One of the top popular comments on MetaFilter is by tangerine and talks about how people grow up "Ask Culture" vs "Guess Culture" (comment reproduced below but edited to remove some irrelevant context, original here):

In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it's OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you're pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won't even have to make the request directly; you'll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

All kinds of problems spring up around the edges. If you're a Guess Culture person then unwelcome requests from Ask Culture people seem presumptuous and out of line, and you're likely to feel angry, uncomfortable, and manipulated.

If you're an Ask Culture person, Guess Culture behavior can seem incomprehensible, inconsistent, and rife with passive aggression.

Thing is, Guess behaviors only work among a subset of other Guess people -- ones who share a fairly specific set of expectations and signalling techniques. The farther you get from your own family and friends and subculture, the more you'll have to embrace Ask behavior.

I've been pondering this after Jammerly1's various threads and it seems to me that perspectives on consent break fairly strongly into ask cultists and guess cultists. In particular the body language types who think it's crude to verbalize consent.

For me prior to RP I was very guess culty and non-verbal but have become much less tolerant of it after WISNIFG. Currently I think I still have a very strong sense of whether or not something will get a yes or a no (and I'm mostly correct), but after WISNIFG/NMMNG just do it anyway and don't care.

Questions for discussion:

  • Which cult are you?
  • What's your pillfiliation?
  • Is "swallowing the pill" escaping the guess cult?