There’s been a lot of noise lately about affirmative consent, a standard of consent which requires explicit verbal confirmation for every escalation of romantic or sexual interaction. It has been adopted as a standard by many college campuses, and efforts have been made to turn it into actual law.
Most of the discussion has centered around the use of affirmative consent as a legal standard, and as such it is quite terrible: unfair, unjust, and impossible to interpret in a consistent way that stops bad behavior without criminalizing normal conduct. But, what I haven’t seen mentioned, is that adopting affirmative consent as a loosely enforced social normis really good for nerds. If you’re not great at reading body language and subtle signs, the expectation that you’ll ask for verbal consent makes flirting much easier. You’re no longer an awkward geek, you’re hip to the times!
I’ve personally erred on the side of asking explicitly in the past, and I think it has worked out great for me. Most women were happy to give consent when asked, the momentary awkwardness of asking quickly forgotten. A few said “no”, in which case it’s a good thing I asked! And I doubt that even a single one was poised so evenly on the fence that asking for verbal consent turned her off me.
What do y’all think? And is this actually making life better or worse for women who date nerds?
Rules making human behavior more transparent would be good for nerds, if everyone followed them. Unfortunately, I believe this is not going to happen.
What is going to happen instead, in my opinion, is the usual: rules that high-status people can afford to break, and low-status people can either accept them as additional burden or get punished for breaking them.
The usual “he said / she said” of sexual violence investigation will remain, only the object of the debate will move to “they gave me an explicit verbal confirmation / no I didn’t”. The usual double standard will remain, too: when two people will have sex, with neither of them giving explicit verbal consent, only one of them will risk actual repercussions.
Also, many people love plausible deniability, so adopting the new rule will stimulate a lot of creativity in this new direction: how to say something that simultaneously could be interpreted as an explicit verbal confirmation, but also as something other than explicit verbal confirmation. And, as usual, nerds will be at a disadvantage at playing these games.
Right. I often suspect attempts to change social equilibriums are not attempts at Pareto improvements but instead trade-offs along the existing frontier that better serve some people that are currently underserved by the existing equilibrium. They are, of course, often sold as Pareto improvements by their supporters because it’s both not considered acceptable to argue for trade-offs that will make others worse (unless they are undesirable others) and because they may innocently but motivatedly confuse them for true Pareto improvements because they have blindspots that prevent them from noticing how the change would be bad for others when it’s good for them, such as via the typical mind fallacy.
In my experience I endorse affirmative consent as a *strongly* enforced social norm. Having sex or even kissing someone without explicitly asking first is something that I would reprimand friends if I knew they did.
I am probably in some very strongly selected communities but I like living in a world where affirmative consent is the explicit norm and I would not want to go back outside that.
I’m curious if you’d reprimand both friends if two of your friends kissed, escalated, and then had sex, both enthusiastically, but without any verbal consent in either direction. (Obvious conclusion I’m jumping to: that we generally mean that men must get consent, even if we state that it goes both ways.)
I don’t have a lot of experience with people within my friend group hooking up, or necessarily a lot of experience hearing about the details of hookups enough to have explicitly put me in that situation.
I have had several personal experiences where I reciprocated advances from women, then later been hit by the fallout of the lack of explicit verbal negotiation of what was going to happen. And I certainly reprimand friends (including women) for failing to communicate in their relationships at a broader level when I do know about it.
There’s been a lot of noise lately about affirmative consent, a standard of consent which requires explicit verbal confirmation for every escalation of romantic or sexual interaction. It has been adopted as a standard by many college campuses, and efforts have been made to turn it into actual law.
Most of the discussion has centered around the use of affirmative consent as a legal standard, and as such it is quite terrible: unfair, unjust, and impossible to interpret in a consistent way that stops bad behavior without criminalizing normal conduct. But, what I haven’t seen mentioned, is that adopting affirmative consent as a loosely enforced social norm is really good for nerds. If you’re not great at reading body language and subtle signs, the expectation that you’ll ask for verbal consent makes flirting much easier. You’re no longer an awkward geek, you’re hip to the times!
I’ve personally erred on the side of asking explicitly in the past, and I think it has worked out great for me. Most women were happy to give consent when asked, the momentary awkwardness of asking quickly forgotten. A few said “no”, in which case it’s a good thing I asked! And I doubt that even a single one was poised so evenly on the fence that asking for verbal consent turned her off me.
What do y’all think? And is this actually making life better or worse for women who date nerds?
Rules making human behavior more transparent would be good for nerds, if everyone followed them. Unfortunately, I believe this is not going to happen.
What is going to happen instead, in my opinion, is the usual: rules that high-status people can afford to break, and low-status people can either accept them as additional burden or get punished for breaking them.
The usual “he said / she said” of sexual violence investigation will remain, only the object of the debate will move to “they gave me an explicit verbal confirmation / no I didn’t”. The usual double standard will remain, too: when two people will have sex, with neither of them giving explicit verbal consent, only one of them will risk actual repercussions.
Also, many people love plausible deniability, so adopting the new rule will stimulate a lot of creativity in this new direction: how to say something that simultaneously could be interpreted as an explicit verbal confirmation, but also as something other than explicit verbal confirmation. And, as usual, nerds will be at a disadvantage at playing these games.
Right. I often suspect attempts to change social equilibriums are not attempts at Pareto improvements but instead trade-offs along the existing frontier that better serve some people that are currently underserved by the existing equilibrium. They are, of course, often sold as Pareto improvements by their supporters because it’s both not considered acceptable to argue for trade-offs that will make others worse (unless they are undesirable others) and because they may innocently but motivatedly confuse them for true Pareto improvements because they have blindspots that prevent them from noticing how the change would be bad for others when it’s good for them, such as via the typical mind fallacy.
In my experience I endorse affirmative consent as a *strongly* enforced social norm. Having sex or even kissing someone without explicitly asking first is something that I would reprimand friends if I knew they did.
I am probably in some very strongly selected communities but I like living in a world where affirmative consent is the explicit norm and I would not want to go back outside that.
I’m curious if you’d reprimand both friends if two of your friends kissed, escalated, and then had sex, both enthusiastically, but without any verbal consent in either direction. (Obvious conclusion I’m jumping to: that we generally mean that men must get consent, even if we state that it goes both ways.)
I certainly have the moral instinct to.
I don’t have a lot of experience with people within my friend group hooking up, or necessarily a lot of experience hearing about the details of hookups enough to have explicitly put me in that situation.
I have had several personal experiences where I reciprocated advances from women, then later been hit by the fallout of the lack of explicit verbal negotiation of what was going to happen. And I certainly reprimand friends (including women) for failing to communicate in their relationships at a broader level when I do know about it.