The other day in London, my friend met someone who left her furious with his refusal to understand the concept of consent. “How do I know if it is a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’?” was his question. “Ask.” was what my friend said, before he went ahead and shared his views on women and their habit of taking undue advantage of men. The hour-long interaction ended with my friend calling him out for his blatant sexism and him walking away.
Their interaction got me thinking about how, a couple of years back in India (where I happen to come from), a film got the nation talking openly about sexual consent for arguably the first time in history. The film, which was based on a basic idea of “No means No” appealed to hundreds of thousands of women and girls who had been in situations where their No was not taken as No, and to many men who had been socialised into believing that a woman’s No had a latent Yes that just needed persuasion and probably force to give in.
My friend’s interaction with a person from a ‘developed’ country with reasonable educational qualification, and the mindset of a lot of men in my country that is part of the ‘developing, third world’ were so similar that it made me shed whatever little faith I had in development as a means to achieve gender awareness (also gender equality, but that seems too far-fetched a dream). Thoughts like patriarchy and sexism uniting men all across the world began to crop up in my mind. The part that hit me the most is that I failed to find any evidence of what people in the development field like to call ‘best practices’. In no region of the world does gender equality seem to be a reality, or even a work in progress.
What is astonishing is that a concept as basic as consent is not only negated by social norms, but legal regulations for it are also blurry. Last year in North Carolina, a case brought to light a 1979 state supreme court ruling that said that continuing to have sex with someone who withdraws consent in the process of intercourse is not considered as rape. In September last year in India, a high court judgement pronounced that a feeble no may mean yes, overturning rape conviction in a high-profile case. Both cases met with public outrage as people came out to question why no should not mean no under any circumstance.
Cases like these provide evidence to show that the issue of consent does not have any correlation with levels of literacy or development. People all across the globe experience situations where their ‘no’ is not taken as ‘no’. The way out of this perhaps also lies in a united approach to make sexual consent the norm. It is time we (those of us who understand the difference between ‘yes’ and ‘no’) come together to spread the message of consent loud and clear until it reaches all those who are deafened by inhumane values of force and violence.
