And now I have the language to say this: consent is not sufficient to cause participation. Consent doesn't guarantee you'll have a good time, and it doesn't guarantee you won't be traumatized.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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"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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End of conversation
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I think this is an interesting distinction but it doesn't carve reality at the joints I think are important.
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(I don't think the conventional model carves there either, but it's closer than yours, I think.) I'm interested in both moral permissibility and also something I'd call equivalent to your "dancing beautifully" thing. It matters if consent is coerced - specifically, by whom!
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