Consent and ‘anything goes’ sex

[Anothernameforallthis]

I work in an educational establishment, not in the U.K. but English-speaking. Without going into revealing detail, we recently had a presentation from a professor of sexual health from the U.S. Her presentation was great in many ways. The overall message was that, frankly, as long as there is consent, anything goes in a sexual encounter and nothing is shameful in any way. Butt plugs, anal, choking, fisting; whatever - she provided graphic expectations of all of them. As long as both parties are consenting adults, anything - anything - goes. She encouraged straight men to experiment with anal penetration. She provided a detailed « Sex toys and how to keep them clean » guide. The whole shebang.

Is this the way it is now ? All I could think was that a lot of this comes from porn.

her focus on consent as the green light for all this really troubled me. I’m not convinced that all young girls / women are necessarily able to consent, properly, even if they say Yes.

My sister works in a UK university, in student services. Basically when a student breaks the university code of conduct (which all students sign up to when they matriculate) she’s the one that investigates the complaints and assesses the evidence for / against the student. A lot of the complaints are of student-on-student sexual assaults, but where the female student does not want to go to the police. Often it’s because she feels like she ‘consented’ to something that she really didn’t want to. We bring girls up to be so compliant, to be kind and nice and polite. They seem to have no idea about the boundaries they c are allowed to set. That they are allowed to say no to rough or unpleasant or kinky sex.

i guess alcohol and drugs are a confounding factor here. The prof is talking about an ideal situation where both parties are sober. Assertive. Aware of and ready to enforce their personal boundaries.

i just seemed to me that we are in the worst of both worlds. Where, literally, anything goes sexually. But where we are still socialising girls to be ‘nice’ and be ‘kind’.

this is exactly what I wanted to say. well said.

like a pp said, this is really really well put.

It sounds like her talk was lacking, consent and the right not to want to do any of these things should have topped and tailed it, along with information about power dynamics and conditioning,

if it wasn’t I’d feed back very strongly and arrange another speaker to cover this.

How was this relevant at work though?

Lesbians sometimes (me included) like fisting, which, if done with, of course, full consent, and knowledge, care, and lots of lube, can be one of the most exquisitely erotic and pleasurable experiences a woman could ever give or have

@SantiMakesMeLaugh my final point about bringing DC up to say no was in response too:

We bring girls up to be so compliant, to be kind and nice and polite. They seem to have no idea about the boundaries they c are allowed to set. That they are allowed to say no to rough or unpleasant or kinky sex.

I don’t bring my girls up to be nice and polite to men about consenting about anything, I bring them up to say no if they’re uncomfortable.

I am uncomfortable with this sort of presentation. I fear they contribute to a climate where young women and girls think anal sex, choking or fisting are equivalent choices to mutual masturbation, PIV sex or oral. I would prefer to see workshops done on knowing your body, knowing how to give yourself pleasure, the social and cultural context of sexual expectations, consent and complications.

Consent like a penis or a fist can be withdrawn at any time.

I think that's very dangerous and the fact it's in an educational establishment is sickening. I don't want my child to be told those things, by anyone, ever, especially in a place where she has a baseline view is a place of authority and education.

I don't want to have to mitigate that viewpoint being told to her by a place she would inherently trust. I'd rather speak to her about it outside of her being exposed to that.

I think this is a matter of life and death, given women die in these situations and given the feelings she could have after "accidentally consenting" or implying consent as you have talked about above, could lead to suicidal thoughts.

Couple this with being told you're a nasty person if you don't believe people can change sex, I think I'm going to remove my children from the UK school system and educate them at home. It's not like the national curriculum makes up for any of this. I no longer see any benefit from school and great potential harm from attending for all those years.

I apologise for this drip feed but the talk was given to 18-19 yr olds, not school children.

it was just such a cognitive dissonance to me. The prof basically saying “anything goes, no shame, as long as you both consent “ and my sister talking about how confused young people are about what consent actually is.

I remember going along with sex when I didn’t really want to because I didn’t know how / when / in what circumstances I could say no. My sister is trying to help young female students who have basically been raped / sexually assaulted but they feel they can’t make a formal complaint because they didn’t say no forcefully or clearly enough.

Still not okay but thank you for that clarification. I had heard schools having talks by Mermaids and also stuff for younger kids that touched on this, which I will have to look into because it's all very worrying.

I was born in 1980 and went to school and this stuff was just not talked about, and I can't see any harm that came to me from that, nor anyone.

When you're young and inexperienced if this stuff is expected of you, even subtly, it must be so scary and intimidating and being scared and intimidated don't make for healthy relationships.

Boys should not be told it's normal to expect this stuff either, because it isn't. It's kinky because it's not the norm.

It's perfectly fine to be into kinky stuff but I don't think it should be normalised in places of education, nor anywhere, unless you specifically seek it out.

OP I agree with you. For far too long young women accept sexual practices that they are uncomfortable with, perhaps out of fear of rejection, or low self esteem meaning they don't feel able to say no.

Haven't RTFT but this reminds me a lot of a gender: a wider lens podcast where sex therapists were being trained. I'll look it up.

It's this one

open.spotify.com/episode/0OvAEIz7vdChCJHfC8rEsK?si=yyIu6TGnSgimV97BuLcWZw

I think if I was going to summarise what my sister has told me it would this: ‘ I see so many girls who have been coerced into sex or agreed to do x y z because they were pissed or felt they couldn’t say no. None of this is consensual sex. But is it rape? ‘

and that’s why they don’t go to the police.

