‘no means no’ … or does it?

The ‘no means no' model of consent was a product of the 70s women's liberation movement. It was a catchy tagline and it successfully landed some of the basic principles of consent onto the radar of popular culture and mainstream Western society. It isn't fool-proof. In fact, given a number of dominant gendered discourses that to this day continue to play into relationships of power; a focus on saying ‘no' is problematic. Not everyone is in a position to say no. Dr Rosewarne writes:

‘In a culture in which women have the burden of being nice, of being acquiescent, saying “no” isn’t easy’.

The other major issue with the ‘no means no’ approach is this: ‘The absence of ‘no’ does not mean yes… the absence of ‘no’ isn’t the same thing as consent’. In Anastasia Powell’s book (2010) Sex, Power and Consent, she argues that the negotiation of sexual consent is much more complex than young women ‘just saying no', and ‘it involves a complex interplay of individual agency and embodied gendered practices’. Powell outlines the myriad of ways in which young people, in their everyday practice, ‘just knew' that sex was [or was not] desired, through [non-verbal] bodily communication – subtle signals including ‘the way a person escalates a mood’, ‘how he looks at me’, all of which require careful interpretation, a reading between the lines. 

With these limitations revealed, discourses of consent have been necessarily broadened beyond a focus on the word ‘no’ toward an affirmative model of consent. In law, policy and education there has been a tendency toward an affirmative model of consent. That is, rather than consent being understood as simply the absence of ‘no', it is understood as the presence of ‘yes'. Campaigns such as third wave feminism’s ‘yes means yes’ campaign press the point that consent equals mutual desire – enthusiasm, the ability for both parties to obviously recognise that the other really wants sex.

While both the ‘no means no’ and the ‘yes means yes’ approaches have been great tools for explaining the boundaries of consent and championing the issue, they are limited. Both frameworks feature obvious gaps and a myriad of possibilities for misinterpretation. In the words of Dr Lauren Rosewarne: 

“No means no, absolutely. And waiting to hear that enthusiastic ‘yes, yes, yes’ is an excellent step. But pretending such words have authority in a world of unevenly distributed power and enduring, if old-fashioned, sexual mores, isn’t helpful.”

Simply put, consent is more complicated than either ‘yes’ or ‘no’.