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Sexual Consent: Exploring the Personal

Writing about sexual consent is never easy. Enthusiastic and articulated consent, of course, is clear, as is enthusiastic and articulated refusal. Between those two ends of the spectrum though, lie an entire range of possibilities which run through many shades of grey, and which touch the legal, political, religious, social, and personal spheres.

It is precisely because those spheres exist, and because they intersect, that any academic account of sexual consent must necessarily be nuanced, to satisfy the demands of a multitude of disciplines, some of which may be entirely inconsistent with each other. And therein lies one of the greatest challenges which those people required to deal with consent, from a disinterested position, face: to find a way in which to reconcile a number of often divergent theories on consent, ranging from those addressing personal healing (if need be) to the legal attribution of culpability (if so required).

Personal accounts of consent to sexual activity, though, do not suffer from that particular restriction: all they need to do to be accurate is to remain honest to themselves. While this requirement, in itself, sounds like little enough, once unravelled, even at the most superficial level, it emerges that such honesty is anything but simple, even if only to oneself. It relies not only on lived experience, memory and emotion — all tricky in themselves — but also on social conditioning and religious teaching.


Each person's story is a distinctly individual story, with there being no certainty that one person’s perception of the grant of consent under a particular set of circumstances being the same as that of another person. The safest course of action is, obviously, to ensure that one always obtains explicit consent from one's partner. Unfortunately, though, explicit consent may not always be enough. The grant, even of explicit consent, could easily be dependent on underlying conditions which find their foundation in one’s upbringing and religious beliefs.

Consent obtained within the confines of a committed relationship may, for example, be entirely dependent on the relationship in fact being a committed one, and any breakdown of such the underlying condition could easily vitiate the perception of granted consent having any legitimacy at all, in the mind of grantor. And once the non-personal is applied to the personal, depending on the circumstances, (and the century!), such a change in perception would, in all probability, either be seen as morning-after regret, or a culpable breach of promise.

Coming back to the personal though: underlying conditions often dictate whether or not consent is granted at all. And for better or for worse, conditions relating to underlying conditions such as commitment and religious sanction (possibly through marriage) invariably involve a host of factors: among others, duty, the desire to please, submission, fidelity — unsurprisingly, all drawn from religion and upbringing. And it is all too easy for these factors to result in the (possibly unintentional) application of coercion.

A perceived or communicated or even simply possible failure to honour either duty or fidelity may all too easily result in the grant of consent solely on the basis of wanting to avert such failure. And should the relevant underlying condition itself be negated, it necessarily negates the consent granted consequent to it. What is left, then, is nothing but sexual activity without legitimate consent, although possibly with willingness.

Sex without legitimacy, unsanctified by commitment or love or sacrament, is shunned by both religion and polite society. Sex without legitimacy belongs to worlds not spoken of in polite drawing rooms. And consent obtained in relation to it is easily questioned in the mind of the grantor especially in cases where the illegitimacy was unclear at the time of the grant.

Each person’s story is different. Perceptions vary wildly. And there is is no such thing as unquestionable consent in questionable circumstances.


Also see: The Validity of Advance Sexual Consent