How many times have you heard things like “they were dancing like this, or dressing like that, so it means they were asking for it?” Or even “they were staring at me like begging me?” How many times did you have to help a friend to get rid of a creepy person who was insisting over and over after being rejected more than once? How many times, in that same context, have you done something you didn’t really want to do?It can be really difficult to interpret signals, those indications.
You can consider yourself a killer with regards to understanding that language, you will never be 100% sure. But actually it’s not that difficult. There’s a magical thing that changed it all, something that will really help you being way more comfortable. It’s called affirmative consent, and you don’t need an app to use it (although there is one out there it doesn’t fit so well with the concept itself, we can talk about that in another article).
Affirmative consent is a knowing, voluntary, and mutual decision among all participants to engage in sexual activity. Consent can be given by words or actions, as long as those words or actions create clear permission regarding willingness to engage in the sexual activity. Silence or lack of resistance, in and of itself, does not demonstrate consent.
Movies, television, song lyrics and pornography shape sexual scripts and even the most enlightened millennial may have a warped sense of how a date should play out.