Sex For Pleasure - And The Question Of Consent

I’ve never consented to sex. Well, maybe once, but for the most part – no. My consent was not needed or obtained.

I’ve never had sex forced on me either, though.
Let me explain.
To consent means to ‘to give permission’; ‘comply’; ‘yield’; or ‘agree’. The term suggests an acceptance of another person’s idea, desire or plan – a passive, not an active, role in the proceedings. Consent is equal to “alright” not “yes please”, and there is a fundamental difference between agreeing to something and wanting it.
I may consent to let you use my mobile or give you a loan of a cardigan, an umbrella or a book; I might consent to giving you twenty quid or even a hundred, if you ask nicely. I don’t want to do any of these things, but sure, I might agree to them; but I would never agree to have sex without wanting it.
Sex education places great emphasis on consent, and as I have written countless times, consent is a fundamental minimum in every sexual experience, whether it is a romantic evening for two or an orgy with multiple people.
However, there are some problems with this model of teaching young people about sex as there is a general, if unspoken, assumption it will be a man who looks for consent and a woman who gives or refuses it. I’m going to call this the ‘consent model’ and according to it, men are active, the pursuers or aggressors; women are passive, accommodating or denying male sexual lust. Where the hell is female desire in this equation? It’s absent, missing or simply unimportant.
I asked a number of female friends if they thought this active male/passive female dichotomy played out in their own lives.
Almost all the women I spoke to said that, while they may be passive relative to men, they did not see this as a position of powerlessness or that it negated their own desires. As Vivienne, 34, said, “On the whole I’ve found myself to be a more sexual being than most of the men I’ve known.”
Most religions and many cultures have sought to control or deny the existence of female sexual desire. Honour killings, female genital mutilation, the shaming of ‘fallen’ women – all these serve to keep women sexually subjugated. They may not be pressing issues here in Ireland, but I would argue that the ‘consent model’, which informs our current understanding of sexual relations, largely ignores the existence of female sexual desire and this has serious consequences for both women and men.
For one, it bears little relation to the real world; nor does it square with most people’s personal experiences of sex. I hate to state the bleeding obvious, but, as anyone who has had experience with women will know, most women have sex because they want to, because of their own desires, needs and lusts.
Yes, on occasion a woman may sleep with a man because she is servicing his desire not her own, but the reverse can also be true – a man may have sex with a woman when he would rather not, perhaps in part because men are not taught how to say no. But mostly sex happens spontaneously, and in a way that it is unnecessary to ask ‘can I’?
Although it is at odds with most people’s own experience of sex, the consent model is greatly entrenched in our accepted public perception of sexuality and sexual relations.
Firstly, it is correlated to the sexual double standard. It is hardly surprising that Irish girls are reluctant to carry condoms, since a woman who is forward about her own sexual needs and actively pursues them can be castigated as a slut. This is particularly true if you live in a small town, as Audrey, 21, pointed out.
“Girls in rural areas are far more passive,” she said, “as every detail of their sexual exploits will get around to everyone in no time. If you’re less sexually aggressive you’ll be more likely to get a boyfriend – women who are sexually aggressive are genuinely seen as harlots.”
For Audrey, this passivity not only dictates her public behaviour but her private actions too:
“I’ve been with my boyfriend for three months. Whenever I’m around him in a situation when we’re going to have sex, I get shy and it’s up to him to initiate proceedings. During sex if I slap or scratch him, he’ll be taken aback – he expects me to be coquettish. Due to prior inexperience on my part, whenever I become confident during sex it surprises him, and he doesn’t seem to like it.”
Secondly, if as a woman you buy into the idea that you should be passive recipient of someone else’s desires, it makes it difficult to have your sexual needs met or even to fully understand them yourself. A study at Queen’s University in Ontario found that there is a disconnection between what women say excites them and what they physically respond to. If you have been taught that you ought to respond to romance, but what really turns you on is pain or domination, it may be difficult to admit that to yourself, let alone to another person.
Thirdly, it means women are probably getting less sex than they want, or less of the kind of sex they want.
