The theoretical possibility that no means yes

Oh yes. You'd encourage a much smaller, better defined project because things are so different and you couldn't tackle the whole area of consent in a dissertation.

Actually that's a very good point. They are poles apart, quite literally, so it's odd and a bit vague that she's proposing to write about "the grey areas when yes means no and no means yes"

Surely, these aren't even the only "grey areas". What about instances where neither "yes" or "no" is used? The vast majority of people don't ask permission from their partner before they have sex but the consent is implied. If one person has a different definition of consent to the other then it's problematic. I've not done a masters so I don't know if this is too wide a concept to explore but it sounds like it perhaps might be - maybe you could encourage her to pin it down a bit more? It sounds like she's had an idea but not really thought it through properly.

I agree Bertie. 'When yes means no' is quite different ground to 'when no means yes'.

I think there's a difference between a more open-ended study in consent and one where the aim is to explore 'grey areas like when no means yes'. You'd easily be able to tell that from the research proposal and ethics form what it was likely to be.

The fact that the student used that kind of phrase at all suggests that she needs much, much closer supervision than she's getting. If I were supervising a student who wanted to do something like this, I'd be very nervous indeed.

I think "When yes means no" is a hugely important question actually. From there you could go into coercion, domestic/sexual abuse, emotional maturity of younger women/teenagers and what constitutes real consent if you're likely to say yes because you don't know how to say no.

It's hard. I think that before you really look at this stuff in detail it's very easy to have vague half formed opinions about saying no when you mean yes.

In my opinion she's probably not talking about a mutual fantasy agreed situation, but more about a situation where a woman or girl (because let's face it we're talking stereotypical gender roles here) says no because she thinks she should - she doesn't want to appear "cheap" or "easy", or she is following some rule she thinks she should about no sex until X date or X arbitrary time period, or she has strong religious/moral conditioning which tells her that women "shouldn't" want sex (at all, or in this situation) and hence she is confused. (I'm a bit about the extent to which a grown woman can be confused about whether or not she wants sex, and surely again the safe thing to do in a confused situation is to leave it)

I think that you really need to make her aware that despite there being actual situations where women might say no but mean yes - this or the fantasy situation - it's still important to draw a distinction and Buffy's point about nothing bad happening if they don't have sex is a good one too. It almost sounds like she's in the position of feeling sorry for rapists/men who have been accused of rape, especially those she sees as in the "grey area" of not being sure whether their partner has consented. It might be worth encouraging her to explore these kinds of areas. Something interesting to look at would be studies about the mindsets of men convicted of rape - the Object comparison of rapist quotes vs lads' mag quotes for example, and another I've seen linked on here but no idea what it was called - it was a survey/interview done in a prison IIRC, and they asked two sets of questions, one was about whether the men had raped and why etc, and the other never mentioned the word rape but instead described acts of rape e.g. Have you ever coerced a woman into having sex with you. Also introducing her to the idea of enthusiastic consent and the concept of consent in general, there are some excellent blog posts on this although I'm not aware of any academic literature - others might be?

It could be a very good topic but it definitely shouldn't be approached flippantly, she needs to be prepared to have her existing views challenged. If she's going to ignore anything that doesn't fit her hypothesis then it's not going to be very constructive - although I would hope there are some kind of guidelines about that in the first place?

I'd be suspicious that her supervisor and the university ethics committe don't really know enough about exactly what this student is up to. Our ethics committee would never approve a student doing a study including the phrase when 'no means yes' with regard to consent and rape.