the one he’d grown up in, and made some friends through the church. Malachi would have preferred to join a Black fraternity, but when he was a freshman there wasn’t one on campus, and so he rushed the fraternity that had “the people I got along with most, because they were more laid back and not always drunk and stuff.” Finding his way also involved leaving spaces where he didn’t feel welcome.25 He recounts transferring out of a class “because the professor literally said when we walked in, ‘Oh, you’re football players, this is going to be a great semester’ [said mockingly]. And I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m not staying in this class at all.’” And he did what he could to make the spaces he was in better. Freshman fall, there was conflict in the room next door, where a “really wealthy, obnoxious kid,” who would be so drunk every Saturday night that “it would be not even ten o’clock yet and this guy was throwing up in the bathroom,” shared a room with a “really quiet, computer science guy.” When Computer Science Kid went home to visit his family in Long Island, Wealthy Obnoxious Kid “would let people come into the room and sleep on his bed and use his stuff.” And so eventually Malachi and his roommate “were like, this is dumb. We told him, ‘If you do it again, one, we’re going to tell the guy. And two, we’re going to have problems.’ And we were bigger, so we did kind of intimidate him. But I mean, it was for a good reason.” Like many other (although not all) Black college students and students from less wealthy backgrounds, Malachi didn’t start drinking until he was 21. He didn’t have a fake ID, knew that acquiring one was against the law, and was not willing to risk the consequences of an unnecessary encounter with law enforcement. Getting really drunk wasn’t a part of his college project, and it wasn’t something he grew up thinking was an essential part of the college experience.
Malachi’s consent practices revealed that unlike other students he didn’t believe himself to be entitled to other people’s bodies. But they also revealed a sense of being on thin ice, always.26 Drunk hookups—“you meet them that night, and then have sex with them that night”—are “completely a no” for him. With the few hookups he had before he met the girl he was then dating, “whenever we were about to get to that point, I always personally asked, like, ‘You sure you want to do this?’ I always asked that question, just for my personal satisfaction. . . . I always just feel that it’s good to make sure that they want to have it.” He explains this in relation to “the entire stigma of being a Black male. And I know that a lot of times, if situations were to happen, then if one person says something, that I did something, even if I know it’s not true, because I’m Black they’re probably going to believe them, like if it was a white girl, or if it was somebody that just wasn’t Black. I never had that concern with Black women.”
Carl, another Black senior, echoed Malachi’s caution about the racialized risk of false accusations, with an additional layer of sadness and fear that reminds us just how much many students are managing. He doesn’t drink, and was so worried about what others thought of him that he spent a good fifteen minutes with us after the formal interview ended, probing for how his answers compared with his peers’.27 Even during the interview, he stopped repeatedly to ask how his answers measured up. When we asked why he didn’t drink, he parroted back the question, laughing: “People ask, ‘Why don’t you drink? Why don’t you drink? Is it for athletics?’ I’m like, no. ‘Is it for religion?’ I’m like, no”:
There are two answers. There’s my political, easy, so I don’t have to talk about it too much, bullshit answer. I mean, it’s like a real answer, but the easy answer is I always want to be accountable for the person I’m being. I never want to be in a room and say it was the alcohol. The guy you get in this place is the same guy you get in the classroom or at the party.
This seemed practiced: not quite false, but not quite true. He resumed.
The honest answer is that my dad died when I was six, and I don’t really know what kind of guy he wanted me to be. And I think that in all my actions, I’m trying to be worthy of his memory. I genuinely don’t know if he wanted me to be a Columbia Lion, or a football player, or a politics major, but I do these things with the hope that it lives up to some essence of worthiness.
Carl was measuring himself by the memory of his father, but what drove him was not just personal; he felt the weight of representation as well—the responsibility to be “the talented tenth.”28 “I think being on this campus, in a place that has not always been welcoming or home to Black people—people of color, really—I think you spit in the face of convention every day you are here and continuing to thrive.”
