Gareth McNamara

Grassroots campaigns to combat sexual assault are gaining strength on college campuses across America. In recent years, Wooster has seen students taking action against rape culture on campus in a variety of ways, from public displays and discussions to an overhaul of the first-year orientation program. Especially when we consider the jaw-droppingly tasteless and backward “date rape” dance at last year’s Lip Sync (we’re still waiting on that apology, incidentally), these efforts are to be applauded. However, the admirability of their cause aside, campaigners on campuses across America would do well to avoid falling into the same patterns that they aim to eradicate.

I’m thinking in particular of the slogans organizers choose to rally people behind their cause, the language and rhetoric they employ. The international “Consent is Sexy” campaign is a particularly thorny example. The campaign offers posters and other materials to colleges across the U.S. and abroad, bearing messages such as, “Man enough to accept no?” Are you starting to see the problem?

Let me give a different example of the troubling rhetoric around curbing rape culture. Last week, President Obama announced the creation of a White House task force to tackle sexual assault on college campuses. While this move is to be applauded, the language the President employed when making the announcement strays wide of the mark: “I want every young man in America to know that real men don’t hurt women.”

Real men? Man enough? Apart from the manner in which these kind of comments grossly ignore sexual assaults in which men are victims, this kind of rhetoric reeks of machismo and paternalism. It paints men as the only perpetrators of sexual assault. It implies that women are necessarily submissive in sexual situations and men are in control, only deferring to consent out of macho insecurity, as if failing to do so will somehow make them less masculine. Frankly, everyone should take exception to this. Women shouldn’t stand for being characterized as secondary, their bodily autonomy subordinate to the desires of men. Men shouldn’t stand for being portrayed as rutting animals, whose carnal urges can only be tamed by appeals to some Freudian man-pride. None of us should need this kind of nonsense to convince us that sexual assault is wrong and getting consent is necessary.

Let’s take a case closer to home. Last year, a list of “reasons to get consent” was displayed on one of the Wired Scot notice boards. Like “Consent is Sexy” and President Obama, the heart of what this was trying to get at was admirable, but the execution was feeble. Just like we shouldn’t need appeals to cartoonish notions of masculinity to persuade us of the importance of consent, we also shouldn’t need a top 10, 20 or 40 to convince us that we ought to refrain from sexually assaulting another human being.

Non-consensual sex is sexual assault. Re-read that sentence, absorb that fact. It is the only bit of information that any of us should need to know in order to recognize that we have to get consent before engaging in sexual activity. When those fighting rape culture engage in the type of rhetoric employed by “Consent is Sexy” and President Obama, when we go down the route of justifying the need for consent on any other grounds, we lose sight of this fundamental point. And this point is the only one that really matters. Getting consent is not an option. It’s not a matter of preference. It shouldn’t have to be dressed up in irrelevance or made “sexy.” No person with even the most basic decency should need consent sold to them. If you really must make a list of the reasons someone should get consent, it should only be one item long. It should look like this:

“You should get consent because non-consensual sex is sexual assault.” That’s it. That’s all the justification anyone should need. Consent isn’t manly. It isn’t sexy. It’s mandatory. That’s all that matters.