Editorial: Consent is…not what we think it is?

Consent sounds enthusiastic. It looks like a smile. It smells like lotion. It tastes like pizza. It feels like a cozy sweater.

These are just a few of the ways consent is described in the draft book handed to every first-year student during orientation. Above it, and in much smaller font, is the somber pledge to “keep all people safe from sexual assault.”

This deconstruction of consent may read as unfamiliar, uncomfortable or straight-up wrong to many students. But this may have more to do with our own misjudgment over how consent should be thought about.

Part of Lehigh’s orientation schedule includes programming by Break the Silence, a peer education organization that spreads awareness about gender violence and healthy sexuality.

But without the proper introduction, context or language, the point being made on the page may not be landing.

“The serious pledge to that casualness of the consent prompt might be intentional, but it isn’t translating,” said Violet Kertis, former graduate assistant to the Office of Survivor Support and Intimacy Education.

The concept being described on the page is that consent is more than its legal definition. Our five senses — touch, taste, smell, sound and sight — inform how everything is experienced. And they should especially be considered when navigating sexuality.

College-age students most likely understand consent to be a content and continuous “yes” during all parts of sexual encounters. And while that’s not necessarily wrong, that viewpoint doesn’t encompass the broadness and nuance of sex or consent.

Limited words and stunted comfort levels mean we often fail to acknowledge safe sex does more than just avert danger, it is also supposed to provide a pleasurable physical and emotional experience.

Lehigh defines consent as: “clear, knowing, and voluntary…A mutual agreement to participate in a specific activity at a specific time. Consent is required at each new level of sexual activity…Consent must be clearly communicated (for example, by way of mutually understandable words or actions), mutual, non-coercive, and given free of force or the threat of force. An individual may change their mind and revoke consent at any time by verbal or non-verbal communication.”

This policy does not explicitly state consent must be verbal. “Yes” and “no” are easy to understand, but students fail to realize the non-verbal ways consent can occur. So while verbal confirmations with sexual partners are no doubt important, that isn’t all there is to it.

Brooke DeSipio, the director of the Office of Survivor Support and Intimacy Education, works to recontextualize the jargon around sexual education in the most accessible and least awkward way — which was ultimately the goal of the draft book page.

“The five senses of consent are to give students examples of how verbals and nonverbals can be working together because students struggle with nonverbals,” DeSipio said. “The brain is the most powerful sex organ, so how do we engage all the senses and not just go straight to the genitals? How do we make sex a holistic, pleasurable experience and not just check the box of consent?”

It might sound childish or inappropriate to liken consent to pizza, especially for impressionable first-years who may not fully understand the context, but we think it’s a valid way to destigmatize the conversation over what consent actually is, even if the execution wasn’t blatantly clear at first.

“This page in the draft book is not a standalone. It’s part of larger programming to push students out of their boundaries. This is a broader conversation about the ways we are intimate and understand our own boundaries,” DeSipio said.

If you don’t sense positivity, smiley, sweaty, chocolate, butterflies in your stomach, maybe it’s worth considering what’s happening isn’t totally consensual.