Maybe the broadening of sexual boundaries is a red herring. Maybe it doesn’t matter what the actual acts are.

I completely agree with you OP and am depressed and disheartened by how many people use the argument that ‘anything goes’ which fails to take account deeply internalised misogyny for both sexes.

her focus on consent as the green light for all this really troubled me. I’m not convinced that all young girls / women are necessarily able to consent, properly, even if they say Yes

Many many young women are ‘agreeing’ to acts they’re not comfortable with and are in fact highly dangerous both physically and emotionally. These so-called normalising talks presentations etc by professionals including on university campuses are shocking BS and we are badly letting our young down. In fact, it’s not healthy for young men either. My teenage DD calmly told me how NFS was ‘perfectly acceptable’ as long as both parties were in agreement and you agreed to a code word for it to stop etc. Funny how the NFS is always men doing it to women and never vice versa.

We had a long talk about that as well as how it takes approximately 4psi (pounds per square inch) to occlude the jugular vein, 11psi the carotid artery and 34psi the trachea. To give some perspective an average male handshake is 80–100 psi. Whilst the force required to open a fizzy drink can is 20psi

What the hell is the world coming to?

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1752928X21000135

Totally agree DrBlackbird.

Nowhere does anyone query whether you've actually got a bit of a problem if you have to choke your partner to feel turned on, or if you have to risk death by strangulation every time you have sex to feel you've had really good sex.

It's almost societal grooming to give a talk like the OP describes to 18 year old girls without saying, you know, you don't have to do any of this shit ever in the whole of your life, and you can still have fulfilling sex.

I don’t bring my girls up to be nice and polite to men about consenting about anything, I bring them up to say no if they’re uncomfortable.

Good for you. So did I. Meanwhile nearly every other thing in society and culture is telling them that normal girls like anal, like fisting, like pornified sex. Just like the woman giving the presentation described in the OP did. So your dd is in a sexual encounter that is consensual and he asks for anal or fisting. Do you not think that having heard a presentation that this is all perfectly normal and usual wouldn't affect your dd's response to this. these are young women - not seasoned 40 year olds.

I have 3 adult kids but the one thing I've learned is that what I say/think matters but so does what their peers say and think,

^This.

Even without the sexual aspect, I don't really see that it can ever be considered acceptable to choke someone just because they supposedly consented.

It is deeply disturbing that someone wanting to harm another person for sexual gratification is being normalised.

The way me and my oh, have discussed different activities, is to talk about them one at a time, to see what we both agree or disagree on, then we plan our session activities from there, then we are both on the same page so to speak.

I fully agree that consent is a complex thing and that the socialisation of women and girls to be compliant and self-sacraficing is problematic.

That said, I'm also quite happy with the idea that kinky sex is fine between consenting adults.

I think there are two different (but related) issues here, meaning both the speaker and you/your sister can be right.

I do think that adults should be able to consent to "kinky" sex. My partner and I both enjoy some things that aren't entirely "vanilla" (nothing nearly as risky as choking etc) and I don't think the government should have a say in whether or not we can do those things.

In the UK, you already can't consent to actual bodily harm during sex (famous Laskey, Jaggard and Brown case). I think banning more things would be difficult, and I'd be strongly against a ban on certain things such as anal sex. An outright ban would disproportionately affect gay men, but a heterosexual-specific ban would imply that only women are unable to understand risks well enough to consent. I think that things like that do - and should - come down to whether both parties consent.

However, what the professor perhaps left out of her talk is the wider societal things your sister mentioned. Feeling forced to consent can happen with oral or PIV as well as rough/kinky sex. I think it's vital that we really reinforce the message that it's okay to say no to sex and to specific sexual acts, and that only enthusiastic consent is true consent.

So glad someone brought this up.

We bring girls up to be so compliant, to be kind and nice and polite.

You lost me at this lazy generalisation- which decade are you asking about. We're in 21st century 2022, who are you saying brings up girls to be compliant?

You must be new to MN is all I can say!

This is very well put. Absolutely.

OP, you are also right when you said
“We bring girls up to be so compliant, to be kind and nice and polite. They seem to have no idea about the boundaries they are allowed to set. That they are allowed to say no to rough or unpleasant or kinky sex.”

I was brought up to be confident in speaking up for myself, setting boundaries etc and YET in retrospect I can see in my younger self that my desire to “be kind” and also frankly just to be seen as desirable by a man meant that I often went along with things that were anything but pleasurable and even into my late 20s amounted to coercion, but could be mistaken for consent by men that don’t understand female socialisation or what doesn’t bring pleasure. It isn’t always obvious, especially when people are in their first sexual relationships.

I agree with others here that there has also been normalisation of more extreme acts, some of which can have significant and unexpected consequences (eg choking). In England and Wales, the domestic abuse act will making non-fatal a criminal offence for the first time - this includes any “choking with consent” where the victim sustains serious harm, even if it’s “unintentional”.

In discussion with single friends recently and looking at what’s on social media, it seems like any discussion around these issues and the potential for abuse is too easily written off as “kink shaming.” It isn’t. I’m all for people having whatever kind of pleasurable sex they want, but there are definitely abusive behaviours out there dressed up as “kink” and therefore something that a loving partner should be up for otherwise they’re “kink shaming.” It’s totally ok to not want to participate in a partner’s kink. If a partner has to repeatedly talk you into something or shames you into it then that isn’t consent, it’s coercion.

If my daughters and sons were in the kind of class that you describe then I hope that there would also be a conversation around these sorts of things.