Anna May Rowan's article makes a very important point about personal relationships; that is that they require judgement calls based upon experience, knowledge, beliefs and listening to personal intuitions, not following a code of conduct or enacting points from a lesson in informed consent. Making personal judgments, as freely as possible, especially in the messy arena of private sex lives, is the only way people can gain experience through which they can learn more about themselves, their own standards and those of others; and through this come to be better able to choose with whom they want to share their time, and possibly their beds.

In pointing out the gap between black and white consent and the ambiguities of lived experience, Rowan points to a fundamental, and dangerous flaw in current attempts to teach students to make ‘correct choices’ in our private lives. In the sphere of personal autonomy, where we decide for ourselves what constitutes acceptable behaviour, our judgments have to be free if they are to have any real meaning and worth for ourselves. If our choices are rule-governed procedures, or an enactment someone else’s idea of what is abusive, degrading or hurtful, they become acts of conformism rather than exertions of individual autonomy. The ability to make better judgements comes from reflecting upon, and evaluating, our own personal experiences – good, bad, and mediocre – just as Rowan does. It does not arise from formalised teaching of codes of behaviour or informed consent.

Alarmingly, CUSU Women’s Campaign is proposing to introduce compulsory consent lessons to tackle everything from attempted rape to lad culture in the mistaken belief that this will help women and create a better climate free from lad culture. By conflating a criminal act with behaviour they find offensive, the women’s group paves the way for criminalising private cultural choices and behaviour – a dangerous contemporary cultural trend. The claim made for no tolerance policies is that it sends a signal. And it does, but not the one advocates claim. The underlying message of all no tolerance campaigns today is that individuals do not have to think for themselves. All one has to do is accept or reject pre-formed options from a smorgasboard of moralistic postures.

Discussion has traditionally been the way knowledge and reasoned thought have developed; and it has been of particular importance in academia (where once degrees were awarded through debate alone). Unfortunately, at the recent debate on abortion organised by the Cambridge Students for Life (whose views on abortion, by the way, I oppose), the Women’s Campaign thought that having to enter into discussion about their ideas and beliefs was a problem itself. In turning their backs on a belief centuries old in the value of free and full debate as a means to ascertain claims of truth; the CUSU Women's Campaign ironically prove themselves to be more authoritarian and conservative in its values, and weaker in intellectual arguments, than their opponents.