Nic, 26, shared an interesting observation.
“The lesbian scene can be a bit of a nightmare. Women do tend to kinda wait for others to hit on them – I don’t know how anyone ever gets laid! Too many on the scene are passive, which to me is a reflection on female sexuality – not necessarily by nature, but definitely due to the role women are seen to have in society. I am myself more active than passive, and it’s at least partly because someone has to do it!”
Finally, there are also more sinister aspects to the consent model. Here the acceptance of an active male/passive female dichotomy criminalises teenage boys for sexual experimentation with girls their own age.
Witness the hysterical reports of knicker-less girls at teen discos, ‘rainbow’ blowjob parties and the supposed secret codes of jelly bracelets. The underlying theme of these mostly unsubstantiated reports is that teenage girls are being used and abused by boys. It’s never the other way around or simply mutual sexual experimentation. The assumption is: boys are lascivious aggressors; girls are victims and/or too stupid to see they are being taken advantage of.
Earlier this year the High Court rejected an appeal in a case where a boy challenged the laws charging him with unlawful carnal knowledge by having sex with his girlfriend. At the time the boy was fifteen and his girlfriend fourteen. As the law stands it is illegal to have sex with a person under the age of seventeen, but girls are exempt – they are guilty of nothing if their partners are also underage.
The challenge was rejected. According to Justice Elizabeth Dunne this is because “the risk of pregnancy as a result of underage sex was borne by girls only.” This may be true, but our abhorrence of sexual abuse of minors has very little to do with whether or not a child is physically capable of getting pregnant. We don’t think an adult raping a thirteen-year-old is guilty of a lesser crime if the victim is a boy instead of a girl.
Forgetting the law for a minute, do I think it ‘wise’ that these two young people had sex? Given the opportunity to intervene in advance, I’d caution first that it is probably preferable to wait until you are older; and second, that if they were to proceed that to do so without using a condom would certainly not be a good idea. But countless young people, here and around the world, have sex before the age of consent – because they are curious, in love or because during your teenage years your hormones are raging, whether you are a boy or a girl.
The age of consent should be there to stop adults taking advantage of teenagers, not to criminalise teens for agreed mutual sexual experimentation. It’s worth noting that, in this case, it was the girl’s father, not the girl herself, who made the complaint to the Gardai. She, it seems clear, did not want charges brought.
This law is incredibly unfair, particularly to boys but to girls as well. It makes boys criminally responsible for underage sex while girls have immunity. This is despite the fact that most underage sex between teenagers is mutually consensual, even if it does not meet the legal ‘definition’. It also seems to say that while a teenage boy is capable of saying yes to sex with a partner in or around the same age, a girl is not. Once again, the assumption is: boys are lascivious aggressors; girls are victims and/or too stupid to see they are being taken advantage of.
The consent model may have evolved because of basic biological differences. Lila, 31, made a relevant point. “Women physically ‘receive’ and men ‘give’,” she observed. “Because the uterus is relatively passive, but the penis becomes erect, thus active, those distinctions are probably going to stay with us.”
It could also be argued, as Vivienne emphasised to me, that for much of human history women exchanged sex for some advantage. “I think the idea of women consenting to sex is a kind of primitive link to the idea that sex is given in exchange for something else,” she said, “such as the [disputed] ‘sex for meat hypothesis’, which is that in primitive cultures, a man’s value lay in his ability to hunt and acquire food, while a woman’s value lay in her ability to procreate. These ‘currencies’ were considered fair exchange.”
Those sexual currencies still exist today, and a woman, or indeed a man, may still exchange sex for love, marriage, stability or financial advantage – as many do.
While it is essential that no one feels forced, manipulated or coerced into sex, sex education and our understanding of male/female sexual relations needs to go further than the issue of consent. It’s time, therefore, that female sexual desire became part of public discourse.
Most of the time, people, whether they are gay or straight, black or white, seventeen or seventy-seven, exchange sex for sex, pleasure for pleasure, and that’s equally true whether you are a man or a woman. We ought to acknowledge it.