Over the past two years, the #MeToo movement has focused public attention on the issue of sexual consent in an unprecedented way. The movement, which began in earnest in 2017, saw people of all genders, from all walks of life, sharing their experiences of sexual harassment and violation. As more and more people told their stories, we saw a predictable backlash, with other people taking to the media to ask whether “flirting” is now forbidden. The question of consent is complicated. In a new book – "Sexual Consent" (MIT Press) – academic and activist Milena Popova offers a nuanced introduction to sexual consent.
Why did you write this book, and why now?
I have been working on issues of sexual violence in one way another for about 10 years now. In much of this work, consent - especially a positive, clear definition of consent - has been absent from the conversation for a long time. But it started to pop up in some feminist circles, and in fact I did my PhD research on how one such feminist community - fanfiction readers and writers - use erotic fiction to explore issues of consent in really creative and innovative ways. #MeToo gained public and media attention the week I sent my thesis to the printers, and consent *has* been one of the pillars of that conversation. So in some ways in my activism and research I have followed the development of ideas of consent from niche feminist groups in some of the more obscure corners of the internet to the kind of mainstream visibility they have now.
To me, tackling sexual violence by articulating a positive vision of a consent culture has real radical potential. Consent is a radical concept. It allows us to question and dismantle so many social structures and oppressive systems that we otherwise take for granted. And that, ultimately, is what the book is about.
You open by talking about the #MeToo movement. What do you see as the most important impact of #MeToo?
I think the most important impact is that, for a little while at least, the topic of sexual violence became inescapable - even for people who previously had the privilege of not knowing the extent of the problem.
Our society continues to be steeped in rape culture, rape myths, and victim blaming, and so for a very long time the stigma of being a survivor of sexual violence has kept the millions of people affected by it silent. Maybe you shared your story with a close friend or a family member. If you were lucky and were part of a supportive feminist community, maybe you spoke about it there. But by and large this was not something to speak about in public, which in turn allowed the extent of the issue to remain hidden, brushed under the carpet. It allowed people to think that they, personally, didn't know anyone affected by sexual violence. I hope that in the wake of #MeToo at the very least those not directly affected realise how pervasive and endemic sexual violence is, and that it is a lot closer to their homes, their families than they thought. At the same time, I hope that survivors feel heard and seen, and at least a little bit more believed than we were before #MeToo.
You write that “we as a society do not have a clear, uncontested idea of what sexual consent looks like”. Could you expand?
Think about some of the common responses - yes, even post-#MeToo! - when someone discloses they have experienced sexual violence. "What was she thinking, going out dressed like that?" "He's a big bloke, if he didn't want it, he could have done something about it." "Do I have to get a contract signed every time I have sex?" All of these speak to deeply problematic attitudes to consent: the idea that a particular way of dressing implies consent to intercourse, the idea that a particular gender and body type means that you can't be violated, the idea that sexual consent is something you can give through a contract, rather than something that is deeply personal, in-the-moment, and that we have a responsibility to ensure it freely-given and continuous throughout whatever we are doing with that person. #MeToo and other, similar public discussions - like the reactions to rape allegations against Julian Assange - have made visible the extent to which ideas about consent diverge within Western societies.
How would you define “rape culture”?
At its simplest, it's a culture where sexual violence is not taken seriously; where victims are disbelieved and blamed, while every effort is made to excuse and exculpate perpetrators. As an example, if a woman is drunk and a man rapes her, we - media, the public, and the criminal justice system - put the blame on her: she should not have got drunk, she should not have been with him, she was "asking for it". If a man gets drunk and rapes a woman, he didn't know what he was doing, he didn't hear her say "no".
But it goes further than that. Our attitudes to gender and sexuality, our very idea of what sex is and how it "should" work, are all implicated in making it easier for some people to ignore and violate boundaries while also making it harder for some to even say "no". This doesn't just split along gender lines either: the ways we relate to age, race, disability, queerness, class, sex work, body type - they all work to marginalise some groups of people and make them even more vulnerable to sexual violence.
Ultimately, a rape culture is one where despite multiple credible allegations of sexual violence, a powerful white man can be appointed to a Supreme Court, and someone who has publicly bragged about grabbing women "by the pussy" can be elected President.
How can the law help or hinder our conceptions of consent?
