DEBATE OVER the definitions of sexual consent and assault has been raging nationally for the better part of a decade. In 2014, California became the first state to mandate that universities receiving public funding use the “affirmative consent” standard in sexual misconduct hearings. Sometimes called “yes means yes,” it requires a sexual partner to obtain “affirmative, conscious, and voluntary” agreement at each stage of an intimate encounter. That is a dramatic break from the past, when until a person said stop (and sometimes not even then), anything was fair game. In separate legislation, any California school district with a health class is now required to include consent education. [...]
Men who receive some form of consent education from their colleges do understand the concept, at least in theory, according to Nicole Badera, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Michigan. In interviews for a paper she presented earlier this year to the American Sociology Association, nearly all of her subjects could offer at least a rudimentary definition: both partners wanting to be doing what they’re doing. Yet when asked to describe their most recent sexual experiences in both a hookup and a relationship, they would expand their definition to encompass their behavior rather than acknowledge misconduct. Not a single student admitted to rape, not even the one whose girlfriend cried and begged for him to stop. [...]
FEW OF THE BOYS I met had ever had a substantive talk with their parents about sex, relationships, or consent. That’s typical, according to a survey of more than 3,000 high school students and young adults published earlier this year by the Making Caring Common project, which is part of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. More than 60 percent of respondents had never had a single conversation with their parents about how to be sure in advance that your partner wants to be — and is comfortable — having sex with you. A similar share had never been told about “the importance of not pressuring someone to have sex with you.” Other research has found that parents are vastly more likely to talk to their daughters about sexual readiness, contraception, and disease protection, perhaps because they believe girls are more vulnerable — emotionally as well as physically — to negative consequences. But that leaves boys to learn their behavior from one another.
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