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Ex: I heard a story once about a woman who enthusiastically consented to sex, even or especially if she didn't want it (I don't remember why, maybe to keep people happy or get it over with or something). She consented but cut off her own participation. This story terrifies me.
And OTOH, people can be coerced into consent. That sucks. And in order to even say that, we need the distinction between consent and participation: if you were coerced into consenting, then you didn't participate. (And I'm sorry.)
Some might prefer to say "if you were coerced into consent, then you didn't *really* consent." This is totally unworkable as an approach to consent-as-a-tool, and I'd rather talk about this sort of thing using participation.
If "really consenting" has to do with another person's internal state and not what they communicate to me, then I can't ever know if I have "real consent" without being able to read people's minds. (This is something I periodically freak out about.) This won't work.
Instead, let's distinguish between "getting consent," meaning having used the tool (explicit communication, setting context, setting boundaries), and "causing participation," meaning the good stuff is happening and not the bad stuff. Dancing beautifully together.
Among other things, this distinction raises the question: what else besides consent is useful for causing participation? This is a deep rabbit hole. Participation is the entire problem of how to engage well with other people.
Thinking about it leads to hard and uncomfortable ethical, psychological, spiritual, and philosophical territory: what does it mean to want something? How can you even tell that you want something? What does it mean to manipulate someone? Etc.
Example: if you subscribe to something like Internal Family Systems' framework that people have different parts that want different things, if Alice has a part that wants to have sex and another part that doesn't want to have sex, does Alice want to have sex?
What if Alice identifies with the part of her that wants to have sex and thinks the part of her that doesn't want to have sex is bad and wrong? This is actually a hard question and I haven't seen any discussion of consent engage with it.
"How do I dance beautifully with other people" is a spirituality-complete question: trying to answer it is a complete spiritual path. Consent is better than what we had before, but there's so much more work for us to do here.
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