This essay argues that when it comes to teaching young people about sexuality, we need to do more than make the case that “no means no, and yes means yes.” We need to make the case that consent is not enough. Great sex – ethical sex – is rooted less in mutual agreement than in mutual enthusiasm. It’s about moving from a “yes” to a “Hell, yes!”

I’m the elder of two sons raised in the ‘70s and early ‘80s by an avowedly feminist single mother. Mom hosted meetings of the League of Women Voters in our living room; Ms. Magazine rested on the coffee table. My brother and I didn’t get much of a sex talk from our mother, but she was gently insistent that we “respect” the girls we dated. When I was fifteen, I had my first girlfriend, Carmen. One afternoon, as my Mom drove me over to Carmen’s house, she warned me: “Don’t push her further than she wants to go. No means no, always.” I was acutely embarrassed (Carmen and I hadn’t moved beyond the kissing stage), and changed the subject. But I remembered the message.

The problem with the “no means no” slogan, as vital as it is, is that it implies the opposite is always true: “yes means yes.” “Yes means yes!” can be a triumphant statement about women’s sexual autonomy. But in a world where so many young women feel pressured to please others (particularly men), too many of the “yeses” uttered in dorm rooms and in the back seats of cars don’t reflect authentic desire. Too many “yeses” are coerced; too many quiet “okays” and “I guess so’s” are interpreted as blanket permission. When we confine our advice about sexual decision-making to a simple “no” means “no”, we risk sending the message that anything that isn’t a clear and strong “no” constitutes a “yes.” And as countless anecdotes told by young women reveal, that’s a recipe for disaster.

When I went to Berkeley, I joined an organization called Peer Sexuality Outreach (PSO). PSO sent teams to dorms, Greek houses, co-ops, and off-campus student apartments. We offered workshops on safer sex, dating, birth control, and preventing sexual assault. (Yes, we played around with dental dams and rolled condoms down many a banana.) The students in PSO were encouraged to develop their own workshops, and my junior year I worked on a team that designed something new called “Consent and Beyond”.

“Consent and Beyond” grew out of some of the stories we heard in PSO meetings. Too often, we heard the familiar anecdotes of sexual encounters gone wrong. Sometimes, we got involved in cases of rape and assault. But other times, we listened to stories of young women who had sex they didn’t want to have – but to which they had said “yes” or “okay” or “I guess” because they were tired of arguing or afraid of disappointing the guy they were with. And as our PSO group debriefed one night after a particularly painful session, we came up with the idea of “Consent and Beyond.” The basic idea was simple: yes means yes, but that “yes” needs to be grounded in genuine enthusiasm.

One problem we addressed then – and which still needs addressing today – is what I’ve come to call the “stoplight” phenomenon. Traffic signals, of course, have three colors: red for stop, yellow for caution, green for go. Good drivers are taught to stop on “red”, which functions as a “no”. But of course, even at the busiest urban intersections, no light stays red indefinitely. If you wait long enough at a stoplight, every red will become green. And when all we do is teach young men that “no means stop” when it comes to sexual boundaries, we often send them the message that if they just wait long enough (or pester, push, nag, beg, play passive-aggressive games) they’ll get the “green light” they’re so hungry for. Good “sexual boundaries workshops” must go beyond the “no means no” message. Specifically, we looked at the ways in which many men will accept a “no” as a “yellow light” rather than a red, assuming that if they simply keep up unrelenting pressure (often abetted by alcohol or exhaustion) they’ll get the permission they seek.

This stoplight analogy is particularly helpful if we consider the meaning of the “yellow”. In driver’s education classes, students are taught that yellow means “slow down”. Of course, most folks on the surface streets of this country interpret it rather differently in practice; for all too many, a yellow means “Gun it, before it turns red!” Our cultural stereotypes about rape and consent involve a similar disconnect between what makes sense and what often happens in reality. In our imagination, a rapist is someone who “runs the red light” in blatant disregard of a clear, unambiguous “no”. But while that may be what is needed to meet the legal definition of rape, this understanding ignores the complexity of consent – and enthusiasm. It’s not uncommon for, say, a young woman to be eager to “make out” with a guy she likes. She may send a clear message of “yes” to kissing and caressing. She may not, for example, want to take off her pants or have the guy try and take them off for her. She may push his hands away when he tries to unbutton them, all the while kissing him with apparent excitement. Contrary to what some argue, she’s not sending a mixed message at all. Her enthusiasm for one set of pleasurable activities does not vitiate her right to reject something “more.” There is never a point past which consent cannot be withdrawn.

Just like at an intersection, a yellow light ought to be interpreted as a signal to slow down. In most sexual encounters, consent is fluid: with each kiss and caress it is negotiated. The currency of that negotiation is desire; not the desire to just “get it over with” but authentic arousal. Sometimes, we might want to be grabbed passionately and have our partner’s hands immediately on our genitals; other times, we might want a much-longer period of foreplay. We have the right to insist that we go no further than we are ready to go at any given moment. A “not yet” might, in a matter of only a few moments, turn into a “God, please, now!” For young people, so often so awkward (and, too often, intoxicated) it can be all too easy to miss non-verbal signals.

