does consent education make us safer?

An feminist argument against the use of consent education for fighting rape

unknown canon is a subscriber supported platform that advocates for womenkind. If you can, please consider upgrading to keep this newsletter independent. Every paid subscriber allows me to continue to invest more time into feminist and antirape advocacy. Thank you so much for the time you’ve spent reading my work. 🩷

Judith Slaying Holofernes Artemisia Gentileschi

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Winter 2021. I was starting to realize that I was losing friends, and phone calls and invitations were drying up. I couldn’t follow my friends where they were heading, either increasingly away from humanity, or desperately, frantically, rushing headlong into squishy meatspace to maximize touch and contact after the isolation of the year and half prior. Had either become obsessed with AI, or become obsessed with sex and sex parties.

The majority went toward sex parties. What’s a sex party? Self-explanatory. They’re parties where people have sex, try to meet people to have sex with, and the atmosphere is highly sexual. The women are usually scantily clad. Men carry things like whips and floggers in duffle bags, or if they want to look cool, hanging from the back pocket of their pants. There are things like St. Andrews crosses and leather benches, or at the very least, mattresses and sheets, so people can, you know, partake.

I had to go to one once. Related to work, which is for me helping survivors and preventing sexual harassment and sexual assault. Am I the only person in the world who’s gone to an orgy for work? I was fully dressed, in a blue velvet jumpsuit. People were friendly. I chatted with a couple dudes. I shouldn’t have been surprised when three of them tried to get in touch with me after the party; shouldn’t have been surprised that they were interested in something that I wasn’t interested in giving to them.

My key takeaways are: (1) they smell absolutely disgusting, (2) they’re surprisingly boring —for me, since I have no interest in voyeurism nor any desire whatsoever to partake, and (3) it’s impossible for them to be completely safe.

And yet, people who organize these parties can’t just throw their hands up into the air and say that latter part. They have to do something. The cynic in me wants to say it’s because they want to make sure that people will continue to attend the parties, that it’s gloss and shine to pretend they’re safe without ever explicitly saying whether they are or not.

The answer to what should be done, over and over again, has been consent. Consent education. Videos, training, codes of conduct, multi-page definitions that they expect their attendees to have read and committed to heart. There are entire entities, like Consent Academy and Consent Wizardry, to teach the nuances of sexual consent.

The problem with this is what’s seldom asked: does it work? Does consent education and thought prevent sexual violence? Does consent make for good sex?

The Definition & Philosophy of Consent

Bear with me through first defining consent before I deconstruct it in this section. Then I’ll back to sex parties and whether all that thought and talk of consent works in the next. Before you get started with this section: I’m not going to make it funny, “approachable”, or rely on tricks to keep your attention. You’re welcome to think I’m a feminist killjoy or a humorless bitch if you want. When we talk about consent, the subtext is sexual violence. The subject deserves gravitas. I’m going to give it that, and I hope you do too.

I wish we could just say consent is like obscenity: you know it when you see it. I want to say that it’s obvious. I believe it is: I know that many people who sexually harass and sexually assault know that what they’re doing is wrong, but don’t stop themselves in those moments. People aren’t that honest, not even with themselves, much less honest with others. And so, we need to define consent.

You’re in luck because I’ve read more than one book on consent. I’ve talked about way more than anyone ever needs to, too, and I’ve had the joy (that’s sarcasm) of studying it conceptually in law school. Years upon years of study and conversation, which can be distilled to a simple definition. Consent is given when a person voluntarily and willfully agrees in response to another person's proposition; to give consent is to agree to something. The person has to be the age of majority (e.g., eighteen; a legal adult), of sound mind (had the mental capacity to agree); consent is not valid if it is coerced, or given under duress, due to fraud or in error, and there are rules about sobriety. French jurist Jean Cabonnier wrote that “Consent is both the will of each contracting party and the agreement of their wills.”

It’s easy to define consent when signing a contract, a signature constitutes agreement. But sexual consent? There’s no signature on a dotted line that accompanied a multiple page contract of all the activities agreed upon with full, unalterable agreement as to what happens after the sex is over, no tidy exchange of goods and services. We’re left trying to apply legal scholarship to something that’s altogether different, more human, gets more into our deepest emotions and traumas. It’s hard. And no matter how many conversations, books, legal cases and theory, no matter how hard we try…I don’t think it’s even possible for it to ever become easy or clean.

In The Joy of Consent: A Philosophy of Good Sex, Manon Garcia tries to. She goes deep into the philosophical underpinnings of consent, bringing in Utilitarianism and John Stuart Mill, and Immanuel Kant.

