The consent conversation...needs some work 😬| Khadija Mbowe

The rumors are true...I'm on Satan's favortie app: twitter.com/khadijambowe

I learned that at 20, going over someone's house that is a male = consent in their minds. Even if they are just friends. 😐 And when I retell the story, the response is "why did you go over there".

Something that bothers me is how for so many people, consent just means getting a "yes" so that way they can do whatever they want. To them, consent is literally just getting a "yes", regardless of the context. They will pressure others, coerce others, manipulate others...etc if it means getting that yes so they can proceed to do whatever they want regardless of how the other person feels. Consent should be about making sure the other person knows whats going on, knows what yall are gonna be doing, and without any sort of pressure or coercion agrees to do it because they want to do it. If you have to manipulate or trick people into saying yes then that yes is meaningless. Consent isnt something you should feel like you're "getting away with".

Here is a list of things that, as a cis man with a lower than average sex-drive, I have had to learn the hard way through personal experience over the past 2 decades because no one in my life ever taught me anything different: 1. It is possible for a guy to not want to have sex. 2. It is possible for a guy to not want to have sex even with someone he is actively attracted to. 3. It is possible for a guy to not want to have sex even if he is physically aroused. 4. It is possible for a guy to be aroused, and want to masturbate, but not have sex. 5. It is possible for a guy to want to have sex, and then change his mind halfway through. 6. It is possible for a woman to have her self esteem damaged and her feelings deeply hurt when her male partner doesn't want to have sex with her because she has spent her whole life being told that all guys are ravenous horn-dogs who will take ANY opportunity to enthusiastically rail any girl they are attracted to, and thus is forced to conclude that her partner finds her deeply unattractive even when that couldn't be farther from the truth. 7. It is possible for a guy to essentially pressure himself into obligatory intercourse with his consenting partner because he has spent his whole life being told that is what he is supposed to want. All of these are things I have personally experienced. My life could have been drastically improved in so many ways if everyone just talked about this more, and more often, and started the conversation in a structured and careful way at a young age and continued it throughout all stages of social and physical development.

When men are taught to view women as sex objects that exist for their pleasure and view sex with women as something they do TO you and not WITH you, it leads to not caring about your consent and normalizing sexual assault as something that men just do. I truly believe there are a lot of men who have assaulted women and genuinely don’t understand what they’ve done wrong because these things are treated so normal. I’ve even seen this in my own life. Edit: Just so this is clear, they may have not seen the problems within their actions but that is not to imply they innocently raped someone. Doing so and having no remorse or care about what they did due to not seeing women as human or caring about consent is deeply violent and misogynistic. I don’t want the wording I used to overlook that.

AMAB here, and yes the whole "boys will be boys" narrative always struck something within me. It never felt right for a plethora of reasons

I think an idea of "go hug/kiss your uncle/aunt" as threatening to further understanding of consent is underrated. I was so uncomfortable as a child to hug or kiss some relative I barely knew, but it was almost a ritual. I even didn't know if that person initially wanted to have a hug, but I was told that it's rude if I didn't do it. Told by someone else (my parents), like the 3rd party! And of course it is a perfect soil for some horrible ideas about having an "obligatory sex". Khadija's idea of educating children AND adults is so on point!

Even in 2022 sexual consent is still a radical idea in our culture

As a guy, yes, the way that I was told that i was gonna have tons of sex, and be a player, etc, just bc I was born male? Horrible. I was laughed at by my stepmom when she found out I was 15 and didn't even have my first kiss (she said I was behind). And then talked abt how she expects to catch me having sex in my room at least once. Like the way it felt made me feel like all guys are expected to be... bad people. And it sparks the thought that maybe alot of guys are bad ppl because we are socialized that way... But we not ready for that conversation.. Love the video as always Khadija <333

Obligatory sex is entirely why it took me a decade to finally come to terms with being asexual. I thought that because I had sex in relationships I could not be ace, but I was only having sex because it was so normalized and expected. I was never given the alternative option of choosing no. This is why I am so adamant about normalizing asexuality and not letting it be shrugged off as not as important of a sexuality because a lot of us, especially boy/men, are told they have to want sex to be happy and it is expected in any romantic relationship. Having asexuality as a normalized concept to developing teens is SO IMPORTANT to avoid so much pain and trauma.

"Pleasure for all" Oh gawd, now they're gonna say consent is socialism.....

The uncle example you gave hit way to close to home. Short Story: Parents, please don't make your kids hug people, even family. Long story: Had an uncle who would hug me and my siblings for super long, rub up and down our sides and kiss the afab people's necks sometimes. He also grabbed my sisters butt at my older brothers wedding "as a joke" 🤮🤮🤮 He would also take A LOT of pictures of the kids, especially while swimming or the very little kids in the bath, and even of random young girls when we would go to the beach with the family. At about 16, I had enough. I had tried multiple times to get him to stop giving me his long hugs and taking pictures of me. I told him that I don't like hugging or having pictures taken of me (not true in all context, but absolutely true for him) and I told my very unhelpful father that if he didn't help enforce the boundaries, I would start refusing any visitation with him. The amount of times I had been forced to hug him "Because he's your uncle" still makes my skin crawl if I think about it too long. It took me until I was 16 to stand up for my bodily autonomy, but even that makes me lucky because a lot of people never get that opportunity.