Carl had caught our attention as he moved through the crowd at a Black Students Organization party; many women followed him with their eyes. He was handsome, and clearly desired. He admitted, “Uh, I go on a lot of dates.” And he described himself, as others might see him, as a guy who is “someone who’s always sober but having more fun than you”—but that is also a meticulously curated self, which he described as rejecting the “Clarence Thomas future” that Columbia made possible for him, “to fall into this category of transcending your Blackness.” He admitted that the perception of his public commitment to only dating Black women gave him a certain social advantage, signaling to these women that they were not competing with “Becky, who they’ll never be in a million years,” that “I value my Blackness, but I also value the Blackness in you.” He segued from the subject of interracial dating to the question of his own legacy—to how odd it feels, knowing that just by graduating from Columbia, he had positively affected the life chances of an entirely imaginary, as yet unconceived child. He recalled his grandparents, who “used to pick cotton. . . . That’s all their parents knew. . . . I am the product of a lot of people’s work. . . . I am here only by the grace of God.” His Columbia education was the product of generations of striving. “I really try to conceptualize myself as one part of a larger story.” Wealthier students occasionally expressed gratitude for all that their families had provided, but reflected less on themselves as part of a “larger story.” For Carl, that larger story is reflected in his everyday social choices, including his preferred party spaces: “I really like spaces that are sort of tailored to dancing, and especially Black people, because drinking is not the event.”
Carl’s consent practices—like Malachi’s, Rosa’s, and Sloan’s—are inseparable from his broader college story. An explicit dimension of this is about alcohol and risk “because I don’t have to think about, like, okay, is she drunk right now?. . . . So if she’s been here for two hours it means that, like, whatever decision she’s making, it’s because she really wants to hang out with me.” We stopped him: “Is that a risk you’re really concerned about?,” to which he responded, “Yeah, I really really really really worry about that.” Four “reallys.” He continued: “Consent matters so much, like, it really does matter and I would hate for a second for you to not, A, enjoy yourself, so like we’re gonna focus on you tonight, or that B, um, for you to have any regrets, like, for you to think even twice about this interaction.” Carl noted that “I have a lot to lose as a man,” and his consent practices reflect that fear: “I have girls say to me, like, ‘Please stop asking so many questions,’ and, like, that’s great but even then I’m, like, ‘No no no, that doesn’t work for me.’ You say—it doesn’t matter what you say in this moment, it doesn’t really matter, when you leave this room, in twenty-four hours, you could say something very different. And I don’t control the narrative.”
Carl told a story that gave a sense of just how fearful he was. A woman he met at a party asked if she could go back to his room with him. He said okay, but “suspected she might not be as sober as possible.” So he walked around with her for forty-five minutes, and then once they went up to his room, they sat and talked for another forty-five minutes. And then,
She still wanted to hang out and then we hooked up, but afterwards I recorded her saying—she didn’t know this, because New York is a “one-party” state—but I recorded “Okay, like, you enjoyed yourself, you had a good time, this was fun, you were okay with this,” and she went “Yeah, it was great,” and that—this is like really fucked up, because I was like, that helped me, just really allowed me to feel a lot more comfortable the moment she left, I at least had some evidence for my own conscience.
It was astonishing to us just how prepared he was for this moment. He knew New York’s “one-party” rules on recording conversations—that he didn’t need her permission. Clearly he’d done his homework. Think about that: the kind of fear, concern, and deliberation that would lead a student to look up the rules for recording conversations.
The fear was not limited to Black men; almost every young man we spoke with, regardless of race, revealed an earnest desire to do consent right, and a real concern about doing it wrong. Of course men are scared: they learn that they are responsible for eliciting consent, and such consent can’t happen when people are drunk, and doesn’t count unless it’s explicitly verbally affirmed. It makes sense that prevention messages target men, as they’re the ones committing the vast majority of assaults, and yet emphasizing men’s responsibility, absent a broader critical conversation about gender and power, inadvertently casts them as the sexual aggressors and women as the blockers. Men know that when two drunk people have sex, it’s somehow supposed to be their responsibility that no one gets harmed. And yet many heterosexual students—especially drunk white ones—do not verbally communicate consent.