I remember well that first Consent and Beyond workshop. It was the spring of 1988, and we did the workshop in a women’s co-op house just across the street from Memorial Stadium. Our PSO team was nervous, especially because the advertising we’d done for the event had proven more successful than we had anticipated. We had three dozen women and perhaps fifteen men. We ran out of chips and Cokes fast. Early on in the workshop, we brought up the “stoplight” phenomenon – and the atmosphere became electric. As we talked about reds and greens – and, especially, yellows — furious nods of recognition spread across the room. A workshop designed to last ninety minutes went on twice as long.

Twenty years later, I still teach workshops on consent and sexual decision-making at my own college and elsewhere. Over the years, I’ve incorporated much of what was first developed informally in those PSO sessions, and this essay owes more than a little to the contributions of a great many men and women at Berkeley all those years ago. Though much has changed in the past twenty years in terms of our willingness to be open and frank about the complexities of consent, desire, and decision-making, there is still so much to be done.

Here’s a thumbnail sketch of what I’ve come to understand about enthusiastic consent:
Part of being a good man is not being a relentless advocate for your own pleasure. Part of being a good sexual partner is not using a variety of psychological (and chemical) tactics to (to return to the “stoplight” image) turn the red light to green, to turn the “no” into a “yes”, or even worse, to simply wait until the young woman has grown tired of saying “no” and falls into a resigned silence. And while one hears anecdotal stories of young women persistently pressuring male partners for sex, all of the evidence suggests that the overwhelming majority of the pressure is uni-directional, from boys towards girls.

The message that needs to be repeated over and over again is this one: true consent is never tacit, it is never silent. Too many young men become date rapists by confusing silence with a clear, verbal affirmation. “No means no”, but – especially with partners you don’t know well – you need to presume that silence (especially when accompanied by physical passivity) is also a loud, clear, shout-it-from-the-flippin’-rooftops, “NO!” How many women have had sex they didn’t desire with men they didn’t want simply because they were too tired of fighting, too tired of resisting, too eager to just have it over with?

I’ve come to realize, listening to countless anecdotes of “sex gone bad”, that we make a huge mistake by refusing to see relentless persistence as essentially just another form of coercion. Our cultural messages teach young people to “not give up” and to “go for it” in a wide variety of arenas. Even now, in the 21st century, we still teach far too many young women to play “hard to get” and, we teach young men to enjoy the “thrill of the chase.” While in so many other areas of life, dogged determination in the face of rejection is laudable, when it comes to sex, that kind of persistence enables a very real form of rape.

A dangerous line I sometimes use: “The opposite of rape is not consent. The opposite of rape is enthusiasm”. It’s dangerous because it’s shocking, and of course, it’s dangerous because it twists the purely legal meaning of the term “rape.” But from the standpoint of one who cares desperately about the well-being of young people, my goal in offering workshops like these is not merely to prevent sexual assault that meets the legal standard of a criminal act. My goal is to prevent that, of course, but to also offer shy and uncertain young people tools to prevent them from having bad sex characterized by obligation, confusion, and detached resignation. I always argue that anything short of an authentic, honest, uncoerced, aroused and sober “Hell, yes!” is, in the end, just a “no” in another form.

That sets the bar pretty darned high. But given the consequences of unwanted sex to the body and the heart and the mind and the soul, given the potential for sex to be life-affirming and ecstatic, our young people deserve to have the bar set just that high.

The title of this anthology is “Yes Means Yes.” The editors have set themselves to a brave and important task, the task of making the case that young women deserve to hear a message that their own desire matters at least as much, if not more, than their capacity to please. Our sisters and daughters need to hear, perhaps over and over again, that the gift of pleasure, laughter, and ecstasy belongs as much to them as it does to men. But ensuring that young women are able to exercise their natural capacity for delight requires giving them a voice, and it requires creating a culture – in our schools and in our broader society – that is willing and eager to hear that voice, whatever it has to say.

Editor’s Pick by Dr. Karen from Adolescent Sexuality:  I ran across Dr. Hugo Schwyzer’s blog on a day several months ago when he wrote about teaching a community college class on the history of gays and lesbians in the United States.  Since then, I’ve found almost every one of Hugo’s posts to be thought-provoking and lively!  In addition to being a community college history and gender studies professor, Hugo also describes himself as an animal rights activist and Episcopal youth minister with a passion for Christ, chinchillas, trail running, poetry, gender justice, country music, and reconciling contradictions.

Read more from Hugo Schwyzer and subscribe to hear more from Hugo on a wide range of topics (my favorites are always his conversations with his community college students about relationships and sexuality).

Read the original post, along with a whole, whole bunch of great readers’ comments and conversation.