based on a presentation for Unsettling Knowledges about Gendered and Sexual Violence Symposium, University of Cape Town, 10 November 2021
In this paper, I will be discussing consent as a concept and its implications on sexual violence research. In my presentation, I will be drawing on what I learned from my Master’s research project, which focused on Black women’s experiences of sexual consent, sex and sexual violence. In my fieldwork, I interviewed eight Black women, aged between 19 and 36 at Wits University. In addition to sex and sexual violence, the interviews covered issues such as gender, sexuality and romantic relationships. This presentation is based on the literature review and methodology sections of my thesis (see references).
Motivation
My focus on sexual consent was inspired by a constructive disagreement I had with something Professor Pumla Gqola said. In 2016, I attended a talk she gave about rape culture, where she said,
“We need to stop talking of ‘consensual sex’. It has to be agreed to and wanted in order to be sex….’Consensual sex’ suggests that there are two types of sex: consensual and non-consensual.” (5 August 2016)
When I conducted my literature review for my research, I came to understand where this line of thinking came from. One of the important political moves feminists have made in sexual violence research and activism is to challenge the idea that rape is a form of sex. This emphasis of a separation between sex and sexual violence occurs in a context where experiences of sexual violence are often mischaracterized as undesirable but still permissible experiences of “inappropriate” sex (Gqola, 2015, p.144). The idea that rape is a form of sex is used to invalidate people’s experiences of rape and contributes to victim blaming.
Despite understanding this, my discomfort remained. I didn’t believe there distinction between sex and rape could be so easily made. In my research, I found scholar Lynn Phillips (2000), best articulated the reasons behind my discomfort, writing,
“Very often, those who advocate for women’s sexual safety and equality are required to defend sharp lines and make unambiguous arguments—such as “No means no” and “Rape isn’t about sex, it’s about violence”—in order to debunk victim blaming myths and defend women’s rights and safety. “(p. 14)
Phillips writes that whilst these types of clear-cut statements are important in discussions about violence, women’s experience tend to “defy the very straightforward arguments many feminists have worked so hard to promote” (2000, p.14).
In her research, where she analyses young women’s hetero-sexual relationships, Phillips found that for many of her research participants, “rape is about sex, as well as about violence” (emphasis hers) (2000, p.14). Given this, I found, in order to understand people’s experiences of sexual violence, it could be useful to let go of the distinction often made between sex and sexual violence.
Consent – distinguishing between sex and sexual violence
There are several ways in which consent features in sexual violence research. In one prominent school of thought, consent is the distinguishing factor between, sex and sexual violence. This extends to how we define sexual offences within the law.
Problems with the consent concept
The difficulty I found in my literature review is that consent, as a concept, presents several problems if adopted in within research and the law. The main problem is that while many scholars rely on consent to distinguish between sex and sexual violence, there is no consensus on how to define consent.
In the most comprehensive account of this, Humphreys et al (2016) identified 3 ways of defining consent:
- The first is as an internal state of willingness.
- The second is as an act of explicit agreement to something
- The third defines consent as behaviour that someone else interprets as willingness (Humphreys et al, 2016, p. 462).
With each of these, the researchers identified shortcomings. With the first definition, for instance, a huge problem is that “others’ internal states are private and unknowable”(Humphreys et al, 2016). This definition would complicate attempts to create legislation around sexual offences, because as the authors note, legislation needs to “be framed around behaviour” (2016, p. 462). In the second definition of consent, a key limitation is that many people prefer to use nonverbal cues during sexual interactions and further, what counts as “explicit agreement” can be debated (Beres, 2014; Humphreys et al, 2016: Obioha & Sunday, 2016). With the third definition, the obvious problem and danger which emerges is that interpretation can be extremely unreliable (Humphreys et al., 2016, p. 463).
Enthusiastic consent
One development within this discourse has been to advocate for enthusiastic consent – a version of consent where only an enthusiastic yes counts as consent. This was intended to broaden the discussion on rape beyond the slogan “No means no and in doing so, to take emphasis away from whether or how rape victims may have resisted. Such a model of consent is important in that it goes against the idea that a legitimate “rape victim is one who puts up the utmost resistance.” (Mills, 2010). It takes into consideration agreement made under the influence of pressure or coercion.
