Australia: Sex consent app proposal sparks backlash
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
https://www.theage.com.au/search?text=consent
With respect to the idea of consent via app - it's simply a dumb idea. People can change their mind, use of the app can be forced, then there's the whole tracking and data privacy issues (the slut-shaming potential of this data can't be overstated, especially in a courtroom context. "But your record shows you consented to 5 other sexual liasons in the last 3 days").
Consent is given continually and can be withdrawn instantly. If in doubt whether you have consent, then you probably don't. So ask (again) or stop.
Agreed. It's laughable. Dave Chappelle even parodied a similar concept (The Love Contract) on Chappelle's Show.
edit: the idea was actually called The Love Contract.
Even if you say yes you could say no later. Even if you have marks, it could be some weird rough sex / kink thing.
Am i really the only one to see it ?
Fundamentally, I think it is indicative of a failing in modern society. These folks have somehow managed to grow up to hate their emotions and those of other people, and now spend a large part of their life trying to murder them whenever they see them. It's immature and destructive and we owe it to each other to do better.
The intention of the app is good. Its just not gonna work
"Fundamentally, I think it is indicative of a failing in modern society. These folks have somehow managed to grow up to hate their emotions and those of other people, and now spend a large part of their life trying to murder them whenever they see them. It's immature and destructive and we owe it to each other to do better."
Yeah, or people are actually waking to the fact that girls get raped more than what society thought and want to fight back
It's nearly impossible to prove a rape case in court. Because of this, there has been some groundswell of support for relaxing the burden of proof in rape cases to a standard that might ultimately permit some false accusations to result in wrongful convictions (a horrifically bad idea that would likely be a Pandora's box imo).
If you reduce this down to the fundamental tension: either we have to ask women to become dramatically more vigilant and accept some nonzero risk of rape (more or less what we implicitly do already) OR we have to increase the likelihood of wrongful convictions.
As far as I've been able to discern, there is no good solution here. And that's how asinine ideas like this "sex consent app" show up. It's a kind of manifestation of denial.
There's a third way, but perhaps equally unappetizing: record all interactions.
I omitted this possibility for obvious reasons.
Video is obvious, but assuming you use a modern phone, you might as well add other sensors like accelerometer data, and extra channels like all WhatsApp conversations.
> I'm going to assume you mean a video recording, which is the only way to be absolutely certain about what occurred when you have exactly two witnesses who also happen to be the accuser and the accused.
Alas, even videos can be ambiguous. Eg picture some BDSM play. There can be lots of context required to make a decision.
We now define consent as something so etheral (probably rightly so) that it's virtually impossible to prove it was granted (clearly, "leave me alone" remains unambiguous). People can change their mind but feel coerced to continue, or grant consent to something different than what ends up happening. Court cases thus go down the "he said, she said" route.
I don't really know how to get out of that.
The flipside is that, indeed, because genuine accusations are so thin on physical proof, it is so hard to separate them from fake ones. Whenever I hear someone publicly shamed for sexual misconduct and the wrath of public opinion descends on them, a part of me shudders at the thought of that happening to an innocent person, with no defense available.
The solution is the de-stimulation of society from an era of overt sexual manipulation and an adjustment of expectations regarding the value of casual sexual activities.
As a result, when looking at rape cases (like with other crimes), we use degrees of certainty and corroborate multiple sources of evidence. The legal system in the US requires "beyond a reasonable doubt", not "100% certain" - because the latter is impossible.
My point was more that while I think the app is kinda dumb for other reasons (am I expected to pull out my phone during sex if revoke consent????), dismissing it as "we can't 100% prove consent" would effectively apply to all evidence of rape and just crimes in general.
So, a new era of abstinence is ahead of us. There is simply no other way for anyone to feel safe than to simply abstain.
Personally I'm okay with this, but I know a lot of teenagers who grew up thinking sex is an important facet of their identity who will disagree...
Frankly, though, I think a more conservative society which treats sex with a lot more respect than the current shit-show, is definitely in order.
Well, it's the same as with anti-natalism:
People who don't care about this stuff, will still have kids / take 'consent risks' to have sex.
An important complication about the topic at hand is that a lot of human courtship / flirting, involves plausible deniability. Eg extensive eye contact in a bar can indicate sexual interest, or perhaps you just have a booger on your nose.
Similarly, status and power play are just as much ingrained in human psyche as sexual behaviour. So there's lots of overlap. Lots of people enjoy when their prospective mate is a bit brazen (or, the opposite, plays extra shy).
Playing with social convention is a big part.
Human behaviour is messy.
I think the discussion of explicit consent is really intended as guidance for children/teenagers who don't the dance yet. For experienced adults it's possible to navigate all of these grey areas and read the underlying signals while being crystal clear about playing within the boundaries which are acceptable to both sides. But for kids who are still figuring this out, it's perfectly reasonable to suggest that people use their words and be unambiguous.
Conservative societies generally had more sex than we do now.
If you think "Victorians" are what is meant when someone refers to a conservative society, then you might need to read a few more books. Its quite possible to be conservative on the subject of sexual activity, while also voting Democrat.
If you never bother attempting to initiate sexual activity, you're pretty safe from those who would use the sex act to alter your life. And if you eschew participating in collective sex-culture, its pretty easy to keep this under control, at a personal level.