The law is an extremely blunt tool to handle something as complex as our feelings, sexuality, and consent. For a start, it deals in absolutes: it constructs a very sharp dividing line between "rape" on the one hand and "consent" on the other. In reality, most situations are way more complex than that. There may be power imbalances involved, either due to the nature of the interpersonal relationships or due to social and structural factors. There are issues with how the law determines whether consent was present: the prosecution needs to establish "beyond reasonable doubt" that it was not, putting the burden of proof on the complainant. Even where there are prosecution guidelines to push the defendant to show how they obtained consent, defence lawyers will still attack the complainant's credibility and interpret anything but the "utmost resistance" as consent. If a complainant experienced a situation as rape but the defendant did not, the law can only admit one of those versions of events - and most of the time its answer is that it was not rape.
In practice, the law and criminal justice system also make some groups significantly more vulnerable to sexual violence. Black women who report sexual violence, for instance, are much more likely to have their criminal records checked and much less likely to have their cases prosecuted as they are not seen as sufficiently credible. People whose attacker is the same gender as them also face problems, in that they are frequently disbelieved by authorities. There is a legal loophole in the US that leaves Native American women extremely vulnerable to rape by white men. Sex workers who are raped also face the risk of being criminalised, or deported if they happen to also be immigrants. Trans women whose attacker is a cisgender woman may not only be disbelieved but also find themselves cast as the aggressor - and end up in a men's prison as a result. The difficulties marginalised groups face in accessing justice through the law make them that much more vulnerable to predators.
Feminist campaigns over the last 50 years have won some important reforms: the treatment of (some) complainants through the criminal justice system has improved; marital rape has been recognised as a crime in most Western jurisdictions; eight European countries (as well as some other Western jurisdictions) have consent-centric definitions of rape. But there is a long way to go before the law and criminal justice system are even remotely fit for purpose when it comes to tackling sexual violence.
You write about the need to expand our definition of sex and which acts require consent. Could you expand?
There is a pervasive idea - in society, in media, in law - that the only act that requires consent is penetration. And that in turn lets us define all sorts of other things as not requiring explicit consent, or even as ways of expressing consent, rather than acts that require consent in their own right. Kissing, removing of clothes (or even not objecting to your clothes being removed), agreeing to go somewhere more private with someone are all commonly seen as expressions of consent to penetration. But if we're to really respect each other's bodily autonomy - the idea that we get to decide what to do with and what happens to our body - we need to recognise that consent applies to all sorts of interpersonal interactions and acts that may or may not be sexual. In communities that normalise this kind of consent practice, it is common to ask before touching someone in any way, including hugs, handshakes or cheek kisses. And certainly when it comes to anything even remotely sexual, we should be making sure that our partners are comfortable with everything that we're doing.
You explore “unwanted sex”. Could you explain what this is, and what issues it raises?
Unwanted sex is sex that an individual may not want but may consent to anyway. In some cases, this may be relatively unproblematic, for instance when trying to conceive (though there may be complicating factors there too!). In others, there are bigger issues: we feel like we *should* have sex, regardless of whether we want to. There's evidence of this both in casual situations and in long-term relationships, and while most of the existing research focuses on women's experiences of unwanted sex, there is also anecdotal evidence that men and non-binary people also experience this. Feeling under pressure to have sex - whether it's to maintain a relationship, or to be seen as the right kind of masculine, or for whatever other reason - is not compatible with ideas of consent and bodily autonomy. It limits our choices and options, and makes our consent less than freely-given. In some situations choosing to have unwanted sex may well be the least bad option we have of exercising our agency, but in an ideal world those pressures simply wouldn't be there.
There has been backlash to the #MeToo movement and other attempts to reconfigure societal ideas of consent. How much of a concern is this pushback?
It is a concern. We're seeing all kinds of backlash - from ridiculing the idea of explicitly negotiated consent to co-opting the movement in ways that reproduce other forms of oppression such as racism and Islamophobia. And while some perpetrators have suffered consequences, others continue to get away with it - the biggest slap in the face for the movement of course being the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court despite a credible and powerful testimony from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
Are you optimistic that we might see genuine social change on these issues?
Social change takes decades, sometimes centuries, to achieve. Rape culture is deeply enmeshed in all sorts of other systems of oppression: racism and white supremacy, cisnormativity, compulsory (hetero)sexuality, patriarchy, ableism, capitalism. Feminists have been fighting sexual violence and other forms of oppression for decades, and there have been cycles of gaining traction, achieving important results, dealing with backlash, and abeyance and regrouping. I think we are seeing changes as a result of #MeToo, but I also think we need to continue to be vigilant and persistent. It's a fight worth fighting.
