When I was a kid, the narrative around sexual assault, rape, and consent was very different than what it is today. It was better than it had been in my mother’s generation, when it generally wasn’t talked about at all, but it still wasn’t talked about the way it should have been. Sexual assault, abuse, and rape were discussed mostly in terms of “stranger danger,” and I think consent was a word I only heard in terms of living wills.
And I got more of an education than most, because my mom worked in the field.
The New York Public Schools had a great curriculum in terms of medically accurate sex education, especially for those times. We didn’t learn a lot about LGBTQ+ issues, but we did learn about STIs, condom usage, how pregnancy happens, and how to avoid it. We understood that sex could be pleasurable and that sex could be a deeply complex subject that might be better left until we were older. This, I think, enabled many of us to delay sexual activity until we were better equipped to make informed decisions.
But we didn’t explicitly learn about consent – not women, and not men.
I hope it’s better now. My daughter’s eight, and she knows there are “special adult ways of touching” she wants to know absolutely nothing more about (her words, not mine). We’ve talked about consent in that context, and it’s a conversation I intend to keep having as she’s ready to hear more.
The reason we have to have these conversations, of course, is that we’re living in times when she can be walking past a newsstand and see headlines like “Sex Crime Accusation Against President,” or against Supreme Court Nominee, or against Congressman, or Senator, or… you get the picture. One of the comments I’ve heard, from a number of different sources, was that behavior in one of the above-listed cases is “normal” for seventeen-year-old boys.
(It isn’t. Just… for the record, it isn’t.)
But anyway, this isn’t a political blog, although given the times we’re in politics do kind of seep into everything, don’t they? The reason I’m bringing this up is that as a writer of romance, and a writer of romance that often includes explicit content, I have to look at my work and ask myself if I’m doing enough to promote a healthy culture of consent.
Consent and Fiction
Now, I know some of you have already clicked away. “If I want to be preached at I’ll go to church! Notice, I’m not there!”
I’ve seen some times when authors, myself included, have gotten a little bit heavy-handed on consent. No one wants to read a lecture. And it can be deeply moving to have a scene where two people just spontaneously move, without the need for a whole lot of discussion, negotiation, forms signed in triplicate. (Two or more people, I should say. No judging.)
That said, it doesn’t take a whole lot of extra time to add in,
“Is this okay?”
“Yes.”
Sometimes you may want the ambiguity there. I just did a scene for a ghostwriting gig in which I deliberately avoided discussion, to highlight some of the differences in morality for both characters involved. This wasn’t a dub-con scene, for the record, but I wanted him to clearly be thinking about the more aggressive partner and to show his concern for her.
I completely understand some people’s frustration. They’re already being asked to show examples of, or at least consideration for, safer sex practices when writing about sex. Some folks refuse, because they’re not writing a how-to manual and they feel they’re writing for adults who should already know this stuff. For me, it takes me out of a scene if some consideration isn’t given to avoidance of STIs or pregnancy (where appropriate.) I lose respect for the characters’ intelligence otherwise, and if I think they’re stupid I don’t want to read about them.
For me, consent in fiction is a little bit like that. I get some folks might not want to clutter up a beautifully written scene with a lot of unnecessary dialogue – and there are times, when two characters know each other well enough and have a good enough understanding, where it might be a little much.
But for two people to just throw down for the first time without any discussion? Maybe once it wouldn’t have struck me as odd. Now it just reads as a little “off” to me. Kind of like those drinks with names like the “panty snatcher” in drink books. Before they’d have just struck me as kind of gross and designed to make the bartender card you twice because he thinks you’re twelve, but now they definitely strike me as sleazy.
It’s a function of the times we live in. On the one hand, there isn’t any more sexual assault, or rape, than there used to be. The stigma of surviving it is lower, so people are more willing to confront their attackers and try to hold them to some kind of accountability. On the other hand, Increased awareness does make us all look at what we put into our work and think, am I part of the problem here?