Did you know about consent when you started university?  Do you know about it now? At the start of your degree (or right now, if you are a fresher), you probably knew about condoms. You probably knew about the Pill, and you probably knew about the biological basics of sexual intercourse, courtesy of a few hours of rudimentary sex education at school.  

But did you know about consent?

Now, I am not talking about yes meaning yes and no meaning no. You learn that first as a child, and then again in the aforementioned awkward sex-education classes as a teenager when you were asked to put a condom on a banana. What you didn’t learn, however, was what to do if she has had a bit too much to drink, or if you have. You didn’t learn what to do if he is sending mixed signals. You didn’t learn what you are comfortable with or how best to experiment. You didn’t think about things like waking someone up with oral sex, or whether acts like that are ok, consensually speaking.

The above are all evidence that we have a bad habit of dissolving consent down to a Yes or No statement that has to be tattooed on your forehead or yelled at your sexual partner. It has dissolved down to some binary switch which needs to be on or off, and evidently so. It is a narrowing, performed most commonly by those who attack such workshops, particularly in the media.

Among these critics is Brendan O’Neill of The Spectator.  In his recent article on Cambridge’s consent workshops, he wrote: “Students will be taught that sexual consent must be ‘active’ and ‘willing’, say the organisers of Cambridge’s classes. That is, you should seek audibly stated consent — ‘Yes, you may now engage in coitus with me’ — before the sex act occurs. How romantic!”

He is misunderstanding the situation, wilfully or otherwise.

He says, “The compulsory consent brigade seem to think that unless two people in the throes of passion have said to each other, ‘I consent to this intercourse,’ something untoward and even criminal has occurred.”

No they don’t.

Where he gets this idea from, that active and willing somehow means audible, is unclear. I’d recommend he drops by at the start of term.  It looks like he could learn a thing or two. Maybe it is sometime audible, but again, I don’t really know. My opinion is formed by what I have read for myself, or watched on handy videos like this one.

My own uncertainty is proof of one thing: that it would undeniably be useful if you could have a place where you could talk through these ideas, a purpose-built session to dispel some common myths and allow you to break into groups to talk things through on your own. Wouldn’t a flexible, open and honest session in which to ask these questions be a good thing?

Well that is all a consent workshop is.

The sessions will hopefully help you to come up with your own model of consent and also consider how other people’s models differ from your own. It is all well and good saying “learn on the job”, but people do not exist in a vacuum. Our mistakes can gravely affect those around us. You do not learn to drive by having a crack behind the wheel. You should not have to be thrown into adult sexuality with no discourse around mature, adult behaviour and relationships.

Some people won’t need such a talk. Good for them. Many will. And it is good to check in to talk anyway. Sadly, workshops are not going to stop rape. But they may help people frame their own thoughts on a complicated, under-explained and over-simplified topic. We all know that yes means yes and no means no. Most of us will act based on that fact. But what about the other 95 per cent of human sexual interaction where those words do not come up? Because that is where we all live and love, in the grey area. Maybe it would be a good idea to start talking about that. It seems to me that these workshops are doing just that.