Throughout the mid-eighties, a popular sexual assault campaign aimed to clarify the definition of sexual consent with the tagline “No means no.” Today, that tagline has been extended from “No means no” to include “Drunk means no, silence means no, and only yes means yes.”
When I first noticed these posters around campus, I was stunned, and brought up the issue with a female friend who felt the same way. She told me she can’t say for certain she’s ever expressly said “yes” to someone before engaging in any sexual activity, or that she had ever even expressly been asked to consent to sex. We both recalled having been intoxicated and then becoming involved sexually with other people. My friend even confided in me about moments, after having been with her partner for a long time, when she was silent throughout the sexual act, although she feels she was nonetheless consenting.
We were concerned about the implications the information on this poster had for both of us. But being male, I was specifically concerned about the implications for men, since the poster is clearly aimed at women: my female friend found the poster in numerous women’s washrooms, when I couldn’t find any in the men’s rooms on campus. I decided to investigate what’s really behind its message.
U of T assault counsellor Cheryl Champagne said that the program is aimed mainly at incoming first-year students who are particularly at risk of sexual assault, and that it is meant, in part, to make people talk more openly about sex. Nonetheless, I couldn’t imagine anyone literally asking a partner to say “yes” before engaging in sexual activity.
Legally, “consent” means “the voluntary agreement…to engage in any sexual activity.” In practice, this means that consent must be active, and that without this active consent, any sexual act is rape. The assumption is that silence can mean a million different things: fear, bewilderment, bad intentions, or confusion.
A person not saying “no” doesn’t mean s/he is saying “yes.” They might, for instance, be too uncomfortable or scared to speak up. They might be figuring out how to get out of the room. They could be completely trashed and not know what’s going on. But they might be just fine.
Often things seem to just happen and aren’t planned every step of the way; some would even argue that this is the beauty of the sexual experience. Are people who engage in this kind of sex committing rape? I now understood much more of the reasoning behind this campaign. Yet, I still can’t wholly agree with it.
What if you kiss someone, and subequently realize that person didn’t want to kiss you. Is this sexual assault? Under the law, all sexual activity must be expressly consented to. “All” sexual activity explicitly includes kissing and petting.
The further problem with this law is that it doesn’t emphasize the responsibility of women when it comes to controlling their alcohol consumption. It surely should be their responsibility to know their limits, and to respect them.
It may seem as if, by pulling this issue apart so deliberately, I am undermining the seriousness of such an important issue. I think what I’m doing is very important to accomplishing just the opposite: posters such as these simplify this topic to such an extreme that their audience may not understand or accept their full message. And that is not the best way to get people to be open about sex.
