Sexual Consent Analysis

Over the last couple of years, the very serious problem of rape culture has come into the national focus, and frank conversations are being had about sexual consent. To this end, programs have been popping up in schools (both in college and the lower grades) that seek to educate students about the concept of consent and why it is necessary for all sexual encounters. In an effort to explain sexual consent to the broader public, several writers and artists have created metaphors (a few of them becoming viral online pieces) that try to explain sexual consent and why it is vitally important. But the reality is we need to stop using metaphors to talk about sexual consent because they're actually doing more damage than good.

Here's a refresher:
The first consent metaphor to go viral recently was the one created by blogger Rockstar Dinosaur Pirate Princess (RDPP). In the essay, RDPP wrote that consent is an incredibly simple concept (and I agree) and proceeded to compare it to asking someone if they would like a cup of tea. The bulk of the metaphor is as
The tea metaphor gets us thinking that consent is something that needs to be explicitly asked for, but it totally misses the driving force behind consent: the equal distribution of power between people involved in a sexual encounter. Asking for consent acknowledges the other person has power and autonomy over his or her body, and not asking for consent is an abusive, forceful use of power onto someone else.

Then, on Tuesday, the artist Banksy tweeted a pair of comics and wrote "if other situations were treated like sexual consent." Here is one of the comics:

Banksy follows a similar pattern behind the "tea vs. consent" metaphor, which is basically to say, "Look how ridiculous not asking for permission is." What I like about this comic is it shows that consent is something that all couples of all ages, genders, and orientations need to talk about.

But in these comics, we again miss the extremely important element of power the same way we did with RDPP's tea consent metaphor. Both of these metaphors water down rape and eschew addressing the consequences of sexual violation — something any metaphor about consent will do, because distances us from the topic at hand. This is to say, there is a problem with using any metaphor to talk about