For example, is it consent if it’s not non-verbal? In some Middle Eastern countries, a woman wearing a mini skirt is thought to be consenting to be harassed and propositioned. This is because it’s improper and ill-mannered for women in those countries to wear mini skirts. In the West, we broadly define consent and appropriate behavior differently. When people from these countries immigrate to Norway, the immigrants are put into cultural training programs and taught that it is not appropriate to harass a woman in a mini skirt.

Now, don’t feel too good about yourself as a Westerner reading about how great we are about not harassing women in mini skirts. Earlier today (June 11, 2025), Harvey Weinstein was found guilty of one count of criminal sexual act, found not guilty of another count of the same, and no verdict on the charge of rape. If you’re like me, well, you might be rolling at your eyes at the not guilty. There are too many Americans (and Brits and French folks, et al) who think that the young actresses and models he (allegedly) assaulted and harassed should have known what would happen when they were invited to hotel rooms by a very wealthy, powerful older man. In an interview after the 2016 presidential election, I listened to an interview with an older woman. She excused the allegations of sexual abuse and rape against the incoming president, stating that it was to be expected of wealthy men. The women should have known better, and they probably did and were attracted to his wealth and power. In other words, these people think women are all opportunists, crying rape after the fact. They also believe that the onus falls on women to predict which men are rapists, and keep themselves safe — they’re ignoring we as a society should tell men not to rape women.

In short, we have different definitions of proper behavior, and what constitutes agreement in terms of sexual consent.

There’s a lot of scare-mongering on all sides, liberal, conservative, progressive, about what consent is and whether we’ve gone too far. Progressive professors write op-eds on how nearly all campus sex is rape. That consent can now be retroactively withdrawn (it can’t, not under legal definition). Conservatives argue that men are in danger because women have begun to speak out, and because of our shifting definition of consent.

Other leftist scholars, like feminist legal scholar and philosopher Catharine A. Mackinnon, who aligned with fundamentalist Christian conservatives on banning pornography, thought we should do away the standard of consent, or non-consent, to define sexual violence. Both Mackinnon and Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn feminists, have been accused of equating all heterosexual sex with rape. Dworkin denied this, stating instead:

"What I think is that sex must not put women in a subordinate position. It must be reciprocal and not an act of aggression from a man looking only to satisfy himself. That's my point."

As usual, feminist thinker’s words are twisted and we’re called overkill and killjoys. People equate feminist with prude, too.

My point is, when a sexual interaction is equal, consent is not needed and does not occur because there is no transgression to be redeemed. Call it sex. And when a sexual incursion is not equal, no amount of consent makes it equal, hence redeems it from being violative. Call it sexual assault.¹

Mackinnon and Dworkin thought sex shouldn’t happen between unequals. But that’s impossible: women are too often in the subordinate position, and they choose and want to have sex despite that inequality. That choice makes it not rape. In making sexual choices, inequality based on gender, class, cis-genderedness, race, etc. should be taken into account, by both the person that is privileged and the person who is oppressed. But if we try to apply “privilege” and “oppression” in an intersectional way to decide near-perfect equality — that’s impossible. Unrealistic, impossible to regulate in any way whatsoever.

The best definition we have for sexual consent is affirmative consent. A really simple way to remember affirmative consent is that it’s yes means yes. If someone freezes up or isn’t conscious and the other party continues with sex, then consent wasn’t given. Affirmative consent is the law on California college campuses, that there must be affirmative, [unambiguous], conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.

For me, this is personally important. When I was raped, my rapist moved to fast for me to say no or fight him off. When I spoke to survivors he’d raped before me, even years prior, he had the same modus operandi. Meaning that if he was raping people in another place or an earlier time, when the standard was no means no, then I and his prior victims wouldn’t be able to say he raped us. It was already bad enough, I got so much flack for coming forward; I couldn’t imagine I could have even tried to come forward if that rape happened in, say 1980.

The other book I’ve read on consent is Joseph Fischel’s Screw Consent, A Better Politics of Sexual Justice. I agree with some of Fischel’s opinions: that affirmative consent as the least bad legal standard we have for the definition of rape…but I also found his attempts to make jokes and keep the topic light-hearted and funny really off-putting.

Manon Garcia argues from the liberal, Kantian perspective: that consent is crucial to good sex, so if we want to have good sex, we need to think about and have full consent. Kant views consent as the expression of the autonomous will of human beings and thus, their dignity. That makes a lot of sense: anyone who has been harassed or assaulted will tell you that the experience strips them of their dignity. The Kantian view also acknowledges people as ends in and of themselves — people are never to be seen as means to an end, eg., objects to used to be sexual satisfaction. Under this view of full consent and human dignity, you’d have to take into account that women and others aren’t equal to men, and how adjust for that.

