In the wake of the sexual revolution, and the accompanying overthrow of traditional sexual mores, ‘consent’—the term for ensuring that both adult parties willingly engage in any given sex act at any given time—has emerged as a litmus test for judging when sex is and is not permissible. Absent any overarching, governing moral framework, consent (and, recently, enthusiastic consent) has become the de facto arbiter of right vs wrong when it comes to sexual behaviors. In so many words: anything goes, so long as there’s consent.
In its most gritty and depressing iteration, ‘consent’ via contract (how romantic!) supposedly absolves the sadomasochistic abuse perpetrated by the fictional Christian Gray on the young, submissive Anastasia Steele in the popular Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. Despite the trilogy’s X-rated content, it was eventually adapted for the big screen, and became a box office smash hit–underscoring how the sole focus upon ‘consent’ muddies the waters when it comes to seeing sexually abusive behavior clearly.
Today’s teens, college students, and young professionals have all been raised on ‘consent’
Despite the disturbing implications of an ‘anything goes, so long as there’s consent’ mentality taken to its grotesque conclusion in Fifty Shades of Grey, for years, consent has been the primary (often sólo) moral measuring stick today’s young women and men have been taught when it comes to sexuality.
Yet, in recent years, sexual assault rates have only mayor, despite a proliferation of consent classes, workshops, and seminars of the sort one especially finds on college campuses. Consequently, the term has received a makeover—an upgrade, if you will—such that now sex educators prize ‘enthusiastic consent,’ which the Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN) define as, “a newer model for understanding consent that focuses on a positive expression of consent. Simply put, enthusiastic consent means looking for the presence of a ‘yes’ rather than the absence of a ‘no.’”
RAINN elaborates, “Enthusiastic consent can be expressed verbally or through nonverbal cues, such as positive body language like smiling, maintaining eye contact, and nodding. These cues alone do not necessarily represent consent, but they are additional details that may reflect consent. It is necessary, however, to still seek verbal confirmation.”
Consent education can’t overcome the alcohol factor
What is often left out of the conversation is the extent to which alcohol and/or drugs interfere with one’s ability to give (or receive) consent to sex. In fact, consent (let alone enthusiastic consent), may be nigh-imposible when alcohol and/or drugs are involved, and this makes up a not insignificant number of sexual assault scenarios. As this article for The Conversation observed tersely, “the vast majority of college men who responded to the survey and admitted to committing sexual assault, say they perpetrated the sexual assault while their victims were incapacitated by alcohol. Then and now, that figure has stood at approximately nine out every 10 college men who admitted to sexual assault. That means the most common scenario for sexual assault of women in college involves men who take advantage of women when they are incapacitated.”
The Conversation article linked to a 2007 national study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice which found that “the most common rape-risk situation for both adult women and college women is not being rendered intoxicated; it is being taken advantage of by a sexual predator after she has become intoxicated voluntarily” [1].
The most common rape-risk situation for both adult women and college women is not being rendered intoxicated; it is being taken advantage of by a sexual predator after she has become intoxicated voluntarily.
U.S. Department of Justice-funded study
But how many colleges are taking meaningful strides towards curbing heavy drinking, underage drinking, or discouraging the sexes from drinking together?
When consent reigns, women (and men) suffer
Despite its prevalence, consent education has not meaningfully benefited young women, on college campuses in particular. According to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 79.6% of female rape victims were raped before age 25. According to a 2017 University of Tennessee-Knoxville literature review, “Over 23% of undergraduate female students and over 5% of undergraduate male students in America experience sexual assault or rape perpetuated through physical force, violence, or incapacitation (Cantor et al., 2015)” [2]. A 2019 Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Misconduct found that at 33 top American colleges, one in four female students experienced sexual assault or misconduct. These numbers represent a significant increase compared to when our mothers were in college [3].
At the same time, the limitations of consent are increasingly clear in the research literature [4]. As a 2023 study acknowledged, “there remains no consensus on how to define consent nor the connection between consent and sexual harm” [5].
