Keywords

In 2021, Australia’s conservative federal government released a new resource aimed at young people, focusing on sexual consent.1 It caused an uproar and left an indelible imprint on all who saw it. The online video was set in a faux 1950s milkshake bar, with two ostensibly wholesome white teenagers sitting at a booth. The teenage girl Veronica asks her male companion Bailey—seemingly her boyfriend—if he would like to try her milkshake. He replies that he would then grabs the metal cup and takes a large sip. She immediately asks if her milkshake is better than his. He thinks for a second and then replies that he prefers his own.

Ordinarily, this might simply be a controversy over chocolate versus caramel, but then the clip takes a strange turn. The young woman appears to be outraged by his choice. A strangely accented British voice-over begins, with the unseen male narrator asking: ‘What happens when one takes action without an agreement?’ The video heads back to focus on Veronica, who erupts fiendishly: ‘You do, huh’. She immediately smears the young man’s face with a creamy milkshake, saying ‘Drink it, drink it all!’. She giggles senselessly, while the young man asks in a horrified tone, ‘What are you doing?’.

If the milkshake video begins with what appears to be a form of assault, the rest of the commentary features a range of other problematic actions and discourses too. Clips of Veronica and Bailey are interspersed with ‘teaching moments’, where the narrator talks through issues of bodily consent. In the second section of the video, the tricky interpersonal relationship between Veronica and Bailey is understood through a metaphor of ‘moving the line’, (a statement which is reinforced in bold white lettering across the bottom of the screen). Somewhat inexplicably, the narrator talks the viewer through a simple line drawn diagram which is entitled ‘Drink my milkshake’. The diagram is divided into three zones in a row, a little like a sports pitch, with the line delineating the zone to the left as ‘no’, and the line delineating to the right as ‘yes’. This leaves a curious space in the middle, which one can only assume is an ambiguous zone. There are also two little squat figures, presumably representing young people, one on each of the opposing lines. The voice-over explains: ‘It’s as if they were moving the yes line OVER the maybe zone, or the end zone, IGNORING your rich inner world’. Now green and labelled the Action Zone, the lines are gone and there is simply one zone, which the narrator suggests is a violation of ‘individual freedoms and rights’. As the zone turns red, the narrator concludes, ‘And that’s not good!’.

If this sounds confusing, that’s because it is. The voice-over continues, flashing back now to our original couple, his face still smeared with the creamy substance, while she looks cutely into her cup. The narrator suggests that this kind of behaviour might be disrespectful, or at worst, abusive. Meanwhile, the pretty Veronica aggressively states, ‘It’s just a funny game, Bailey. I know you really like my milkshake’. The voice-over man asks, ‘how does a line moving make you feel?’.

We might hope for a better explanation now, surely. But we go to a new diagram, this time with the heading ‘Get pizza?’. The original three boxes reappear, with the two squat figures and the No to the left and the Yes to the right. The voice-over suggests that ‘Some decisions may be more important to you than others’. Moving the line, the male narrator suggests, on having pizza for dinner, may not upset a person as much as saying ‘Can I touch your butt’. The acutely disembodied discussion is briefly embodied. Then, just as quickly we revert to the line drawing, and the voice-over says that, similarly, moving the line once might not matter, but if someone moves the line over and over again, ‘then you might come to feel very upset’. The voice explains that is all very clear: whoever moves the line is breaking the rules, and whoever has the line moved is ‘entitled to feel upset’. The script flashes to the young man covered in cream and suggests that ‘you have every right to feel as upset as you like’, while his girlfriend giggles on. The young man asserts that now he feels angry, while she laughs and says flirtatiously, ‘oh you are just being silly’.

The video then moves to the third stage, a reconsideration of the relationship. This does not take the form of a discussion about a coercive relationship. Instead, it remains within the trope of romance. The young man then writes a pros and cons list—mainly pros about how pretty his abuser is—then asks himself poignantly, ‘is this a respectful relationship?’ The young woman is now playing a pinball machine, with a second young (black) man Oscar, seemingly a friend of both Bailey and Veronica. At this, the narrator suggests that after a moved line, ‘you might want to repair’ the relationship. In front of the pinball machine, the victim Bailey tells his girlfriend Veronica that sometimes he doesn’t like the way she treats him, and he suggests he is owed an apology. She giggles (only a little this time) and apologises ‘I’m sorry Bailey’ and explains that she knows he doesn’t want to drink her milkshake. She also notes that she plastered it all over his face.