Although this model has enriched the literature, it also has definitional issues: for instance, it is unclear how much coercion or duress is “required to render consent” illegitimate (Humphreys et al, 2016). This complicates the potential for enthusiastic consent to be used in legislation because some forms of sexual coercion can be extremely subtle.
Social norms vs Legal definitions
Another finding in previous research was that legal definitions differed from how people understood their experiences. So while people might understand consent as “a minimum standard for acceptable or non-criminal sex”, they tend to have a much more complex understanding about how willingness to have sex is expressed and communicated (Beres, 2014, p. 382). In addition, experiences of sexual coercion by intimate partners are often normalized and not viewed as criminal, whilst coercion by strangers or non-intimate partners is “more likely to be considered rape” (Buikema et al, 2016, p. 142). This may mean that legal definitions defining sexual offences may not necessarily be socially agreed upon or reflect how individuals interpret consent (Buikema et al 2016, p. 146). Thus, while legal definitions of sexual violence are powerful, they are still these limited.
The conflation of desire and consent
As I read further, I came to another problem with consent as a concept: the assumption that consent – which will for the rest of the discussion be defined as agreement to sex – always correlates neatly with desire for sex. This revealed a binary view, where sex is seen “as either wanted or unwanted” (Humphreys et al. 2016, p. 463). As Humphreys et al argued, a binary view of sex is flawed in that it does not leave room for ambivalence, or for situation where consent is “dependent/contingent on something” ( 2016, p. 464). Going deeper into this issue, researchers Muehlenhard and Peterson suggest that it is useful to separate desire/wanting a sex act from consenting to that act (2007, p. 73). In this, they highlight that using the binary view of consent and sex limits our research. ‘
From these authors, I learned that within what they call the “wanting-consenting conflation, the assumption is that all consensual sex is presumed to be desired, eliminating the possibility that sex which is agreed to/consented to, could be unwanted. It also leaves out the possibility of nonconsensual sex being wanted, which researchers have found to be congruent with some people’s experiences. These ideas open up the possibility of reframing how we understand people’s experiences of sex and sexual violence. Such scholarship spoke to my initial discomfort with Gqola’s argument that consensual sex or ‘sex’, by definition, is always wanted/desired.
Unwanted, consensual sex or in Gavey’s theory, unjust sex
I focused on undoing this assumption/argument through my research design. In my interviews, I asked participants the question “Have you ever consented to sex you did not want?”
This framing borrowed from other researchers, such as the authors mentioned above as well as Nicola Gavey, Ann Cahill and Robin West. Gavey, for instance, had done prior research where she interviewed women about unwanted, consensual sex, and coined such experiences “unjust sex”. For Gavey, unjust sex could contain a range of experiences, including:
“situations in which a man applied pressure that fell short of actual or threatened physical force, but which the woman felt unable to resist, as well as encounters where a man was rough and brutish, and the woman described letting sex happen because she felt unable to stop it. They also include stories of situations where a male partner was not directly coercive at all, but where the woman nevertheless found herself going along with sex that was neither desired nor enjoyed because she did not feel it was her right to stop it or because she did not know how to refuse.” (Gavey, 2005, p. 136 in Cahill, 2014).
Following Gavey’s research findings, what emerged from my research interviews pointed to a spectrum of experiences, all of which were unwanted, consensual (agreed to) sex. In my participant’s words, they described these experiences differently, some of them referring to the experiences as sex, coerced sex, and on fewer occasions, sexual assault and rape. Framing my questions the way I did took into account that focusing only on the labels “rape” or “sexual assault” may lead to the exclusion of some experiences which had harmed the women I spoke to. Using the concept of ‘unwanted sex’ was useful in that it could be used to describe both consensual and nonconsensual experiences.
Consistent with the theories I read about ‘the wanted-consenting’ conflation, my research interviews revealed that there are multiple elements of desire at play when it comes to sex, and sometimes those desires are incongruent or varying (Muehlenhard and Peterson, 2007, p. 73). (For more on this, refer to the section of my research report titled ‘Catching Feels’). Given this, my research supported scholars who insisted that consent/agreement and desire for sex should be theorized “as distinct concepts that sometimes correspond to each other but sometimes do not” (Humphreys et al. 2016, p. 463).