Where Garcia’s argument goes wrong, in my opinion, is that consent is needed for good sex. I get why people make that argument: it’s meant to be persuasive. It presumes the audience is stupid enough to fall for that argument, it talks down. Hey, consensual sex is better sex! It’s more fun! Really? Since when? And here Fischel gets it right: no, you can have really bad sex that’s also perfectly consensual. There are also victims who orgasm through rape, and that orgasm doesn’t invalidate or make it not rape.

However we define the “enthusiastic” element of “enthusiastic consent,” it is simply untrue that enthusiastic consent—or for that matter, and here is a phenomenological whopper, any consent—is necessary for a sexual experience to be enjoyable. ²

Certainly, consent isn’t a necessary or sufficient condition for enjoyable sex. Consent education has value, though not in preventing sexual assault. It’s great for teaching communication and for reducing bad feelings around sexual relationships. For example, it encourages people to negotiate dislikes, likes, hard boundaries. It also encourages people to talk about expectations outside of sex, eg., aftercare (what happens following sex) and make clear whether the sex is leading up to a romantic relationship or not.

Are Sex Parties Safe?

A few days ago, Nicole Daedone — founder of an “orgasmic meditation” company was found guilty on charges of coercion. She started a company called OneTaste, the core idea of which was a gloved person (usually a man) publicly stimulating genitals (usually a woman’s) in a specific way for fifteen minutes. The coercion was toward the employees, who were coerced into paying for classes and provide unpaid labor. The employees alleged that they were chosen because they had past trauma, and that trauma was exploited by leadership.

OneTaste began here in San Francisco. Unsurprising, really. The People’s Temple — Jim Jones, the cult leader that killed his followers via cyanide-laced Flavor Aid (knock-off brand Kool Aid), also started in San Francisco. San Francisco is a very cool place, but it’s also prone to cult behavior.

I know the OneTaste method for sexual stimulation because I’ve had friends tell me about it. For the friends of mine who fell into the sex party scene here: it’s another cult. Not a cult like the People’s Temple, but something more like OneTaste, which didn’t ask people to give up all their wealth or move to another country for the cult, but was nonetheless coercive and manipulative. I’ve mentioned this to friends. They agree, and then go back to the parties. I’ve asked friends of color about this, and I haven’t had a single one disagree that the scene is itself pretty racist. As I type this, I’m thinking of nearly all have told me stories of the racism they’ve experienced. Even my white friends will say that: comment on the higher positions held by white folks, that people of color are discriminated against, that white people are considered broadly more attractive and fuckable.

I shudder when I think about the woman who holds herself out as a consent trainer and restorative justice advocate who also told me that a Black woman was to blame for her rape by her white boyfriend, and that people of color should have their own events — that people of color shouldn’t expect to be included by white people.

In her essay Ending Female Sexual Oppression, bell hooks wrote this about the sexual liberation movement:

The focus on “sexual liberation” has always carried with it the assumption that the goal of such effort is to make it possible for individuals to engage in more and/or better sexual activity. Yet one aspect of sexual norms that many people find oppressive is the assumption that one “should” be engaged in sexual activity. The “should” is one expression of sexual coercion.

I love that quote and it resonates with me because that’s how I feel about sex parties and the sexual positive movement. That they sound like a really good idea, the idea of throwing off the shackles of sexual shame and oppression and having as much sex as you like — very hippie-era free love — but that’s not the reality of them. Another essay, by

Freya India

on porn, could also be applied to sex parties:

The most painful realization to me, as I get older, is the gaslighting. Girls like me grew up being told that this is completely normal; healthy, even. Pornhub is a right; it’s good for relationships. It’s not cheating; it stops men from cheating! It’s like food and water! Every guy watches it, you can’t expect him not to! You’re overthinking it; maybe you have anxiety?

And so we thought the problem was us. Boys who realized this was harming them got gaslit and ridiculed; girls were made to feel insecure and broken

You could swap “sex party” for “Pornhub”, porn for sex positivity/sexual liberation. Like the OneTaste employees, far more women than the average — have prior sexual trauma and join the sex party scene. And if you’re like me and don’t want to partake, you’re gaslit and ridiculed, you’re told that you’re not normal, and that sex with many people is necessary and it’s good and if you’re not with it, you’re the problem. Maybe you deserve to be raped, because, hey, sex is good. The more sex partners you have, the better. The kinkier and risker the sex, the better, too. Clearly you don’t get it. Maybe you need to be forced into understanding it.