Before the viewer gets complacent, however, the mood shifts to an alternate vision. The narrator suggests that if someone is repeatedly disrespectful or ‘moves the line’, then perhaps the relationship needs to be reconsidered. ‘Why am I here?’, asks the cream-smeared man, while Oscar looks on in alarm, and his girlfriend takes selfies of his greasy, milked face. Should you try to repair the relationship and get help, asks the narrator? Or ‘just walk away?’ At this point, the young woman physically grabs her boyfriend and pouts aggressively, ‘You don’t go anywhere!’ The narrator then concludes, ‘In extreme cases, you may feel unsafe to stay or leave’. Here, at last, we might expect some discussion about intimate partner abuse. Yet we are treated to more images of Veronica smearing more food—perhaps cereal—on Bailey’s face. The narrator begins to talk aloud about Veronica, asking whether or not she will recognise what she is doing, or continue to act in this way. At this point, the viewing is profoundly uncomfortable.

His face now smeared with cream and other food, Bailey blurts out to Veronica to get off him and says he hates her. Her grin quickly turns to submission, and she asks herself ‘What am I doing? I’m hurting Bailey to make myself feel more powerful. I have to stop this’. She apologises and asks for his forgiveness (if only all coercive relationships were so readily solved!). When he rejects her, she says ‘Please know I don’t want to be this way’, but he leaves, with the camera shot panning out to show Veronica and the friend/witness Oscar, now sitting at the bar. Veronica turns to Oscar and asks, ‘Am I a bad person?’, to which Oscar replies ‘Ahhhh, Veronica, I think you should talk to a professional’, and hands her a business card. He pats her kindly on the shoulder and leaves. She stares blankly at the card, which is a number for counselling about respect (we note that Bailey, as the victim, is not given any advice to seek help).

The narrator concludes that relationships are hard work, voicing over the content of both fun images of the couple and their low points too. ‘Handling a disrespectful relationship can be upsetting, lonely, or even dangerous’, he suggests, while the visuals show Veronica again shoving cream all over Bailey’s face (by this stage, the cream is surely fetishized). The narrator concludes that young people can always find someone to support them, ‘no matter which side of the line you are on’, showing Bailey with his friends around the jukebox, while Veronica looks at the counsellor’s card and makes a phone call. The narrator finally cheerily promises that in the next video, we will learn about ‘stepping in’, whatever that might be.

This entire exchange is a little short of excruciating to watch and muddies ideas of consent with a peculiar twist on a coercive or abusive relationship. The Milkshake ad is an abominable way to try to explain sexual consent to young people: in fact, it might have been billed as consent education, but it does not deal with consent in any useful way. It is—dare we say—quite a creepy interpretation of consent, focusing on all the wrong things. Notably, it doesn’t mention the words ‘sex’ or ‘consent’ once. Its analogy has none of the simple yet clever charm of the cup of tea, where the meaning is somehow more obvious. In the milkshake clip, the target audience of teen viewers was left wondering, ‘Are they talking about sex?’. By refusing to use the words sex or consent, and by highlighting an abusive relationship, messages about choice and bodily autonomy are lost.

The pseudo-1950s setting, the white heterosexual couple, the smeared face, and the weird exaggerated even maniacal laughter of the ‘offender’ held no appeal to young people, or indeed to anyone much at all. This is a resource that verges on mockery about sexual violence and coercion, issues that will be deeply traumatic for many in the community. And of course, the gender inversion, where the woman is the offender and the male the victim, doesn’t help young people understand the most common forms of sexual abuse that they will likely encounter. This is not to say, of course, that men can’t be victims to female offenders, but for an entry-level script aimed at a generalist audience aged 14–17, it is hardly the most likely scenario, as Chanel Contos’ website has well shown (see Chapter 4). Is there also an undercurrent at work here? It’s hard to know whether this was a simple attempt to not offend men’s rights groups. Is it an attempt to divert from the reality of the statistics that show the commonality of men’s violence against women and girls, or is it a way to silence women’s voices even further? The inversion of gender roles probably achieves all of these objectives, while making it an alienating encounter for young women viewers.

