Learning about consent
Nov. 14th, 2017 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dpolicar(Written as a comment elsewhere, in response to a question about what I was taught about consent as a child, and captured here.)
I don't recall any explicit teaching on consent at all.
More implicitly... the primary message I learned about consent growing up, I guess, was that it wasn't important. People in relationships had obligations, was the lesson, which were a function of their role in those relationships, and the important thing was to live up to those obligations... to do otherwise was both wrong, and harmful. One dates, and people on dates have specific roles, prescribed by gender. One gets married; ditto. Married couples have children. One is born, one is raised, one obeys one's parents. Men find work and do that work in order to support their families. Women take care of the household and raise the children. Etc.
The underlying frame is that these aren't things one consents to, or that one is able to refuse consent to, any more than one consents to aging or diabetes. They're simply the way the world is. People have obligations, period-full-stop.
And then there was the time my dad very seriously told me I should never let myself become responsible for anyone. (It was years before I unpacked just how fucked-up a thing that was to say to one's small child.)
That said, I realize you are primarily thinking about sexual consent here, and I'm talking about relationships more broadly.
WRT sexual consent, again, no explicit teaching. To the extent that I got any explicit teaching about sex at all, the theme was primarily about not letting myself be taken in by "bad girls" who would ruin my life.
More implicitly... I suppose I mostly learned about sexual consent from mass media. The primary lesson I took away, I think, was that sex is something that "happens"... it isn't planned, isn't discussed, isn't coordinated. Words may be involved, but they don't really matter, they're just expressions of emotions, like grunts or moans. Insofar as consent is relevant, it's a kind of a telepathic thing, where everyone involved reads one another's minds and just instinctively knows what the right thing to do is,.and can simply be taken for granted.
It was decades of experience that taught me otherwise, and listening to a lot of different people talking about their experiences.
I don't recall any explicit teaching on consent at all.
More implicitly... the primary message I learned about consent growing up, I guess, was that it wasn't important. People in relationships had obligations, was the lesson, which were a function of their role in those relationships, and the important thing was to live up to those obligations... to do otherwise was both wrong, and harmful. One dates, and people on dates have specific roles, prescribed by gender. One gets married; ditto. Married couples have children. One is born, one is raised, one obeys one's parents. Men find work and do that work in order to support their families. Women take care of the household and raise the children. Etc.
The underlying frame is that these aren't things one consents to, or that one is able to refuse consent to, any more than one consents to aging or diabetes. They're simply the way the world is. People have obligations, period-full-stop.
And then there was the time my dad very seriously told me I should never let myself become responsible for anyone. (It was years before I unpacked just how fucked-up a thing that was to say to one's small child.)
That said, I realize you are primarily thinking about sexual consent here, and I'm talking about relationships more broadly.
WRT sexual consent, again, no explicit teaching. To the extent that I got any explicit teaching about sex at all, the theme was primarily about not letting myself be taken in by "bad girls" who would ruin my life.
More implicitly... I suppose I mostly learned about sexual consent from mass media. The primary lesson I took away, I think, was that sex is something that "happens"... it isn't planned, isn't discussed, isn't coordinated. Words may be involved, but they don't really matter, they're just expressions of emotions, like grunts or moans. Insofar as consent is relevant, it's a kind of a telepathic thing, where everyone involved reads one another's minds and just instinctively knows what the right thing to do is,.and can simply be taken for granted.
It was decades of experience that taught me otherwise, and listening to a lot of different people talking about their experiences.
