Consent has become a huge issue in hook up culture lately. XXXConnect looks at the evolution of consent from "'no' means 'no'" to the removal of the grey area.

Consent has always been an incredibly important issue in hook up culture, but the discussions about it always seemed to be on the fringe. With incidents of sexual misconduct being the largest stories in pop culture and politics these days, the conversation is finding itself on the front page of almost every newspaper in America, and the lead story far too frequently on entertainment news programs. There was a time when consent was more of a feeling than it was a verbal exchange. Instead of asking if you could kiss someone, you would simply read the situation, and if you thought you had the go-ahead, you would just lean in and kiss them.

This was, and still is a relatively safe approach to kissing provided the person you're kissing is sober, and they have time to react to your attempt (i.e.: move out of the way before your lips touch). Things get foggier when you move onto other forms of sexual contact though. Men will often assume that since they have consent to kiss someone, they have consent to try and then grope them, or more. This is not always the case, and a woman shouldn't have to have her breast grabbed in order to be able to say that they don't want their breast grabbed.

We're going to go deep into it, and examine many of the different ways we can get proper consent when hooking up with someone, but the short and simple answer is to always make sure that your partner is sober enough to make an informed decision, and to actually ask for consent each step along the way. This is a new way of hooking up for a lot of people, but we're entering a time when it's the safest and most respectful way of doing things.

Consent isn't something that's suddenly important. It has always been at the very top of the list when it comes to important parts of a healthy and lawful sex life. Bringing up the law may seem harsh, but it's really not. The power imbalance that exists in the world is terrifying, and it's often wielded over women by men. There's a overwhelming knowledge that if a man wants to have sex with a woman, he could more often than not do it with or without her consent based on their physical strength alone. And that's just one example. There are so many other ways that men abuse their power over women with sex. If we are able to use this moment to create a culture of consent that puts the comfort and safety of women above the comfort and fears of men, we'll find ourselves in a much better place.

On August 14th, 1945, the USA celebrated Victory over Japan Day. Everyone was out in the streets celebrating the end of World War II. It certainly makes sense to assume that many people were drinking in their celebration. Apparently the streets were absolute chaos. People's energies were all over the place. Some where happy, while others had become rather volatile because of the booze. Photographer Alfred Eisentaedt was in Manhattan that day, taking photographs of the celebrations in Times Square. One of his photographs from that day is one of the most iconic photos ever taken. It features George Mendonsa, a sailor, holding a local dental assistant, Greta Zimmer Friedman, in his arms, and giving her a passionate kiss. It's an incredible photograph. There's even a mural of it in New York to this day. The photograph looks like Mendonsa and Zimmer Friedman are a couple, but that couldn't be further from the truth. The two had never met before. They hadn't even said, 'Hello' to each other. What the photograph captures is a drunken Mendonsa, grabbing Zimmer Friedman without any warning, and then proceeding to kiss her without her consent.

Without knowing that story, the photograph is warm and uplifting. Knowing the story behind the photograph however, the feeling changes, and it becomes a powerful example of why consent is important.

Because many of us grow up in houses that don't speak openly about sex, and are educated in schools that don't provide proper sexual education, we find ourselves fumbling through our sexual awakenings. There are probably lots of moments in yours that you wish you could do over with the knowledge that you've learned as you've grown up. One of the biggest issues when it comes to adopting a more vocal approach to consent is that we're raised to think that sex is embarrassing, and talking about sex can be a challenge to some. We hopefully get better as we become more experienced, but our experience is only enhanced by the past experiences of our partners. If people gravitate towards partners who are shy and don't talk much about sex (either before, during, or after), those skills are never developed.

There are many ways to work consent into our hookups without it feeling too awkward or embarrassing. Let's take a look at some of them.

Talking dirty is a very standard part of sex, and though some people aren't completely comfortable doing it, if their partner asks them to, they'll try their best. If we incorporate verbal consent into talking dirty, it will feel very natural, and unforced. Perfect!