Finally, conceptually, the video does not aid understanding of consent or affirmative consent. It presents the ‘maybe zone’ as a concept, with no useful explanation. While there are complexities to consenting to sex (especially in relation to power differentials), we would suggest that a ‘maybe zone’ is unhelpful in discussing consent, without picking through these difficulties. All the talk of ‘moving the line’ is spectacularly unclear, and seems to suggest there is a profound ambiguity to consent, rather than empowering young people to assert their own desires. The milkshake video is anti-sex, in particular by discussing the moving of ‘the line’ as in itself threatening, going against decades of evidence that messaging about abstinence does not work (Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine, 2017). It would be more constructive to acknowledge that relationships do shift and grow, but that changes in sexual activity do need to be consensual.

At its core, the milkshake ad suggests that the government believed that teenagers do not have the maturity to deal with proper conversations about consent or sex and that these concepts need to be spoken to in the most oblique of ways. It goes against decades of sex education, which suggests that young people need to be given the tools to combat abuse, including correct terminology, basic ideas about the law, a reminder of the importance of sexual and gender autonomy, and a deeper understanding of power relationships. Those who have worked on sex education with young people—often for decades—openly acknowledge how difficult this can be, but a student-centric approach is critical, alongside a willingness to discuss the gendered components of sexual agency (Keddie, 2023).

The media was unequivocable in condemning the milkshake video and its budget, reported as AUD $3.8 million—almost half of the Federal governments $7.8 m budget for the Respect Matters campaign (Zhou and Boseley 2021). The Federal government suggested that there had been widespread consultation with subject matter experts, as well as community members, teachers, and school leaders—though few would later own up to any involvement (Landis-Hanley 2021). Within days of it being live, the resource was pulled from distribution. On one hand, the entire incident was laughable, cringeworthy, and a poor reflection on a conservative government strikingly out of touch with young people. On the other hand, it was an enormous missed opportunity, at a moment when young people want and need concrete yet sophisticated information about consent and sexual violence. The misuse of taxpayer’s money is not as distressing as the wasted chance to produce something exceptionally good for young people.

While the Milkshake video is an extreme example, of how confused, convoluted, and just plain wrong sex education about consent can become, clear messaging around consent is nonetheless complex. In part, this is because affirmative consent itself is more multifaceted than it seems. At best, it offers an opportunity to engage in sexual encounters with openness, honesty, and good intent. It should force open the lines of communications in both new and existing relationships and help to forge bonds of intimacy based on mutual desire and understanding. It should allow individuals to enact and enhance bodily autonomy and shore up partnerships that are based on trust and genuine exchange.

Affirmative consent should, ideally, help protect against sexual violence. It will not, of course, protect against all sexual assault: some offenders will simply not care about the consent of their victim. Nor can affirmative consent help, necessarily, with the ‘he said, she said’ of the adversarial trial, where so much still depends on the words after the fact, and within the courtroom.

Yet affirmative consent can be a force for cultural change, where clear expectations are set by society that all partners need to be willing participants in any sexual encounter. Just as importantly, it can help with sexual encounters that occur at the edges of intended violence, where offenders miss social cues, have unrealistic or incorrect assumptions about their partner, or who plunge on if they are unsure. The articulation of ‘yes’ (whether verbal or nonverbal), combined with checking in to ensure the sexual activity is still wanted, may help people to understand their partner’s wishes, with more clarity and confidence. Normalising affirmative consent is important. It may take some time and practice, but clear expectations around the likely scripts of a sexual encounter should help to guide people as they navigate the tricky grey areas, and hence offer protection from both unwanted sex (where a person might agree, under sufferance) and outright assault.