Why is drunk heterosexual assault the man’s “fault”? If both parties are too drunk to consent, why do we typically view the man as responsible when an assault occurs? The underlying logic is that the person who causes harm is the person responsible. In this sense, drunk assault is not that different from most other sexual assaults—one person thinks they’re having a sexual encounter, and the other person experiences that encounter as assault. The responsibility lies with the person who causes, rather than experiences, the harm, whether they’re drunk or sober. Men are more likely to cause harm during heterosexual sex, in part because of greater power, and in part because of sexual scripts. While men don’t always have more power within sexual encounters, social arrangements produce heterosexual dyads in which men tend to be older and control space, and to have been socialized to be attentive to their own sexual desires. They are also often larger and physically stronger. On top of that, gendered sexual scripts teach men to do their “gendered job” by trying to advance sexual contact. In drunken scenarios, doing this job puts them at risk of committing assault, because they’re the ones advancing their agenda, in a context where they don’t have their full cognitive capacity, where the other person may not have the capacity to fully express how they’re feeling, and where men who think of themselves as good people and not assaulters may not recognize the power disparities that make it hard for women to voice their wishes.
Research suggests that men massively overestimate the frequency with which false accusations are made, but that fear is an important part of men’s lived experience of consent on campus.29 And in a context where accusations of sexual assault can, as both men and women told us, “ruin your life,” the fear is understandable. This intense fear of the consequences of doing consent wrong represents the emergence of a shared understanding that consensual sex is important. Fear might signal a desire to do better, but it is not a prevention approach. Engaging competently in consensual sex requires both articulating that as a goal—which most of the students we spoke with had done—and then building the skills to do so.
We cannot know what the man who put his hand down Sloan’s pants while she was asleep was thinking—but it seems unlikely that he would have done that if he’d come upon her asleep in the library, rather than on his couch. Sexual geography is part of what produces vulnerability. Since a great deal of sex happens in dorm rooms, students who feel unable to ask or are not interested in asking interpret being in a sexualized space as consent to sex of some kind. Sexual projects shape the kind of sex that students seek out, and the way that they see their partners—as a warm body, the next number, or a person they care about. The heavy reliance on acutely gendered sexual scripts among heterosexual students—even those with intimacy-oriented sexual projects—lends credence to the notion that a woman’s consent can consist of not saying no. For some students, the fact that all of this is navigated while they are intoxicated adds to the fundamental impossibility of clearly communicating with one another; the whole point of getting drunk is to blow off steam and do stupid things that you might not feel comfortable doing if you weren’t drunk. Demanding that both parties secure consent does not “de-gender” consent, because sex still happens within a set of power relations which are often gendered. But men don’t always have more power than women, not all sex is heterosexual, and there’s lots of power that isn’t about gender. “Mutual consent” doesn’t seek to pretend that power doesn’t exist; in fact, it requires its recognition.
Undergirding all of this is sexual citizenship: the recognition of one’s own right to sexual self-determination, and an equivalent right in others. The feeling of a right to say yes, to desire sex, is fundamental to being meaningfully able to say no. Consent as a verbal transaction between two individuals is meaningless when either arrives at a sexual interaction with deep, culturally imposed beliefs about others’ right to access their body; or when a student’s language or understanding of sex is so impoverished that they don’t even know what they want. Many young people—men and women both—had come of age in contexts that failed to promote their development as sexual citizens, or as people with respect for the citizenship of others. Examples include the aside, in an undergraduate’s story about having sex, that she felt that it would have been rude to say no, or, as we heard frequently, a woman giving a man a blow job “just to get out of there,” when she does not want to have penile-vaginal intercourse, or perhaps even spend more time with a man.
Sex that isn’t assault, but that involves treating the other person like an object, or is characterized by a mutual acceptance of a one-way flow of pleasure, trains young people to overlook other’s sexual citizenship. This isn’t assault, but it helps pave the way, culturally and interpersonally, for assault. But to see this even more starkly, we turn to the accounts of people who, either by their own admission or in the eyes of others, have committed assaults.