I Spent My Life Consenting to Touch I Didn’t Want - The New York Times

"We still don’t have words for the receiving of touch we don’t crave but commonly endure and even consent to because we don’t feel entitled to resist it. I mean encounters like mine with that older teenager, but also countless less disturbing ones: the impulsive fondling of pregnant women’s bellies, hugs from mere acquaintances, sex that we simply aren’t in the mood for. During the pandemic, I have been happy to live without the inevitable close-talking men at literary or work events. I do not miss shoulder squeezes, back pats, draped arms or even handshakes. Of course, plenty of people don’t tolerate touch they feel ambivalent about or actively abhor, but I suspect that a majority of them live in male-identified bodies....

Sex work taught me a vocabulary for consent, but in it I also refined my techniques for silencing my own wishes....

If anything their responses made a case against sex work’s increasing the likelihood of their consenting to touch they didn’t want. I wondered more about the other factors they shared that might have primed them for what I began to think of as empty consent....

I was not surprised to see how often the women I surveyed described giving empty consent because they feared something worse....

Here, I see two powerful imperatives that collaborate to encourage empty consent: the need to protect our bodies from the violent retaliation of men and the need to protect the same men from the consequences of their own behavior, usually by displacing the responsibility onto ourselves. ...

Even if the practices of affirmative consent were adopted by every college student in this country and subsequently spilled into life beyond those privileged spaces, we would all still live in a society in which vast numbers of people are conditioned from childhood to consent to touch we don’t want...."