Despite the optimism that a framework of affirmative consent can bring, this book has charted a series of problems with affirmative consent, both in theory and in practice. We have shown there can be gaps in recognising the cues of consent and non-consent, often due to expectations around gender roles, sexual scripts, and rape myths. Our quantitative survey shows that most young people have a reasonable theoretical understanding of consent. The majority can read non-consent in examples of emotional coercion and physical force, for instance. Many also understood passivity, including lying still, as a sign of non-consent. However, individual’s reactions are tempered by their pre-existing understandings of relationships and conceptualisations of sexual violence. It is harder, for example, for many people to read signs of sexual assault in longer-term relationships, where consent is more readily assumed. Further, some groups are more perceptive about non-consent than others: women, for instance, recognised non-consent at higher rates than men, while older participants recognised non-consent at lower rates than younger adults.

That young people do not always implement this knowledge in practice is, however, clear. Through an exploration of young women’s online testimonies, we have shown the vulnerabilities of girls and women to sexual assault—it is notable that the initial impetus to the Teach Us Consent website was amongst relatively privileged young women in affluent areas in Sydney. They were and are not immune to sexual violence. Their testimonials were a significant and brave attempt to challenge rape cultures, moving beyond the traditional criminal justice sector, to a distinctly feminist form of anti-rape activism. The agenda was widely adopted by young women. Speaking of sexual assault shifted the power relations, with women forcing through from silence to visibility, and laying witness to the violence and harm of non-consenting actions. In Australia, the testimonies led to widespread calls for better, age-appropriate sex education on consent for all school children, to empower young women and other exposed groups, and to explain to young men the meanings of, and necessity for, consent. Sex education about consent was confirmed in 2022 by the Federal and State governments, and the Teach Us Consent project will be involved in design and delivery. As the testimonials reveal, in many of the sexual assaults listed by young women, consent was not requested or conveyed. Shifting a culture that allows for women’s silence to be interpreted as consent will require a significant intervention, and one which carefully constructs and narrates affirmative consent, with substantive buy-in required from all partners.

This is, of course, one of the major problems with affirmative consent: it fails to speak to, and with, many diverse communities. Chapter 5 explored the ways consent and affirmative consent can be understood and reimagined amongst refugee and migrant groups, and the necessity of complex engagement with marginalised women and men. This is not the only significant gap. Affirmative consent is generally anticipated and explained in heteronormative, cis-gendered terms: the man actively seeking sex, the woman either agreeing (actively or passively), or refusing consent. There is little room in this explanation, or in the corresponding analysis of rape cultures, for the LGBTIQ+ community and especially amongst trans and non-binary folk, who are, nonetheless statistically vulnerable to sexual assault. While the law itself does not distinguish between genders in legislation or (theoretically) in case law, cultural and social narratives of affirmative consent need to be expanded well beyond gender binaries and sexual stereotypes, to include all groups at risk of abuse, as well as all potential offenders.

Our work has, therefore charted a series of problems and limitations of affirmative consent. This does not, however, lead us to the conclusion that it should be abandoned as a framework for thinking about improving issues of sexual violence. Instead, we suggest that we might simply need to think more boldly about affirmative consent.

Part of the appeal of affirmative consent has been its simplicity. It has a straightforward message, that can be readily utilised in slogans such as ‘only yes means yes’ or ‘consent is sexy’. It translates to a poster, or a social media campaign, in ways that are accessible and easy digested, especially for young people. The success of the cup of tea video is a prime example, in the way it lays out a clear and simple message, not complicated by any of the intricacies of sex, intimate relationships, hook-up culture, or gender normativities and expectations. A ‘cup of tea’ exists in a vacuum. It is a great place to start talking about consent, especially with teenagers, but it is the tip of the iceberg. Messaging about sex, then, needs to be supported and underscored by more complex understandings of affirmative consent.

First, it is critical that affirmative consent be understood in sex-positive ways, especially for women and non-binary people. It’s too easy to slip into a model of affirmative consent where men are imagined as the active partner or even the sexual aggressor, while women are defending their right to consent. Of course, this can be one pattern. Nonetheless, it’s important that we understand older girls and women as capable of pleasure and desire, and reassert this as central to the sexual experience. Sex cannot be articulated primarily as a defensive position, but rather needs to be understood as an opportunity. Indeed, how might women write themselves into active consent?

