Yes means yes and no means no, but both these mantras need to go: communication myths in consent education and anti-rape activism^*

* This article is based on a project that won the 2017 Top Paper Award from the National Communication Association’s Feminist and Women Studies Division.

ABSTRACT

For decades, feminists have intervened in a sexually violent culture. Many public health professionals, educators, and activists who design these interventions have called for complex conceptualizations of communication, yet communication studies scholars have not written extensively on consent. Moreover, researchers outside the field rarely rely on insights from the discipline. Accordingly, I offer a critical review of consent activism and research, and I highlight disciplinary assumptions that could enhance existing knowledge. I argue that many feminist academic/activist interventions use false ideas about communication, what I call communication myths: discourse merely reflects reality, and local discourse is disconnected from larger social Discourse. I show how these communication myths resonate with rape-supportive arguments. By suggesting communication should be unambiguous during consent, anti-violence educators/activists lower the standard for communicative competence, disconnect it from historical-cultural context, and miss opportunities to politicize consent. I argue feminists can challenge communication myths to build on existing interventions while more fully dismantling rape culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• consent
• communication myths
• discourse
• education
• feminist communication
• rape culture
• rape myths
• sexual violence

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Amy Adele Hasinoff for her feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Kate Lockwood Harris http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8173-2777

Notes

* This article is based on a project that won the 2017 Top Paper Award from the National Communication Association’s Feminist and Women Studies Division.

1 The original video of the incident – which Yale Daily News posted to YouTube – is no longer online. Excerpts of it appear in secondary sources (e.g. WTNH News 8, 2011).

2 Because Men’s Fitness removed the article from its website, the piece is now accessible only via screenshots published in secondary sources (e.g. Gupta, 2016).