What is (and what is not) consensus culture

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What is (and what is not) Consensus Culture

  • Emphasis on group agreement: Consensus culture prioritizes reaching a decision all parties find acceptable.
  • Focus on collaboration: It involves open communication and shared decision-making.
  • Not about unanimous agreement: Consensus doesn’t necessitate everyone being 100% in favor, but rather that all voices are heard and concerns addressed.
  • Decision-making may be slower: Achieving consensus can be time-consuming due to the need for thorough discussion.
  • Can lead to better solutions: Diverse perspectives contribute to richer and more sustainable solutions.
  • Not about avoiding conflict: Healthy conflict can be productive in consensus-building processes.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making

Talking about consensus is not as simple as it sounds. Limiting oneself to saying that “no means no” tends to exclude all those occasions when the line between a “yes” and a “no” is more uncertain.

Even the tea metaphor invented by blogger Emmeline May and made viral by a Blue Seat Studios short film is only partially effective. If you imagine offering a person a cup of hot tea and she was unsure whether she wanted it, how would you act? Certainly it would be absurd to decide for her or to try to force it down her throat, even in the case where she initially accepted and then realized she was not thirsty, or did not like that particular tea. But in real life sex is more complicated than a cup of tea, and our feelings about it can be more ambiguous.

The 27th Hour recently conducted a survey on sexual consent and found that this feeling is familiar to 52.9 percent of participants. You don’t need to be threatened, coerced, or blackmailed to be put in a position where you have no choice: sometimes one says yes because one is afraid of hurting the other person’s feelings, other times the own discomfort is neither acknowledged nor listened to, in still others one is blamed for not being clear enough in saying no.

To really understand what consent is we should take a step back and rethink the way we understand sex and relationships, suggests French philosopher Manon Garcia in What We Talk About When We Talk About Consent (Einaudi).

What on paper should be a conversation between peers is often portrayed as a negotiation on a battlefield, particularly when it comes to men and women. From this point of view, consent becomes a question of what women are willing to concede in the face of male insistence.

A old-fashioned perspective that ignores both the existence of female desire and will and the possibility that it is men who feel pressured and forced to agree to do something they do not want to do. Recognizing that both partners are first and foremost people who think, want and desire is instead a first step in the right direction.

Overcoming old patterns

One might think that certain patterns of thinking are outdated, at least among the younger generation. Yet the results of a qualitative study published in 2019 in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence and reported in the psychology journal State of Mind suggest otherwise.

Based on a sample of 33 adolescents between the ages of 14 and 18, the researchers found that in everyday situations boys and girls rely primarily on nonverbal cues to understand whether their partners are involved and consenting, and also that for boys the rule of silent consent still applies.

Since they are almost always the ones initiating sexual contact, they tend to interpret the lack of an explicit “no” as a green light. Not only that, boys and girls agree that in sex, precedent matters more than the will of the moment. If two people have already slept together, there is no longer a need to obtain consent. Or is there?

If we think of consent as a contract, we risk getting the wrong idea. Precisely because we are not negotiating the terms of a surrender, consent should not be mistaken for a formal, once-and-for-all agreement, to be wrested from the other person so that he relieves us of all responsibility to him. It is more useful to imagine it as an invitation to a conversation that has neither a definite beginning nor an end, but which should be kept alive throughout the sexual encounter and if possible even before and after.

A continuous exchange of feedback and ideas that requires to Paying attention to the other person, his or her desires, impulses and situation, accepting that we may change our minds and especially that it is not always possible to determine in advance what we will like and what we will not.

One option to keep in mind to make this conversation looser is to borrow concepts such as the safe word from the BDSM community. Having a tool for accepting or rejecting practices and proposals while experiencing them (and not before) allows one to feel less pressure, because it is based on the assumption that it is possible to say no at any time without hurting anyone’s feelings.

Demanding more

Building a culture of consent together means demanding more from sex, writes Laurie Penny in a lengthy article on the subject published in 2017 in Longreads.

Insisting on the importance of consent as the basis for pleasure and desire is a way to become better than we have ever been, going beyond simply “not getting into trouble” and talking about what really matters to us, to our autonomy and freedom of choice. Otherwise, conversations about consent run the risk of becoming a contest between technicalities, like those who are used to thinking that it is enough to make sure that a person is not unconscious or trying to push you away.

Lee Huxley
WRITTEN BY

Lee Huxley

Lee Huxley is an internationally known confidence and dating coach with nearly a decade of experience. He is the successful author of several dating and confidence books that have helped thousands of men find incredible results that they didn’t even think was possible. While traveling the world Joe consistently finds new and valuable ways to meet and attract women that men everywhere can use immediately.

Joe has a Bachelor’s Degree in Multimedia Journalism from Bournemouth University and has been featured in many large publications including AskMen, TSB Magazine and Dumb Little Man.