If we look into the definitions of affirmative consent, we see that there is a focus on the defining of affirmative consent, and also an articulation of what it not. Most American colleges have a version of affirmative consent in place. To take an example, the State University of New York (SUNY) defines affirmative consent as follows:

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. The definition of consent does not vary based upon a participant's sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression’. (SUNY website, ND)

Here, the college articulates that affirmative consent requires a verbal or nonverbal agreement to sex and that silence or passivity is not counted as consenting. The SUNY website also expands gendered notions of consent, to say that gender or sexual orientation do not impact on the way consent is understood. Similarly, jurisdictions where affirmative consent has been introduced, take a similar tact, with an emphasis on the legal parameters of a contractual agreement.

Nowhere in this sense of contract do we get a sense of the pleasure and joy in sex. Clearly, pleasure and desire are two of the key drivers of sexual contact, yet in these definitions of affirmative consent, there is no sense of sensuality or carnality or amusement or relaxation. So many of the key players to sexual contact are simply written out of current understandings of affirmative consent.

Further, women are left in affirmative consent largely as responders, urged from passivity to action, if only to respond to the advances of their more amorous (male) partner. There is no real sense of women being players, shapers, or agents. Even when gender neutrality is attempted (which, as in the SUNY example, it generally is), we read these documents through our cultural expectations and our own lived experiences. Men are coded as sexual agents, actors, and initiators. We unconsciously draw on long histories where male sexuality was and is understood as hydraulic and active (Featherstone, 2010). This leaves women as receptive, reactive, and immobilising. In drawing on these binaries, women are written out of the script of sexual autonomy, responding to rather than initiating sexual activities. As scholars of sexual and gendered violence, we too, deflect to a protective mode, where safety is core. But we need to imagine affirmative consent as an opportunity to explore pleasure, recreation, fun, and desire, too, and this needs to be at the forefront of how sex and consent are explained to all young people.

Part of this, too, is breaking down the gender binaries that seem to slip into many models of affirmative consent. As Rona Torenz has suggested, heteronormativity is one power relation that has been invisibilised in discussions about consent (2021, 722). It’s not just the milkshake video that appears relentlessly cis and heterosexual, but many of the scripts that encode affirmative consent end up being read and socialised within a gender binary. Yet understanding that consent is important for queer people, trans people, non-binary people and so on, is vital to any attempt to mitigate sexual violence within communities. All of this means that we need to drive affirmative consent via cultural, not legal, change and that we need to acknowledge sex and gender diversities to be central to any discussions about consent.

Second, we need to think far more about power within relationships, both during casual sex and in longer-term relationships. Centralising the idea of power into discussions of affirmative consent must be a priority, and it needs to operate sensitively at multiple levels. Affirmative consent cannot be reduced to a contractual engagement, delivered digitally by an app. Indeed, the mythical app is a common device used by naysayers to mock the concept of affirmative consent—this is perhaps the one thing we agree on—that there is not a technical solution! More seriously, however, any discussion of consent needs to interrogate the power of the individual to consent. There are many examples of power imbalances that render consent problematic, even amongst adults. An employee might agree to sex with their boss to keep their job; a wife might agree to sex with her husband, to keep the peace; a young girl might agree to sex with her boyfriend, so he doesn’t stray.

In educating about affirmative consent, it is important to empower women and other groups to say no to unwanted sex, not to simply acquiesce because it is easier or expected or anticipated. The discussion about a right to bodily autonomy but also to pleasure and desire needs to be at the forefront of education about consent. If sex is unwanted, then questions need to be asked about power and sovereignty. While not all unwanted sex is criminal, there is also no obligation to have sex. We need to be unafraid to discuss this frankly with young people, and to define their bodily autonomy clearly. We need to strive towards a social, sexual, and political culture that acknowledges the bodily self-determination of women and all minority groups.