The reality of the sex party scene is that there’s a lot of sexual violence. A lot. And a lot of the time, the perpetrators of that violence are allowed to continue participating in the party. Whether or not they’re allowed usually depends on how much social power they have: very small numbers of the less powerful are kicked out, cited as examples of action and deep care about safety on the part of party organizers. When the party organizer himself was accused? Or one of his close friends? Well, then…

Does consent education and thought prevent sexual violence?

If you were paying attention, reader, you’ll notice what I’m leading up to: that despite the focus on consent and the necessity of a consent in defining what rape is, consent education doesn’t actually keep people safe or prevent sexual violence. It doesn’t necessarily make sex “good”. As evidence, I presented to you the San Francisco sex party scene.

I chose to frame my argument using a real life example, but there’s research that backs my observation. For the past forty or so years, the rates of sexual harassment in the workplace have stayed steady, despite consent-focused sexual harassment trainings. I wrote about this in more detail HERE, but the relevant part is this: that those sexual harassment trainings, the role playing and demonstrations of good consent actually made things worse.

There are other things that are more effective in reducing sexual harassment and sexual assault: bystander training, but most of all, having more women and people of color in leadership. Here the second-wave feminists were right: the issue is actually, strongly rooted in oppression and inequality. Usually, the workplaces with more women and women of color in leadership had far less harassment. Why? Women tend to believe reports, act upon them, and not retaliate against accusers/victims. Women of color experience more harassment and assault, which is why it’s particularly important to also address racism. In my work, I’ve found nearly 70% of the survivors I’ve helped are Asian-American — large sets of data also show that women of color are targeted at higher rates. This is why my feminist advocacy is intersectional.

Research also shows that organizations that are highly hierarchal tend to have more harassment and assault. Because the sex party scene is stratified on race lines, and with socially powerful, often wealthy, too often problematic men leading it…well, you can see how there’s a problem. In my work around sexual assault and survivor support, I’ve also observed that the more stratified, cult-like, and domination-based a group is, the more sexual assault happens in it.

The underlying thought of using consent education to stop sexual violence is logically unsound. This part is tricky, but I’ll try to explain: that if you say consent education is the best way to stop sexual violence, you’re also presuming that sexual violence can be remedied through a better understanding of consent…which means you’re saying that consent violations (aka, sexual harassment and sexual assault) arise because of misunderstandings of consent. That means you’re basically saying that sexual harassment and sexual assault are mistakes. The reality is that they are often quite intentional, and the reality is that they’re complex and the solution isn’t as easy as “consent training”.

The non-cynical part of me understands why people resort to consent education: they want to do something, they think that doing anything shows that they care to stop sexual violence is in and of itself effective, and they don’t give more thought to actual effectiveness. The cynic in me thinks that the things that actually work: reducing oppression and inequality, addressing racism, addressing culture, and less gaslighting of women and giving them more social power…those things are so hard that the people in dangerous scenes and organizations chose not to do them. They chose to uphold the status quo because it’s easier and beneficial for them.

The Joy of Sex

I’m not a cynic, though. I am a fighter, and I plan to keep fighting to make the world a more safe place. I have to believe that it’s possible to do so, or else I couldn’t continue fighting.

In my work with survivors and in ending sexual violence, I remind myself throughout that I believe that sex is essentially sacred. Sex is otherworldly, the closest we can get to a secular divine. There’s deep emotional connectivity, joy, and creative power that can be found in consensual, loving sexuality for people of all genders. Sex is not abuse. Sex and love are in many ways the antidote and opposite of abuse.

In her essay Uses of the Erotic, Audre Lorde wrote

But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revolution, nor succumbs to the belief that sensation is enough….The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony.

In her essay, Ending Female Sexual Oppression, bell hooks wrote about the shortcomings of the sexual liberation movement. “Ironically, some feminists have tended to dismiss issues of sexual pleasure, well-being, and contendedness as irrelevant.”

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reading and finding more material from people who are advocating against the way pornography is ubiquitous and entrenched today, like the Freya India essay I cited above. Unlike the second wave feminists that went before us, those of us who are fighting for more healthy sexuality and against sexual violence — two sides of the same coin — remember that both sex and love are beautiful and not inherently wrong.

I hope that in keeping that lesson engrained in our modern-day fight, we might succeed where those who went before us did not.

unknown canon is a subscriber supported platform that advocates for womenkind. If you can, please consider upgrading to keep this newsletter independent. Every paid subscriber allows me to continue to invest more time into feminist and antirape advocacy. Thank you so much for the time you’ve spent reading my work. 🩷

1. Mackinnon, Catharine A. Rape Refined. Harvard Law & Policy Review. Vol 10, p 476. 2017.

2. Fischel, Joseph J. Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice. University of California Press. 2019. p 2.