Transcend and include consent culture ✋

Consent is a beautiful way of respecting individuality. I believe the cultural movement towards more consent-awareness is a positive step towards a better culture, especially compared to abuses of the past. But the way consent culture is applied is frustratingly self-defeating! All defenses do what they would defend, as A Course in Miracles says. In this case, here’s how:

1) People learn not to listen to all the nonverbal cues about what’s available, both in the “yes” and the “no”. Eg: I ask someone for consent if I can offer advice in a relateful session; just because their words say ‘yes’ doesn’t mean I’ll give them advice.

2) People use “asking for consent” as an excuse for being out of attunement. Eg: A total stranger asked a friend of mine if he could kiss her in the hot tub, which she was completely not open for.

Despite best efforts to the contrary, these two mean consent culture ironically ends up ignoring how dynamic our consent is. People often don’t learn a relational or cultural attunement that goes beyond listening to the individual, including what not to ask for. But the concept has deeper flaws… 

3) Consent Culture is contradicted—Consent culture assumes frame dominance by imposing its consent norms without considering whether everyone involved consents to these standards. This creates a performative contradiction, where the enforcement of consent principles undermines the very autonomy they aim to protect.

Examples of alternate views that already exist: Forcing a man to marry his deceased brother’s ex-wife makes little sense in modern America, but has been a compassionate social norm protecting women. Community consensus and collective well-being is valued over individual autonomy in tons of cultures and probably half of the developmental stages. Almost all societies agree parents have a right to make choices for their children that the children didn’t consent to, for example, and almost all societies assume that right changes over time, although they disagree on when.

A better option is to be in more relationship with the cultural context of any given moment and set of people, especially developmental dynamics. Imposing collective values onto the individual members is inevitable so our best bet is to be honest and humble about our impositions. At its best, ‘consent culture’ brings us more awareness and moves us in this direction.

4) Sometimes we’re contradicted. A version of us is ‘yes’ and another is ‘no’—who or what gets to decide? Pretending it’s always “no” gives us the illusion of certainty but doesn’t honor the reality of a given moment’s truth, and life will true us up one way or another.

Eg: A random person named Romeo and another named Juliet have a relational culture that strongly emphasizes "no" as the default to avoid any potential overstepping; as a result they’re afraid to express their true feelings and neither is getting the intimacy they both want—disrespecting themselves, each other, and the relationship in the name of respecting them all.

Which brings us to:

5) It’s poor practice for life: Life doesn’t ask for consent when it comes to our most painful lessons and transformations, almost all of which we end up being deeply grateful for, but would never have consented to.

We need to learn, and teach attunement and listening on all levels of meaning making—body, mind, spirit, emotions, words, tone, energy, intuition, context, timing, place, etc. Thankfully that’s what we’re up to with relatefulness. We’re not perfect, but we’re moving in the right direction.

With love, Jordan