Obviously, however, ideas of consent become even more complicated in cases involving various forms of gendered violence, including domestic and family violence. Here, power imbalances are already in play, including the use of physical, sexual, financial, or emotional abuse. Women may lack the ability to refuse consent. Affirmative consent relies intrinsically on the autonomous subject, who can articulate ‘yes’ or ‘no’. This is not the case where women feel vulnerable to violence, or indeed are already in a violent relationship. There are no easy fixes here, of course, and victims need access to a raft of resources, including support for personal safety and financial well-being. Yet the power imbalance found here needs to be part of the conversation about affirmative consent—the simplistic messaging of ‘only yes means yes’ renders women enduring family and domestic violence invisible.

These are the tough, difficult, and thorny conversations we must have in the mainstream. We need to think through the concept of the rational subject and see how power imbalances do not allow some women to consent or refuse consent. In these instances, the problem is actually a bigger one than sex: the victim here is unable to maintain bodily autonomy in more ways than one. The vulnerability of women and other people to physical and sexual abuse needs to be tackled as part of a broader conversation, not simply one about consent, but the links between affirmative consent can be part of this discussion. Further, these need to be discussed not just in rape crisis centres and domestic violence services but as an integral part of the educative content about affirmative consent.

Third, thinking about consent needs to be a lifelong endeavour, not something aimed just at young people. We applaud moves to introduce better school-based sex education to children and young people: this is core to building a society where consent and bodily autonomy are the expectation, not add-ons. Yet, this can’t end when formal schooling is completed. Chapter Three, which focuses on understandings of consent from age 18 to 35, shows that consent is better recognised by the younger cohort, while the older participants had murkier interpretations. This sends a clear message that education about consent is not a ‘one-and-done’, but rather needs to be backed up by consistent reaffirming across the life cycle.

Fourth, we need to listen far more carefully to diverse groups and to ways that cultural specificity intersects with an affirmative consent message. This is not easy. It would be far simpler to hire a translator, to make generalist affirmative consent messages available to different cultural and language groups. This is, however, unlikely to be successful (Maturi, 2022). Migrant and refugee groups have multifarious backgrounds and needs, and each group will have its own frameworks and lived experiences for understanding sex, relationships, and potentially sexual violence. Within some cultures, there are distinct views on access to sex after marriage, and the consent of a wife is assumed: this means sexual assault can be a remote or extraneous concept. Further, it can be difficult for women to challenge ideas of masculinity and male privilege, while maintaining important cultural traditions. Programs to educate around consent and affirmative consent need to be co-designed and implemented with and by community groups, to ensure that outcomes are meaningful. Working with communities on human rights, individual autonomy and sex education can be more promising than mere criminalisation, and including men in these discussions has proven to be positive. But it’s not merely about providing structures for thinking about consent and sexual violence, or about criminalisation and legal solutions. Rather, we need a more complex engagement with marginalised men and women, including deep financial, legal, and cultural support for victims as they navigate difficult terrains.

Finally, understandings of sexual consent need to be broadened, beyond the initial sexual experience. Our work on sexual and reproductive coercion highlights the vulnerability of women and pregnant people to abuse. While these forms of reproductive control might not initially seem to be related to consent or affirmative consent, thinking through the ways that bodily autonomy operates within relationships will help us to drive change around sexual consent in broader, more impactful ways.

Part of thinking through the conundrums of affirmative consent is about embracing the inherent messiness of sex and relationships. Consent to sex is, at the core, necessary for sovereignty, and is part of a suite of basic human rights. Acknowledging this is an important part of the feminist agenda, as is delineating the power relations that make it difficult for some women to say no, and for some women to say yes. We need to be unafraid of the grey areas, and of thinking through the boundaries of what is possible. We need to expect more of affirmative consent, than a simple slogan. We need to acknowledge the limitations of the model but strive to tackle these. We need to be braver and anticipate a richer framework, that is inclusive at its core. Ideas about affirmative consent need to be courageous and daring, but operationalised at a local level, so they are right for the precise audience. It’s too easy to think that sexual violence is timeless and therefore normalised and never-ending. Affirmative consent will not solve all of the problems of gendered and sexual violence. Nonetheless, social and cultural change around affirmative consent is one important step towards bodily autonomy for all people. If we can complicate this next step, affirmative consent models will be richer, more precise, and undoubtedly more inclusive.

FormalPara Notes
  1. 1.

    The video can currently be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3aHhNKIcKU. Last accessed June 2023.