Our autonomy can be compromised by limitations in our capacities, or by the power relationships within which we are embedded. If we insist that real consent requires full autonomy, then virtually no sex will turn out to be consensual. I argue that under conditions of compromised autonomy, consent must be socially and interpersonally scaffolded. To understand consent as an ethically crucial but nonideal concept, we need to think about how it is related to other requirements for ethical sex, such as the ability to exit a situation, trust, safety, broader social support, epistemic standing in the community, and more.
A Nonideal Theory of Sexual Consent
Our autonomy can be compromised by limitations in our capacities, or by the power relationships within which we are embedded. If we insist that real consent requires full autonomy, then virtually no sex will turn out to be consensual. I argue that under conditions of compromised autonomy, consent must be socially and interpersonally scaffolded. To understand consent as an ethically crucial but nonideal concept, we need to think about how it is related to other requirements for ethical sex, such as the ability to exit a situation, trust, safety, broader social support, epistemic standing in the community, and more.
Let’s Talk About Consent
What is sexual consent? What practices does it refer to? Rébecca Lévy-Guillain explores these questions through the prism of sociology in her doctoral research. A Ph.D. student at the National Institute for demographic studies (Ined) and at the Observatoire sociologique du changement (OSC) of Sciences Po, she is studying the uses of the category
Against the Couple-Form | LIES Journal
Libidinal flows cut through the social world. Amorous and sexual relations do not exist in some domain safely taped off from the rest of society. Rather they are constituent elements of nearly every aspect of social life. Desire flows and circulates amongst places of employment, intellectual debates, political organizing, artistic circles, playgrounds, and cemeteries. The elderly patient grabs at the breast of a nurse hunched over him. A governmental official strips his newly hired intern down to her leopard print thong during an important briefing in his office. The incarcerated man holds his hand up to the glass of the visiting booth, attempting to touch his wife after twenty years of their bodily separation. These flows of libidinal desire operate within and amongst broader social mechanisms, such that they help animate the dynamics of economic and political life. Often a locus of politics, desire permeates the so-called ‘public’ terrain.
Polyamory Consent: 2026 Communication Strategies for Boundaries
Discover 2026 strategies for enthusiastic consent in polyamory, with practical scripts, group check-ins, boundary frameworks, and advice on jealousy to build trust in multi-partner relationships.
Black Schoolgirls at the Intersection of Consent and Property: Mapping a Socio-Historical Analysis for Anti-Rape Education Futures in Schooling
This article examines how the concept of consent, persons as property, with its links to the convergence of law, imperial governance and schooling reveal the fragility and possibilities of consent ...
The School of Consent-Based Business
Discover a deeply human way of doing business on the internet
Relationship Anarchy - LGBTQIA+ Wiki
Relationship Anarchy (abbreviated RA) is the belief that relationships should not be bound by set rules, aside from the rules the individuals involved mutually agree...
Real Rape — Harvard University Press
Many men believe that they can force women to have sex against their will and that it isn’t rape—at least, not if the man knows the women and doesn’t beat her up or wield a weapon. The law’s casual treatment of such rape cases is the subject of this pioneering book, which is both a powerful exposé of the often shocking facts and a trenchantly written call for reform.
Communities of Not
On the strange hostility that grows in communities built around abstinence.
Your Body, Your Feed – Creating a bridge between consent and self-expression - What’s Happening on My Feed?
Recently, we’ve seen an increase in discussion around how adult content currently shows up on our platform. By adult content, we mean content that is usually labeled as pornography, non-sexual nudity, or sexually suggestive content. Labeling adult content (both text- and image-based) is an example of how we empower community members to share more of themselves with folks, without creating a non-consensual experience for other members that do not wish to engage with adult content. To solve this, we want to present you with options and invite you, as a member of our community, to decide how adult content shows up on Blacksky.
The forced global adoption of puritanistic American cultural norms vis sexuality and nudity via app store/payment processor rules is one of the least-discussed free speech issues of the last decade and this lack of attention is going to hurt online expression so much in the years to come.
♍ Bee 🐝
I think also we cannot ignore the potential social and cultural ramifications of normalizing the demonification of anything adult or sexual The whole system is stacked against any sort of movement in the other direction and it's not something the porn industry can handle alone at this point
