I was arguing with a friend who said that consent should always be obtained explicitly. I tried to explain that in most cases consent is given non-verbally. That the way you touch, eye contact, hand movements, tone of voice, can all be ways of communicating consent. These subtle gestures reflect shared knowledge and experience between those two people. Putting it into words means you lack trust and understanding. Explicit consent should never be the standard.

My friend disagreed and said that some girls might touch friends and it is easy for such consent to be misinterpreted if the guy escalated without bad intentions then the girl is put in the position where she has to hurt his feelings and give an explicit no. Many girls might freeze, like a deer in headlights. They might let it happen and not engage enthusiastically. This is why she concluded we needed consent to always be verbal, explicit, enthusiastic, and talked about the FRIES acronym.

So I think these are the issues with FRIES -

  1. Freely given - does this only cover explicit threat of force or emotional blackmail, where does the line lie? what if the guy love bombs, uses dread game? promises gifts, commitment? no one is truly free. Her action is partly controlled by his actions. The reason she gives consent is that she was impressed by how he managed to court her. She was unable to refuse because he won her love. How is this free? The illusion of free will keeps coming up. I think I can go with my gut feeling and say any manipulation of her decisions with selfish goals which don't take her long-term happiness into account is where the line is crossed.
  2. Reversible - I believe this means she can revoke consent for any further intimacy at any point during the interaction. I have heard some red pill folk say that women want the right to revoke consent retroactively. I don't think that makes any sense, I wonder if anyone here supports that pov. Anyway I think it is totally right that either party should be able to ask the other party to stop. In fact we have a responsibility to actively monitor both verbal and non verbal cues of discomfort. Just like consent can be given non verbally it can revoked non verbally. When you are so close to a human being it seems so limiting to limit communication only to words.
  3. Informed - I guess this says consent is invalid if she was a victim of fraud, starting from him lying about not having std, being married to stuff like owning houses, having a particular occupation. I think here it gets messy because sex without consent is rape. So it seems a bit too much to put a person who physically rapes a girl and lies her into bed in the same category. I think lying about STDs can mean you prosecute him for assault. I don't think consent should have this.
  4. Enthusiastic - This seems like a lot to ask for. I mean I personally would love to have sex with a partner who is enthusiastic but we all have our neurosis. What if she wants to "act" unenthusiastic? This ties into a key red pill claim - Red pill claims that due to social conditioning women look for Plausible Deniability when entering into casual sex. They put themselves in situations like "oh I was drunk that is why", "we just got caught up in the moment and it just happened". This is also why many girls will not let you escalate in front of her friends or in public since she fears the social stigma of being a loose women. So PUA which used TRP ideas asks men to get the number and escalate in private and always give the girl an out. Men don't need the innuendo of "Netflix and chill" but it gives women a valid excuse to meet up in private and also reject your advances at anytime - "I came over for netflix not this". This means I think we should not add such extra baggage on something as basic as consent.
  5. Specific - This means consent should be obtained for specific acts I think. So she might say ok you can kiss me but then for sex you need separate consent, anal needs separate consent. I agree with this point if consent can be nonverbal. Expecting explicit consent for everything sounds inane to me, what about grabbing breasts? will that be separate from kissing? These boundaries are all negotiated between the two individuals. The whole point of explicit speech is that it is specific while non verbal speech is not specific. It is ambiguous but communication still happens.

So yeah, the issue is people are growing more socially inept and it is easy to make mistakes, misinterpret signals. Especially if you start getting sexual with someone you don't know very well. The question is who should bear the burden? should one party obtain explicit consent? should the other party be obliged to give an explicit denial? Depending on what social norm we accept the blame game plays out very differently. "she should have said no", "he should have asked me".

What do you think? since casual sex is more acceptable is it time we shifted the burden away from the girl and onto the guy to obtain explicit consent? is red pill correct that girls feel the need to find "plausible deniability"?