Consent is a useful but also utterly bananas magic concept. Eg:
*If you're 16, your ability to consent to sex depends on the age of your partner *consent only counts if it's enthusiastic
*Must be verbal to count
*Only important for your body, not your livelihood or property
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*you become less able to consent the more famous the person is you're consenting to
*Animals can't consent to sex, we say as we artificially inseminate them
*It's impossible to consent to sex for reasons other than arousal, like money for food
*consent violations are The Worst
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What the hell is consent? It can't be "the individual wants the thing to happen"; lots of young/vulnerable people/animals feel this, but we consider their consent invalid.
And there's lots of "don't want this thing to happen" that we're ok with cause we justify it, e.g.-
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ppl who don't wanna pay taxes or kids who don't wanna go to school or people who want to take the wrong kind of drugs or people who want to sell their bodies for sex. It's ok to violate their consent because it's "for a greater good".
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So the actual cultural definition of "consent" is closer to:
wanting/rejecting something that society deems is for the greater good, and where validity of that desire/rejection being dependent on how much power that person has. 5/
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To be extremely clear, I'm not arguing that since consent is a bananas concept, we should throw out everything. For example, kids often "consent" to sexual experiences with pedophiles because they're kids who don't know better; the bad thing here is the intense betrayal. 6/
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I'm arguing to quit consent as a magical concept. Take it off the pedestal; there's lots of other ways to handle understanding "boundaries around what we want", and it's often different for different types of situations. Thinking in consent just blurs what's actually going on.
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I don't think acknowledging that consent is really difficult to quantify exactly negates bodily autonomy. You do retain absolute ownership of your body even if you participate in scenarios that you do not consent to. I do pay taxes out of convenience. That doesn't make me...
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...a slave to govt. I think everyone has had sex they were not 100%, enthusiastically into. That's normal. A big part of the allure and challenge of sex is that it's fuzzy and filled with power dynamics. It's hard. That's why it's fun.
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Also want to remind folks that Western European intellectuals in the 70s considered the idea that a 13 yo couldn't consent to sex ridiculous. And this wasn't a lunatic fringe position.
forbes.com/sites/tamarath
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I feel like you could have made your point a lot clearer here without attempting to try to attack the concept of consent and redefine it - which unfortunately sounds a lot like you are basically saying that bodily autonomy is a "magic concept".
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