I was SAssaulted by a man I went on a date with- I went over to meet him at his house (I was homeschooled , so I was NOT experienced enough to know the implications, and feeling the need to explain this up front is probably saying something on its own), but I was literally told “it’s not SA because you willingly went to his house”. I was automatically the recipient of the responsibility for this assault. And this lead me to accept getting SA’ed repeatedly because this taught me SA doesn’t count if it’s from someone you chose to see. So thank you for having this conversation, I’m so thankful someone is talking about this. Hopefully this will help others who may be very naive like myself avoid these dangers. I appreciate your voice!!

I’ll say that as a man it isn’t just an extreme overemphasis on sex (and more specifically, sexual dominance) that we’re expected to uphold. When you’re told the only appropriate way of expressing love is through sex, that permanently damages a man’s ability to express love and affection in any other way. We’re actively encouraged to dismiss and belittle women’s expressions of love. This starts almost immediately, with boys being conditioned to turn their nose up at anything remotely “feminine”, from the notebook to, say, crying. This leaves young, impressionable boys with the only in to the adult world being through exploitative pornography and depictions of women in “masculine” media being nothing but objects for the pleasure of men. I hate to say it, but I feel like the only way to combat rape culture is for men themselves to find some Jordan Peterson-esque redpilled “intellectual” movement repackaging old feminist ideas. Men, the way they are now, are not going to listen to women.

My ex-boyfriend used to tell me how he specifically hated how so many comedians (especially white, cis-het male comedians, along with so many other media figures) would basically just give in to social pressures and always have a bit like: "Men only want THREE things ladies... food, fuckin', and sleepin'... It AiNt ThAt DiFfiCuLt". He had to deconstruct a LOT of his socialization while we were together, and it led to a lot of depression and helplessness after a few years. We both went through it all together, because I was learning (and unlearning) a lot of things about our society's outlook on sexual expression, consent, etc. too, but it was excruciating to say the least. Men definitely deserve, and NEED, better role models to help them deconstruct all of their social brain-garbage, because it can nearly ruin the people who aren't even very susceptible to it, not to mention the people who are.

So as a cis straight man I have had some weird interactions around consent. I am terrified of making a woman or anyone feel uncomfortable so whenever I want to do anything I always just ask out loud in plain words like "can I kiss you?" and I can not express how many women have laughed at me for asking, or tried to explain to me that I'm just supposed to somehow tell that they wanted to and leaned in. One woman's exact words were "I would have if you hadn't asked" (she was actually very cool and we still ended up making out later and she even expressed a few days after that she thought about it and appreciated me asking first). I don't really have a point here but it's always been a really confusing thing that happens pretty consistantly the first time I kiss a woman. But also I refuse to not ask because the one time I don't is going to be the time she didn't want to.

The topic of consent is often multifaceted and much more nuance than just a "No" or "yes" which often ignores the problem of coercion and power dynamics. People can emotionally and financially manipulate people into having sex with them which is a form of rape we neglect to talk about. This includes bosses asking for "sexual favors" for a promotion or withholding love from a partner unless they provide you with sex. Oversimplifying consent makes it a lot easier for our society and legal system to create loopholes for rapist and sexual assaulters to negate responsibility for their actions.

As a man, the notion of being characterized as a sex hungry fool who will go to absurd lengths to obtain sex simply because of the gender that was assigned to me at birth has always been immensely off-putting (Rather hurtful actually). Doubly so as a black man because, as FD Signifier so eloquently put in his most recent video, we're perceived to be these inherently lustful creatures born for sex. Because of the way this mindset proliferates, we aren't often given an avenue for exploration outside of that hypersexuality. And it's demoralizing to be viewed as such by society, especially by the folks in your own community. Whenever I listen to a black podcast and they respond to story of a black dude doing something stupid for or because of sex and the hosts respond "Oh, of course he would. He's a nigga! What else would you expect?", I get tight, not just for myself but for the black boys (or children socialized as boys) who are coming up now and being confronted with that same social stigma. I know the sort of pain that leads to and I hate the thought of kids my cousin's age enduring the same inner turmoil I went through as a black kid. People make it out to seem as if black male hypersexuality is as certain as gravity and it's so upsetting because it so often leads to relentless pain. One day, I hope we can view these attributes as ones we were socialized with rather than something inherent to our nature. Thank you so much, to you and F.D, for pushing this conversation forward.

People always like to bring up how porn messes with your view on sex and how it propagates a bad image of women's sexuality but like, as a dude, I feel like being shown way too many James Bond movies as a little boy fucked my understanding of consent up way worse than porn ever could've.

"I used to love Pocahontas and then I found out," Is a crazy relatable statement oh my gosh