Consent

[Content Note: Rape culture.]

Here is a man writing a garbage piece about how difficult consent is.

And here is a woman writing a terrific piece about how easy consent is.

The thing about consent is that it comes down to this: Everyone must be empowered with the right to say no—and, as Brienne of Snarth has been very eloquently talking about today on her Twitter timeline, the right to say yes—and everyone is obligated to hear and respect that no or yes.

Beyond that, all the discussion about the "murkiness" of consent, whether it's the invocation of "implicit consent" or intolerable thinkpieces about "drunk sex," is just a confluence of colossal horseshit that acts in service to the idea that consent is difficult to establish, in order to underwrite narratives about how rape is a crime committed by good-intentioned, gold-hearted boys who just made a mistake because of a perfectly understandable miscommunication.

Hostility to consent is not a bug of the rape culture; it's a feature.

And all of the nonsense about the alleged difficulty of consent is just a red herring to avoid talking about that fact. Rape doesn't happen by accident. Rape is an act committed by people who don't give a shit about consent.

Except, perhaps, insomuch as a lack of consent is central to their enjoyment of said act.

We need to stop pretending this is difficult. It is not difficult. It is a distraction, so that we don't talk about rape honestly. And, more importantly, so that we don't talk about rapists honestly.