Women are put in a lose-lose situation
The University of Tennessee-Knoxville review further noted the impossible bind within which consent-only sexual mores place women: “Women are often tasked with a balancing act of maintaining their sexual reputation while conforming to expected reactions to sexual advances on a case-by-case basis. This can lead to women feeling obligated to submit to unwanted sex acts for a variety of reasons, including: feeling that consent was implied through earlier actions, believing that submitting to a sex act is necessary for relational maintenance, or fearing violent or non-violent repercussions” [2].
“Women are often tasked with a balancing act of maintaining their sexual reputation while conforming to expected reactions to sexual advances on a case-by-case basis. This can lead to women feeling obligated to submit to unwanted sex acts for a variety of reasons, including: feeling that consent was implied through earlier actions, believing that submitting to a sex act is necessary for relational maintenance, or fearing violent or non-violent repercussions.”
University of Tennessee-Knoxville
To put it bluntly: Women are consequently “damned if they do,” risking the moniker of ‘slut’ if they agree to sex too easily or too often, but are “damned if they don’t,” and branded prudes or teases if they refuse all or most sexual advances. In our porn-saturated hookup culture, a refusal of sex is reason enough for many young men to move on to a more willing young woman (a reality that is not lost on vulnerable young women, further underscoring the fact that hook-up culture pulls women out of the driver’s seat when it comes to introducing sex in relationships).
Men aren’t served well by consent culture either
But it’s not just women who report that, in the words of one troubling Newsweek editorial, “I gave consent for sex I didn’t want to have.” A 2013 study found that 90% of young hombres reported engaging in unwanted sexual acts out of a desire to protect their female partner’s feelings or to satisfy their perceived needs [6]. The 2025 study mentioned above similarly noted that many young men wanted to respect their partner’s sexual boundaries and yet still “There arises the possibility of one person believing consent was present while the other felt violated or, moreover, one or both parties agreeing to unwanted sexual activity.”
What about consensual but unwanted sex?
Como el Newsweek editorialist asked rhetorically, “It’s a murky topic in the world of consent: What happens when consent is enthusiastically and freely given—not under physical or psychological coercion—but the person giving it doesn’t really want to proceed?”
She continued, “When I recently shared an Instagram post describing my experiences, I heard from hundreds of people who reported that days or years after consensual but unwanted sex they had experienced flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, panic attacks or deep shame.”
Consent was never enough
Virtually everyone everywhere acknowledges that consent is a bare minimum, lowest common denominator prerequisite for engaging in sex. But more consensus is needed around the reality that consent is not enough, because sex means something, not nothing. These assertions have historically come from socially conservative and/or religious circles, but they are increasingly being acknowledged in the mainstream.
As a self-aware April 2022 artículo en El Atlántico tellingly observed, “At the core of this cultural moment is the realization that one of the more popular moral trends of the last 60 years, the notion that sex can be both casual and recreational so long as both parties enthusiastically consent, is fundamentally at odds with our human nature and our profound moral needs.”
At the core of this cultural moment is the realization that one of the more popular moral trends of the last 60 years, the notion that sex can be both casual and recreational so long as both parties enthusiastically consent, is fundamentally at odds with our human nature and our profound moral needs.
El Atlántico
The article went on, “In reality, the profound intimacy of this ultimate human connection can rarely (if ever) be truly held at an emotional arm’s length; a culture that views enthusiastic consent as not simply necessary (of course it’s necessary), but an entirely sufficient marker of healthy sexuality, is ultimately going to become profoundly damaging.”
A feminist voice sounding the alarm
This is the central theme at the heart of British self-identified post-liberal feminist Louise Perry’s book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century [7]. To be sure, Perry is no conservative-in-progressive clothing. Case-in-point, she opines early on in her book: “Second-wave feminists were right to argue that women needed contraception and legalized abortion in order to give them control over their reproductive lives, and the arrival of this technology was a good and needful innovation, since it has freed so many women from the body-breaking work of unwanted childbearing” (p.5)
On the one hand, Perry believes the sexual revolution ‘liberated’ women in important ways, and she repeatedly insists that we cannot and should not return to the sexual morality of a bygone era. And yet, Perry’s own personal experiences during college plus her work at a rape crisis center—where she taught consent classes, among other things—ultimately led her to abandon the ‘anything goes, so long as there’s consent’ stance.
