Men in college aren’t good at gaining the explicit consent of their female sexual partners

Men in college are not clear as to what qualifies as sexual consent.

Consent is a clear ‘yes,’ not the absence of a no,’ but it turns out, many straight men on the college campuses aren’t doing well in gaining the explicit consent of their female sexual partners.

According to a University of Michigan study, young men are using non-verbal cues and presumed behaviours to assure themselves that their partners are wilfully participating. Researcher Nicole Bedera found that too often men don’t obtain verbal consent during sexual encounters. They use behavioural cues and signals as all the consent they need as they begin and continue sex with a female partner.

“A lot of the guys will say, “I knew sex would happen because, well we made eye contact. Or I knew sex would happen because she came to my room and she wasn’t wearing a bra,” Bedera explained. “It’s not that these signals and behaviours are isolated, the men were looking at the behaviours to support their belief that a woman wanted to have a sexual encounter.”

Bedera also found that many of the men who were interviewed simply couldn’t articulate a definition of consent. And of those who tried, it was evident that some offered changes to their definition so as to excuse their own behaviour which would prove they had not explicitly gotten a partner’s consent. Bedera’s findings make it clear that even among men who have been taught how to obtain sexual consent, the message still isn’t clear to them. The paper will be presented in Montreal at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.

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