pink By all means don't toe my line but don't think you have the corner on the feminist viewpoint insofar as it represents women generally.
If you can wrap your head around the idea that intelligent people can't get the hang of trains occasionally, surely you can understand that sex might occasionally be a little more complicated and therefore might quite possibly flummox someone, especially if they're both inexperienced, feeling under pressure to act things they don't feel, and have had a drink or two?If you see on a train timetable that a train is leaving at two o'clock, at least you have some solid information to go ahead with.
Since you don't yet get to decree who women can have as sexual partners and which men should be banned from having sex, I'm not sure why you feel it's an option to say they shouldn't be having sex in the first place. They can and they will and they might benefit from an 'idiot's guide to consent' in the same way that your friend might find a masterclass on catching trains enormously helpful.
I'm not suggesting you be gentle (WTF?).
I haven't yet seen a really engaged feminist response to why consent is always easy-peasy given those threads that pop up relatively frequently in which posters try to decide if they gave consent for sex that they didn't want, or if their consent was never sought in the first place.
My feeling in almost all of those threads has been that the person in question was raped and it's always stunning to see how many women disagree.
The question 'Did he have reasonable grounds to think you were participating?' is the one that everyone asks themselves. They don't respond: 'Did he ask you if he could penetrate you? He didn't? Well then you were raped. He should have seen there was reason to doubt and the fact that he didn't makes him a rapist.' That seems to depart from common sense on threads in which women acknowledge that they had taken care to seem enthusiastic in kissing/sexual touching - in fact, as if there was no reason to doubt their enjoyment - but hadn't intended to convey enthusiasm for penetration.
I would understand the feminist position better if there was an insistence that verbal consent should always be sought (seems to cover both parties interests) but this is rejected. I find it enormously frustrating. Making penetration without irrefutable evidence of consent completely unacceptable would be much easier if consent was recognisable a mile off, which is usually but not invariably the case.
Your insistence that problems in communication can't occur (because you see a line of argument that could potentially be exploited in court) is only facilitating more of these fucked up situations IMO.
More posters would disagree but don't want to stick their heads above the parapet. Surely you don't want that - a situation where other women disagree with what you are claiming is representative of women and can't say so? And all, apparently, in the name of protecting women. One would have thought that these are the very people you would want to be engaging with - they are women, they are as clever as you, as valid as you and yes, they do, generally, give a damn about rape victims.