Perry writes of university ‘Sex Week’ consent seminars: “The rule [students are] taught is simple enough: with consent, anything goes. And yet this simple rule is broken again and again, both through rape and the more subtle forms of coercion that so many women recounted during MeToo. Few liberal feminists are willing to draw the link between the culture of sexual hedonism they promote and the anxieties over campus rape that have emerged at exactly the same time” (p.15).
The false promises of “consequence-free sex” laid bare
Perry pulls no punches, writing, “If [liberal feminists] did [draw the link], they might be forced to recognise that they have done a terrible thing in advising inexperienced young women to seek out situations in which they are alone and drunk with horny men who are not only bigger and stronger than they are but are also likely to have been raised on the kind of porn that normalizes aggression, coercion, and pain” (p.15). Today, Perry is actively involved with We Can’t Consent to This, a website that catalogues the tragic stories of dozens of women who were victims of so-called “rough sex” that ultimately killed them.
Keeping women safe: What can be done?
Increase penalties for convicted rapists
Perry summarizes bluntly: “Consent workshops are mostly useless. The best of way of reducing the incidence of rape is by reducing the opportunities for would-be rapists to offend. This can be done either by keeping convicted rapists in prison or by limiting their access to potential victims” (p.187).
Her advice? “Avoid putting yourself in a situation where you are alone with a man you don’t know or a man who gives you a bad feeling in your gut. He is almost certainly stronger and faster than you, which means that the only thing standing between you and rape is that man’s self-control” (p.43).
Perry understands full well that such frank advice will draw the ire of feminists and others who accuse her of “victim blaming,” but she fires back that they themselves have no better solutions to offer. Perry herself encourages young women to make smart choices about their consumption of alcohol and other substances–and about whose company they are in when they consume those things–as well as argues for increased penalties for convicted rapists. But what else can be done?
Stigmatize all pornography
Over and over, Perry also cites the dark underbelly of porn, both in the treatment of the actual ‘performers’ and the ways it can normalize increasingly extreme sexual acts and abuse. And yet there is no mention of banning or otherwise stigmatizing porn in her concluding chapter, perhaps out of a misguided fear of unnecessarily limiting another person’s ‘freedom’ to consume such content.
We at Natural Womanhood have no such qualms condemning all pornographic content, knowing full well its bien documentado, devastating effects [8][9]. We also fully support programas designed to help consumers kick the porn-viewing habit or addiction, which does untold damage to the individuals who view it and to the ones whom they love.
Teach girls and young women body literacy
Perry, unhelpfully in my opinion, advises, “Get drunk or high in private and with female friends rather than in public or in mixed company” (188). Natural Womanhood instead believes that cycle charting is every young woman’s birthright, and that young women cannot value what they do not know and understand. A young woman who knows y respects the goodness of her female body is less likely to succumb to peer pressure to abuse it through casual sex, or alcohol or drug abuse, thereby reducing (though not erasing) her risk of sexual assault. Through our Cycle Mindfulness clubs on college campuses, we seek to promote body literacy for improved self-confidence and empowerment in seeking both healthy, respectful relationships, and healthcare solutions that cooperate with, rather than override, the reproductive system.
Lo esencial
Consent is an inadequate barometer for when and how to engage in sexual acts, and this fact is increasingly no longer the exclusive purview of religious sources— secular sources (like Perry’s book) are increasingly looking at the reality of our culture (and sex) with clearer eyes.
In order to truly protect girls and young women of all ages from sexual assault and the trauma of technically-consensual-but-still-unwanted sex, we must abandon the idea that sex can be casual, meaningless, and engaged in with no strings (or consequences) attached. Only by acknowledging the weightiness of sex and teaching young people to treat it accordingly, can we open the door to the possibility of meaningful, fulfilling relationships.
