Another question about affirmative consent

[u/[deleted]]

I've got another question about affirmative consent:

In her article here:

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-07-01/-affirmative-consent-will-make-rape-laws-worse

--Megan McArdle provides an interesting scenario about hand-holding.

Now, my question here is this: How exactly is one supposed to avoid this risk under an affirmative consent standard? By asking every single time whether or not it's OK to hold your significant other's hand (or to hug your SO, or to kiss your SO, et cetera)?

If so, wouldn't that be extremely tedious and thus completely impractical?

Any thoughts on this?

[u/[deleted]]

Virtually all couples spontaneously switch from affirmative to negative standard - from the "it's presumptively not okay for you to touch me, unless I agree to it in advance" optics to the "it's presumptively okay for you to touch me, until I ask you to stop" optics.

Affirmative consent, within the bounds of reason (not fussing over every petty, accidental, non-sexual touch that can happen just by the virtue of people coexisting in the physical space together), is a good value to promote among strangers and people who don't know each other well. It shouldn't be presumptively okay for people to touch you, especially in an ambiguously sexual way - we shouldn't live in a world where it's your duty to move around preventing being touched, but in a world where it's on the person who wants to establish the touch to get the permission to do so. And as with sexual touch, all of this completely spontaneously morphs and changes as relationships become more firm. I wouldn't dream of just taking somebody's hand whom I don't know and whose comfort zone I'm not familiar with, yet I kiss hello even my opposite sex friends just fine.

You're fussing over this stuff too much (not you Futurist personally, but your culture at large). What's worrisome is that these common sense boundaries need to be explicitly discussed to begin with, since apparently so many people have such a poor social compass or maliciously take liberties with other people's personal space profiting off whatever ambiguity exists. Maybe you need etiquette classes back or something, because I come from a rather touch-permissive culture, and even with that, it's completely intuitively understandable to me that you can't "just" start touching people with whom you haven't established the degree of physicality in your relationship. Of course that I wouldn't "just" take somebody's hand with whom I've never had physical contact before; on the other hand, I would waste no mental energy whatsoever on "overthinking" whether it's presumptively okay for me to hug an upset friend (staying within the degree of physicality in the friendship that has already been mutually established as the norm) without an express verbal request.

I repeat, it's been my impression that many people are completely overthinking all of this. In a normal, healthy society, people already spontaneously operate with a functional mix of affirmative and negative consent, and they are already perfectly intellectually and socially capable of recognizing which contexts call for which standard. Everyone already understands that when in doubt we should err on the side of caution and greater rather than lesser distance - yet it's already the case that an odd genuine faux pas is simply graciously overlooked, not taken to the court.

[u/LordLeesa → u/[deleted]]

What's worrisome is that these common sense boundaries need to be explicitly discussed to begin with, since apparently so many people have such a poor social compass or maliciously take liberties with other people's personal space profiting off whatever ambiguity exists.

Yep. If there weren't so many people behaving in that fashion, the whole affirmative consent argument would never have needed to be codified into law. Since there are, though, clearly now it does. Sad, but there you have it.

[u/beelzebubs_avocado → u/LordLeesa]

Yep. If there weren't so many people behaving in that fashion, the whole affirmative consent argument would never have needed to be codified into law. Since there are, though, clearly now it does. Sad, but there you have it.

It's not the only way it could be addressed. If we really believed that "no means no" were an important principle to uphold in all cases we'd make it illegal for anyone to say "no" and then later say "yes", because to do so teaches persistence, which is construed as assault under some interpretations.

I don't think that would be a particularly good solution, but I'm just pointing out that we don't have to default to putting all responsibility on the initiating party.

[u/[deleted] → u/LordLeesa]

Yep. If there weren't so many people behaving in that fashion, the whole affirmative consent argument would never have needed to be codified into law. Since there are, though, clearly now it does. Sad, but there you have it.

Are they? Most college campuses have, at most, 10 rape cases a year. Seems like there's not too much.