This is just to say

[ailbhe]

I have been reading the post about rape and consent and stuff and all the comments, and thinking about the times in my own past when I failed to make consent clear by buying into the cultural structure which has seduction as a base and by ignoring my own involuntary "No" responses as "one of those involuntary things" rather than as "oh, look, part of me said no."

And then there were the times when I cajoled, seduced or persuaded, my own self.

I think I am going to work harder to make the "enthusiastic collaboration" model of consent the default. It will make a lot of people's sex lives simpler and a whole lot more fun.

Sometimes I think I could make a bigger difference if I were raising boys.

Comments

[supermouse]

I think it'll make a big difference to the two girls you raise who won't be raised on a model of 'no means yes'.

I wish part of my sex education had been 'boys who keep pushing you to say yes are being bad'. My teen years would have been so very different. My models of consent were built on my teenage peers' models of consent and on magazines and films and so on. Sex education taught me about contraception and AIDS but discussion of consent was missed out entirely.