Hmm. What do you suppose the implications of the word “consent” are in a world where the dominant male paradigm posits that women have no innate interest in sex?

I was thinking about someone I quoted earlier on the limits of “no means no” and it occurred to me that even the concept of requiring consent is kind of missing a big point.

We don’t seek our friend’s “consent” when we ask them to join us for lunch. Instead we seek consent to park our car in somebody’s driveway. We don’t seek “consent” when we have a couple of extra tickets and ask if our friends want to tag along. We seek consent to use the school gymnasium for a neighborhood fundraiser.

To the extent society acknowledges heterosexual women initiating sex at all it seems to me it occurs more in terms of the woman inviting a partner and him accepting, or not accepting. Outside of the extremely structured confines of booty calls it seems to me that men don’t often simply invite women to have sex, nor does she simply accept or decline.

The assumption behind consent is that one party has something the other wants but otherwise wouldn’t be interested in or likely wouldn’t initiate.

The reality on the ground is that men, far, far more than women, are expected to seek consent because, way, way to often they don’t seek consent. Thus the very real need for a requirement that men wait till consent is clearly granted. I’m suggesting that either way the heteronormative assumption is that sex is something to be obtained by the man, and dispensed by the woman… that sex is requested by the man and granted by the woman… which in turn assumes that sex isn’t something she just might naturally just want to have. And that’s what I mean by the dominant male paradigm of women as the “no-sex” class — that by nature women just aren’t interested, let alone motivated, the way men are.

This is neither a request that women invite men to have sex more often, nor a suggestion that men lighten up rather than “seek consent.” [Note how both those admonitions would reinforce the paradigm. —fl]Instead it’s, well, an invitation to reflect on the assumptions we make about the way we conduct our relationships. Rather than endlessly seeking excuses validation for the status quo in, say, evolutionary psychology or relative levels of testosterone and estrogen. If men (speaking for my gender anyway) instead assumed that men and women, being people and all, had the same degree of interest then I think more practical ideas fall out when we shake it.

Final note here: when examining assumptions don’t assume either gender’s sexuality is the baseline norm from which the other gender’s sexuality is the deviation. Interesting things fall out of both sides when you shake it, and we won’t get all the benefit if we’re not looking at everything.)