In addition, part of my methodology was to avoid seeking out to label my research participants’ experiences, as has been done by other researchers. Several of the sources I consulted in my research process noted how researchers had imposed the term ‘unacknowledged rape victims’ onto research participants. This term is used to refer to anyone who describes having experienced rape according to legal definitions, but does not describe the experience using that phrase. In ‘unacknowledged rape victim’ narratives within rape research, women who do not label their experience as rape have been perceived as victim blaming themselves or not understanding rape definitions (Harris, 2011). This approach has been criticised for being condescending, and privileging the perspective of the researcher over the people who were interviewed (Johnstone, 2016, p.276). Thus, in allowing participants to define their own experiences, and sitting with the discomfort that may exist when someone describes having experienced unwanted sex, my research led me to understand better how people make sense of their own experiences.
Conclusion
Consent models can account for some harmful sexual experiences, but due to the way consent models conflate desire for sex and agreement to sex, there are some experiences which are consensual but unwanted, which go under the radar in our discussions of sex and sexual violence. Thus, continuing to rely on consent models to understand sexual violence will likely only reinforce the conflation of harmless sexual interactions with consensual sexual experiences.
Overall, this moving away from the idea that consensual sex is always wanted made room for ambiguous experiences – those falling in the in-between space of what is considered rape and what is considered sex – to be documented. It allowed me to turn to instances of confusion and ambiguity as sites of knowledge, rather than relying on binary ideas s of sex and sexual violence.
See my references below. Feel free to contact me if you’d like access to the journal articles.
Beres, M., 2014. Rethinking the concept of consent for anti-sexual violence activism and education. Feminism and Psychology, 24(3), pp. 373-389.
Buikema, R., Cooper, D. & Stern, E., 2016. South African women’s conceptualizations of and responses to sexual coercion in relation to hegemonic masculinities. Global public health, 11(1), pp. 135-152.
Chengeta, G., 2018. An exploration of black women students’ sexual experiences (Master’s dissertation). https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/26500
Cahill, A. J., 2014. Recognition, Desire, and Unjust Sex. Hypatia, 29(2), pp. 303-320.
Cahill, A.J., 2016. Unjust Sex vs Rape. Hypatia, 31 (4), pp.746-761.
Gavey, N., 1999. I wasn’t raped, but….. In: S. Lamb, ed. New Versions of Victims: Feminist Struggle with the Concept. New York: NYU Press, pp. 57-81.
Gavey, N., 2005. Just sex?: The cultural scaffolding of rape. 1 ed. Brighton: Routledge.
Gqola, P., 2015. Rape: A South African Nightmare. 1 ed. Johannesburg: MF Books.
Gqola, P., 2016. Rape is violence, not a form of sex. Grahamstown: #WeBelieveYou campaign, Rhodes University.
Harris, K. L., 2011. The Next Problem With No Name: The Politics and Pragmatics of the Word Rape. Women’s Studies in Communication, 34(1), pp. 42-63.
Humphreys, T. P., Jozkowski, K. N., Muelenhard, C. L. & Peterson, Z. D., 2016. The complexities of sexual consent among college students: a conceptual and empirical review. The journal of sex research, 53(4-5), pp. 457-487.
Johnstone, D. J., 2016. A listening guide analysis of women’s experiencs of uncknowledged rape. Psychology of women quarterly, 40(2), pp. 275-289.
Mills, S., 2010. Consent and Coercion in the Law of Rape in South Africa. Canadian Woman Studies, 28(1), pp. 81-89.
Muehlenhard, C. & Peterson, Z., 2007. Conceptualizing the“Wantedness” of Women’s Consensual and Nonconsensual Sexual Experiences: Implications for How Women Label Their Experiences With Rape. Journal of Sex Research, 44(1), pp. 72-88.
Obioha, E. E & Sunday, E. A. , 2016. Partner communication and decision-making regarding sexual issues among students in a South African University. Corvinus Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 7(2), pp. 103-124.
Phillips, L., 2000. Flirting with Danger: Young women’s reflections on sexuality. 1 ed. New York : New York University Press.
West, R., 2002. The Harms Of Consensual Sex. In: The Philosophy of Sex: Contemporary Readings. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 317-322.
gorata chengeta 