The tricky issue of consent

What’s the age of consent in Thailand?

That’s terrible dark humour taking a dig at the child prostitution/trafficking problem in Thailand, where over 40 per cent of sex workers are children, and perhaps an apt introduction to the not-so-simple topic that is consent.

It’s been a long mental journey trying to figure out how to talk about a term that most of us men only heard about in our early 20s, but whose importance we realised only through the experiences of women in proximity to us.

A simple definition of consent is actively agreeing to have sex/sexual contact with someone who has the capacity to give permission.

The more I learnt about consent, the more I realised that there were many situations when, looking back, I was unsure, whether I had got full consent or that I hadn’t cross lines that I shouldn’t have.

A conversation last week during a barbecue with a couple of good friends led us to think, as men, about our past actions.

RAPE CULTURE

A friend of mine who lives in Mathare started talking about something which he said was common, but which came as a shocker to me.

Young men who are having sex usually pull a quick one and leave the room (since it’s dark) and let their friends have sex with the same girl, who had agreed to have sex only with the first guy.

Sometimes the girl realises when there are huge physical differences between the men but even when she does, what can she do?

That’s despicable, but worse still, it’s outright rape. But the men don’t see it as rape and that’s a very huge problem. How does such behaviour occur daily?

Consent doesn’t start during sex, but with all the other little things in between that we ignore, and the things we feel aren’t too serious that lead to the eventual culture that is the rape culture.

It begins with disrespecting women’s physical space, objections and suggestions.

HORRENDOUS LYRICS

It’s in the things that we let our boys get away with, like the “games” where they lift girls skirts up.

It’s in the spanking and groping that we let teen boys get away with in the name of letting boys be boys.

It’s in the inappropriate comments we make even when women are visibly uncomfortable.

It’s in the constant need to touch women without their permission — from the makanga trying to get her into the matatu and threatening and abusing her if she doesn’t, to the men who can’t seem to get past women in tight spaces without touching their waists.

It’s in the lyrics of Ethic’s song, "Tarimbo", which had to be pulled down after a public outcry, which outrightly referred to rape.

Apart from the fact that the lyrics were horrendous, I’m also terribly mad that Ethic forced me to agree with Ezekiel Mutua on something. (I wish Uncle Morality also agreed on male contraceptives because I would personally pay for contraception for him for the sake of Kenya and Kenyans.)

PRESSURING WOMEN

It’s in that and in the other totally subliminal ways that we men act that we don’t even notice, and that many times do not seem malicious at all.

In fact, the actions that don’t look malicious are even harder to address because they’re not ill-intentioned and women look like the bad guys for even pointing them out.

How often do we leave clubs with clearly intoxicated women? How often do we pressure women into having sex?

How often do we take women coming to our houses as automatic consent? How often do we keep on pursuing, even when the woman has made it clear that she’s not interested?

CONSENT IS....

Freely given: without pressure or coercion and they aren’t drunk or high. Reversible: they can change their mind whenever they want.

Informed: you need to lay all your cards on the table, for example, on the use of condoms. If you take the condom off during sex, it’s called stealthing, and that’s rape.

Enthusiastic: this is self-explanatory. Specific: saying yes to one thing doesn’t mean saying yes to everything. For example, saying yes to coming to your place doesn’t mean she has said yes to sex.

Capacity: the person should have the capacity to give consent, for example, a minor cannot give consent.

The hazy part is the fact that most consent is non-verbal, so add that to a lot of socialisation around women needing to be pushed to say yes and women being cultured to play hard to get in order to appear virtuous, and I feel that will be the second part of this article, which I can’t cover in 800 words.

If this article got you feeling a bit uneasy as a man, perhaps it’s time to take a long, hard look inside and realise that maybe, just maybe, even though you don’t see yourself as a bad guy, you’ve not respected consent and that you need to do better.