Lots of us have sex, and many of us too have been told the importance of informed, enthusiastic consent. Ensuring that a sexual partner is fully informed and voluntarily agrees to any and all acts you two may perform is important because it ensures that both parties want to engage in sexual activity, and it ensures that both parties understand what they are agreeing to.

But is that the end of the story?

Feminist scholar Ellie Anderson questions whether consent is sufficient for ethical sex in her article “The Limits of Consent in Sexual Ethics,” arguing that even if consent is enthusiastic or affirmative, it allows for victims of sexual assault to be silenced if the abuser were to claim, “But they consented, so I did nothing wrong.”

Furthermore, seeing consent as a “red light or a green light,” as Anderson claims, prevents people from understanding how to pay close attention to the nuanced desires of their partner. Instead, women are more often expected to learn to care for men’s desires, but men are not expected to do the same.

Focusing on just consent hides any change in the desires of each party. Since what we want fluctuates as time and circumstances change, viewing an encounter as pre-consent and post-consent hides how a partner’s attitudes and wants shift as a sexual encounter progresses.

Joseph Fischel, associate professor at Yale University, claims in his book “Screw Consent” that “consent talk at best diminishes and at worst perverts our sexual justice politics,” which happens because consent has been defined as an “enthusiastic, imaginative, creating yes-saying.” This conception of consent, however, is harmful because it construes non-enthusiastically desired sex as sexual assault and worsens the person’s perception of their injury.

Fischel claims that even consensual sex can be “really bad, and usually worse for women.” So, even if a sexual encounter was consensual, if we focus on just consent, we won’t consider the other important relevant factors. As Fischel claims, “the consent-as-enthusiasm paradigm…divides sex into the categories awesome and rape.”

To solve these issues, professor of philosophy Rebecca Kukla claims that we should use “invitations” to signal a desire for sex, as opposed to asking for consent.

“The consent model distorts our understanding of how a great deal of sex is initiated, including in particular, pleasurable, ethical sex,” Kukla states. When someone asks for consent, they are asking for permission to do something, which excludes the other party from being an active participant.

However, when someone offers an invitation, instead of agreeing or disagreeing as you would a request, you can either accept or decline. Asking for consent expects a response, and it would be uncomfortable to straight up say no. To invite, however, allows both parties to actively join doesn’t require a response other than “Thanks.” This prioritizes both parties’ willingness to participate, while minimizing any coercion or force.

So, next time you talk to someone about sex or consent, consider offering an invitation instead.

Ian Palacios is an English and philosophy major. He can be reached at 581-2812 or at [email protected].