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.
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.