50 Shades of Grape

Exploration of the evolution of a consent

10 years ago, I’m sitting in a lecture hall with a few hundred students at UCLA. A good chunk of them dozing as a few people in the front do a presentation on sexual harassment. I was apart of Greek Life and every year there was a mandatory sexual harassment and assault training that was required for both men and women.

You’d think that you don’t need a whole lecture devoted to explaining drugging women’s drinks is bad, but that’s where we were in the 2010’s.

The “Yes Means Yes” law was just enacted in California a year prior in 2014 - it established that universities needed to adapt a policy of affirmative consent.

This law actually stemmed from a previous definition of consent that came up in the 90s “No Means No.” While it was meant to be a progressive stance against sexual violence, people realized there were gaps in this approach because it didn’t account for situations in which one couldn’t say no due to intoxication or coercion.

The “Yes Means Yes” Movement was actually established in the early 90s at Antioch college, but didn’t make it’s way into California legislature until 2014. You might be wondering why it took so long to make it mainstream, but in case you didn’t remember the 90s were a wild fucking time and rape culture was rampant. In fact, SNL did a skit “Is it Date Rape?” a jeopardy parody, in direct response to this movement at Antioch college.

But alas, I digress.

Back in the lecture hall at UCLA, students didn’t find the idea of consent particularly riveting and were waiting eagerly to see the end slide. The reality was students weren’t really incentivized to care about consent. Talking about consent is one thing, but actually breaking through cultural norms, enforcing good behavior, and getting a generation of men that actually respect women, is a whole other thing.

I mean, the Brock Turner case happened within a year of the “Yes Means Yes” law (if you don’t know the case, spend some time looking it up - it’s too extensive for me to cover here). All said and done, Brock Turner spent only 3 months in jail after raping an unconscious girl. There was enough public outrage to push for legislature to establish a minimum sentence in raping unconscious victims.

Perhaps it was still just early stages of the movement against rape culture, but consent was still a very unidimensional concept for most people and not socially relevant.

I mean, it’s a little insane that we needed an animation about tea to explain consent - and this was a revolutionary explainer video.

I’m not being facetious when I call it revolutionary - it did shake up conversations in ways that hadn’t been breached, at least this broadly, before.

When we look back at how we viewed rape 10 years ago, I think most of could admit that we had very primitive ideas of what consent meant, as well as a very specific idea of what rape was.

Rape, as we understood it, was physically violent and happened by a stranger.

(I want to say here that yes, all rape is inherently violent, but in this context I’m using the word to refer to an encounter that includes resistance or physical force being used)

The idea that “real” rape is physical, forceful, and committed in a dark alley obscures the far more common reality: emotional manipulation, coercion, and violations that don’t leave visible bruises.

Part of being a good person is learning to acknowledge your biases. We all have biases, both conscious and unconscious. Many of us have similar biases as a result of growing up in shared cultural values, and not all of them good.

Here’s what I can tell you: we all have some racist and sexists and other shitty biases. These “invisible” biases aren’t necessarily individual moral failings, as much as it is cultural inheritances that we have the responsibility of correcting.

All of us have some sort of internalized misogyny.

I don’t care how woke you are, women couldn’t get credit cards without their husband until thirty years ago, we still don’t have a female president, and many of us are having to fight for our bodily autonomy. And this is just in America. We didn’t undo thousands of years of treating women like shit, overnight.

As a woman, facing your own internalized misogyny can feel like self-betrayal. How can you hold disdain for what you are? However uncomfortable you may be, facing these harmful internal and seemingly invisible beliefs, is necessary.

It’s then we can acknowledge that even people who think of themselves as “good” can still be complicit in rape culture. And that the ideas put out by people who might otherwise seem coherent and reputable can be based in one of these biases.

What even is rape culture?

It’s when an society or environment whose prevailing social attitudes have the effect of normalizing or minimizing sexual abuse or assault.

I think one of the most perverse way this presents in today’s culture is the silencing assumption that forceful, physical violence is a characteristic part of rape.

People are way more likely to explain non-consensual sex away or find a justification, if there’s an absence of forceful physical violence, than not.

But the problem is not all rapes happen that way, in fact there’s research that shows most rapes do not result in physical violence.

So, why is it we start to question if something was indeed rape when it’s “non-violent” or even complicit?

Why do we have such a hard time understanding emotional violence?

And why do we take it less seriously?

"I don’t know if I’m emotionally abusive, but even if I am, isn’t that better than being physical abusive?” - A Crazy Man I Once Knew

We tend to measure harm in bruises. In ER visits. In rape kits. If there are no visible injuries, we ask: Was it really that bad?

