Consent is NOT simple
On the screen in front me is a cute pink cartoon penis and an equally cute and plump looking pink cartoon vagina. They are bopping to a beat – the music suggests they are at some kind of nightclub together. Eight seconds into the animation, the penis shuffles toward the cartoon vagina and pokes her. And the cartoon vagina responds with a shocked, ‘Hey!’. The penis quickly steps away, gushes with embarrassment and responds with, ‘Uh, my bad.’ The vagina laughs awkwardly and turns herself slightly away from the penis. The music resumes and they continue bopping. Across the screen flashes the following: ‘Consent is simple. If it's not yes, it's no’. This is the video for the ‘Consent is Simple’ campaign, launched in 2016 ‘to teach people just how simple it is to understand consent’. It is a powerful and catchy tag line that may be particularly effective for the prevention of ‘forced’ sexual violence. The campaign has been incredibly successful in terms of visibility, amassing more than 14,733,242 views on YouTube, and drawing much mainstream media attention to Project Consent's work.
Whilst I celebrate the success of the campaign, and as smitten as I am with the plump pink animated genitalia, there is a small part of me that is somewhat irked by the video. Consent is not always simple. Well, at least not in my own experience, nor the experiences of the young women I interviewed. I can think of several everyday situations in which a ‘yes’ holds little to no authority – both with regards to sexual encounters as well as other everyday non-sexual encounters. Sometimes it can be difficult to say ‘no’, and in those instances our ‘yeses’ are simply a consequence of our inability to say ‘no’. Or perhaps ‘yes’ is only uttered because one truly believes that their ‘no’ would not be heard or acknowledged. Or perhaps there are cases where we simply are not enabled to say ‘no’, and so we say a ‘yes’ that means nothing.
Discourses of consent in popular culture, our legal systems and in well-meaning campaigns such as the work of Project Consent often lack nuance. Consent as a concept ends up being represented as a yes or no binary, incongruous with the realities of our complex sexual experiences. The stories shared by some of the young men and women who participated in our research represent consent as a multifaceted, gendered and embodied ‘process’ of negotiation, in which dominant discourses, unwritten rules and relational dynamics render a yes or no notion of consent too simplistic.