If you're not into talking dirty, you can simply communicate consent through normal types of sexual communication. If you're doing things right, you're going occasionally be checking in with your partner, to make sure that what you're doing feels good for them, and asking what they want you to do; if they want you to do something different. In this method of getting proper consent, you can simply ask your partner what they want to do. If your partner says, "I want you to kiss me," that means that you have their consent to kiss them. If you feel like you want to move on to the next stage of your hookup, you can ask your partner, "Do you want me to do anything else to you?" This is creating a very clear line of dialogue, and a sexy bit of play where you're putting them in charge. You're telling them that you're not going to do anything to them that they don't want you to do. This allows them to control the pace of the sex, and if at a point they decide that that's the furthest base that they want to go to with you; when you ask them if they want you to do anything else to them, they can simply say, "No. I only want you to do this. I don't want to do anything else but this." It's very clear what you have proper consent to do, and it could be argued that it actually made your hookup a lot more exciting that it would have been if you decided to just move onto the next base whenever you decided you wanted to.

When people use body language, and what they consider a natural progression of sex as a substitute for consent, they often begin to tread on dangerous territory. Sex can quickly become less about what their partner wants and finds enjoyable, and more about what they can get away with before their partner tells them to stop, or to do something else because they don't like what is being done to them. This is connected to the fact that a large percentage of people are first exposed to sex through pornography that displays intercourse where the man is often trying to one up himself in what he does to his partners. There's an escalation in pornography that treats sex like a movie. It continues to increase the tension as a scene plays out, so that you get more and more excited, up until the point where the scene, or in the case of a porno, the muscle man with a fake tan and ponytail achieves climax.

The way sex works in pornography isn't how sex works in real life though, and men who make love this way, often put women in a difficult spot, where they don't feel completely comfortable telling them to do things differently, because they're so wrapped up in replicating things that they've seen on their free porno sites, that it often seems like they're not even paying attention to whether or not they're having a good time. They're acting out scenes so that when they then masturbate to those scenes later, they can better imagine themselves in that situation. It's extremely messed up, and something that verbal consent has the potential to curb significantly.

When we're finished dinner, and we want to leave the table, what do we do? We ask if we can be excused from the table. Why are we so precious about asking whether or not we can go sit on the couch and watch a movie after we've finished eating? We've been living in a world where we're more worried about asking if we can help a woman carry some grocery bags than we're worried about asking if they want us to go down on them, or penetrate them. What sense does that make?

Imagine you have a doctor's appointment in the morning, and you miiiight be fifteen minutes late for work if it takes longer than it's scheduled for. More likely than not, you'll check in with your boss the day before, and let them know. If you end up being fifteen minutes late the next day, could you not just explain what happened to your boss then? Or call the office as soon as you know you're running late? Imagine if we felt so obliged to get proper consent when hooking up with someone. Consent is just being polite, and respecting your partner's wishes.

There are a lot of people who're up in arms about the push for verbal consent to be the norm. They say that it feels weird, unnatural, or that it's embarrassing to say things like, "Can I kiss you?" If asking someone if you can kiss them is embarrassing, that's not because it's embarrassing. It's because you have confidence issues that you need to work on.

Lucky for those people though is that not every woman is as keen as verbal consent at every step of the way as you would expect them to be. That's 100% fine because that's something they're comfortable with. Hopefully they can find themselves paired with the people who are too shy to ask for consent, and they can have great consensual sex on the regular.

There's no two ways about it. Consent is sexy. When you ask your partner what they want, or if it's okay if you do this or that to them, it shows them that you're a considerate lover, and that you want the sex to be everything that they want it to be. That you don't want them to feel uncomfortable at any point (unless that's part of an agreed upon situation of course). You're acknowledging that the world is not always concerned with what they want, but that you are. If that isn't sexy, we don't know what is.

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