People look for bruises or broken doors, not gaslit memories and shredded boundaries. But studies show that emotional abuse, coercion, degradation, chronic invalidation, literally alters the brain. The parts of us that manage fear, regulate emotion, and navigate threat go into complete overdrive.

You don’t just lose your ability to say no. You lose your ability to even know what you want.

📚 Follingstad et al. (2005) found that emotional abuse was a better predictor of post-traumatic symptoms, depression, and low self-esteem than physical abuse alone.

Sexual coercion, particularly in intimate partner relationships, is frequently rated as more traumatic than physical violence.

• Victims report higher levels of shame, self-blame, and emotional distress from sexual violations that occur in the context of emotional manipulation or relationship coercion.

• Even when no physical force is involved, the violation of agency and the erosion of autonomy are often more psychologically destabilizing than a discrete act of physical violence.

How could someone possible consent in a relationship where their literal brain chemistry was being intentionally manipulated by the person abusing them? (They can’t)

So, our society has collectively understood that ‘yes means yes,’ but consent isn’t just a yes - it’s a meaningful, informed, and freely given yes.

Let’s do a thought experiment.

You go buy a car, you’re told it has a clean title.

You ask all the right questions.
The dealer looks you in the eye and says it’s never been in a crash.

No damage, no red flags. It’s safe. Trustworthy.
You’re desperate for a car. You need it to get to work, to live your life. The person selling the car can smell that desperation and pushes harder for you to make the big purchase.

So you say fuck yes—and you sign.

But later, you find out the title was never clean. You find this out because you drove the car, got into an accident, and got really fucking hurt.

The car had serious damage that was covered up. It was never safe.
You never would’ve agreed to buy it if you’d known the truth.
You would have never been hurt if they were honest.

And now? You’re stuck with something you technically chose, but that choice was based on lies. You didn’t agree to buy the car you were given.

This is where the analogy diverts from reality. You could actually take that person who sold you that car to court for fraud and win.

I know this because I saw my brother have pretty much this case and he got a pretty settlement for the fraud of this piece of shit car.

But, if you carry the analogy over to assault, the victim is stuck with the damage of the assault and not only that - the victim is the stupid one for not knowing there were issues to begin with and there’s little successful legal recourse.

To be frank, I hesitate to put any analogies that draw parallels to sexual assault or rape, especially in the context of abusive relationships.

Why?

Simply because people are reductive and lack the ability to see nuance.

However, I chose to include it because I think it highlights on a superficial level how absolutely, astoundingly prevalent rape culture is.

If we all get really honest with ourselves, there has been a story told where you immediately questioned the truth. Fuck it, probably even mine.

“They’re in a relationship.”
“She said yes.”
“She is just trying to ruin his life.”

We’ve all had a moment or glimpse into the doubt that perpetraters feed off of and abusers count on.

It’s absurd that a fraudulent car is something so simply and obviously immoral, but when we take a similar situation in regards to sex, all of a sudden it’s 50 shades of g(rape).

(Ok, you might not have the same fucked up humor as I do, but I thought that was a brilliant pun and even a double entendre with the book reference)

This is analogy is also a rather basal example, in the sense that it doesn’t even touch on many frequent tactics used by abusers to achieve the enthusiastic “yes.” Emotionally abusive tactics like withholding affection, the silent treatment, gaslighting, triangulating, power dynamics or physical or financial manipulation tactics.

So, how is it possible to give a meaningful, enthusiastic, informed, and freely given yes under confounding variables like these?

It’s not.

When you look at the past few decades of the sexual revolution or feminism, especially more recent discourse, there’s a group of contrarian people who hold the notion that consent has somehow changed or gotten more complicated. Because it’s the only thing that explains why we culturally accepted what happened back in the 90s, right? That back in the 90s what we culturally accepted as consent was simply different and certain things were “okay”?

Hate to break it to the incels, the definition of consent has always been the same.

The tolerance for “grey area” has simply shrunk.

When we look back at the evolution of cultural consent (ie what society socially accepts as consent), I think it’s important that we can recognize that we have all had thoughts or actions that are not in alignment with true consent (ie consent as we hopefully understand it, today).

Similar to how we culturally and collectively have accepted the different iterations of cultural consent throughout the years (eg “no means no” to “yes means yes” etc), I think the current spotlight has shifted to highlight the insidious aspects of coercive consent and power exchanges.

Oftentimes, we are so fixated on changing the future, we forget to look and learn from the past.

That requires honesty - the honesty that maybe we were wrong. Maybe there were some people we should have listened to. Maybe, just maybe, victims are speaking truth.

We have a lot of real work to do as a society.
The real work begins at building a society that actually punishes rapists.
That listens to victims.

That understands consent isn’t complicated.

It’s just inconvenient for people who benefit from ambiguity.

Nobody Asked Me,
D

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