All this does is make people think twice. If you're married and trying to have children how can any craziness ever happen? Not sure what "collective sex-culture" is, but it may be what many just call "promiscuity" (which is kind of my point).
Although on top of that, note also that consent is specifically for specific acts with a specific person (or people) in a certain context. Exact legal rules may vary over time and between places, and we may debate the exact comparative moral weights of different violations, but it should be clear to us all (I hope!) that consent to vaginal penetration is not consent to anal penetration; consent to sex with a condom is not consent to sex without a condom; consent to sex with someone whom you believe to be sober, disease free, and otherwise single is not consent to sex with someone who is not one (or more, or all) of those things.
And those aren't just hypotheticals; plenty of arguments about consent hinge on those things; eg, two people consent to sex with a condom, sex is initiated with a condom, one person looks down partway through the act and realise the condom has been removed or fallen off, they start yelling stop, but it takes some time before their partner actually stops, and now a judge and jury are trying to resolved a factual debate over what was or was not said about condoms prior to the sexual encounter, who was or was not responsible for the condom being removed and/or falling off, how long precisely it took between the call to "stop" and when the partner actually stopped, how long a reasonable person in that situation should be expected to take to realise consent had been withdrawn, and whether or not one person actually spent a significant amount of time consciously choosing to penetrate someone they were aware (or should have been aware) was no longer consenting, etc.
And then to take all that and think a EULA-style checkbox in an app will actually help any of that? At best it'll do nothing; more likely it'll confuse the situation and make mistakes and miscommunication more likely.
Reviews aren't perfect, and they won't catch someone mostly well-behaved who only occasionally sexually assaults [1]. But as it is, there are serial-perpetrators out there who get away with it, because there's no 'background check' for dating, and the only remedy is if a community around a known predator keeps trying to warn each new girl he tries to get with - which is indistinguishable from slander, and can just as well be used to ruin someone's life based on a single lie. So maybe an app could actually help with that? Make an 'official' paper trail so your sexual behavior, good or bad, is on the record. The technology could enforce various things - e.g. the review could be 'locked in' after a couple days, so you can't change it weeks later due to a bad breakup (it wouldn't even need to be published or sent to a server, a cryptographic hash would be all it takes to make it possible to verify later that the review wasn't tampered with). And by only allowing 'authorized' reviews, you avoid the possibility of brigading.
Using technology to deal with a sensitive issue, and sensitive data like this isn't easy - and doing so would require a very careful design about what is visible to whom under which circumstances (not unlike the recent contact tracing systems in iOS and Android). But I feel like a legal grey-zone like this, where the courts continuously fail to help women that have been raped, that calls for more creative solutions, even if they don't solve the problem completely. With a consent app, each person 'signs away' their right to call the other person out, but with an app like this, the opposite is true, you give weight to the other person's voice, and I think that's worth exploring.
It can just as easily be argued that the app which this police officer is proposing in the article is designed to help precisely this type of woman.
Of course details matter. Perhaps an audio recording of the entire encounter that is uploaded to the cloud and deleted after a pre-specified period of time, where both parties give consent orally and report how much alcohol they have consumed in the past several hours, would be a more practical solution to protect the "sexually adventurous" type of woman that the OP is describing here.
Im not saying consent is not an issue which should not be taken seriously, but I think the effort to bring formalized tracking and regulation into sex - one of the most natural base and human behaviors besides eating and sleeping - seems like something you would do if you want to treat all sexuality on the terms of the worst examples of sexuality.
In which case, your claim "that probably a vast, vast majority of sexual interactions between adults are probably perfectly fine and healthy" may be understating the risk here.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campus_sexual_assault#:~:text=....
Still I believe even if we do take it as true that 1/4 of young women will experience sexual assault during their undergraduate years, this would not disprove my assertion.
1. It could be the case that many of these young women have many, many healthy sexual encounters during university, and one incident would still put them in that statistic, but it could still hold true that a vast majority of overall sexual encounters are unproblematic.
2. Undergraduates in their late teens and early 20's who are still learning how to navigate lives as sexual beings - in a permissive social environment lubricated by alcohol - are likely at an outsized risk of encountering grey areas of consent, or finding themselves in bad situations they haven't learned how to avoid or extricate themselves from. I don't know that this statistic should be generalized to the population as a whole.
Now please understand that I am not trivializing this statistic. I can believe that sexual assault on campuses is a prevalent and serious issue, and causes serious harm to the people who fall victim to it. In this environment, I believe it is warranted to take these matters seriously, and put a strong emphasis on explicit, verbal, enthusiastic consent.
However, I think it is probably not warranted for a happily married couple, or two people in their thirties meeting for a date to operate under the same set of assumptions as a couple 19 year olds at a frat party.
[1] https://time.com/2934500/1-in-5%E2%80%82campus-sexual-assaul...
"Fix" the above first along with a string of other problems. Then an app might be appropriate but I very much doubt it.
And maybe he's learnt the hard way: nothing wrong with brainstorming and coming up with new ideas, but media interviews are not the right context to do that in.
And.. maybe the NSW police could have used a consent app before they started illegally strip searching minors at music festivals.
> Dukaj extrapolates from the current trend of increasing lawsuits and political correctness: in his world many people willingly live under constant mass surveillance of the New Etiquette (NEti), which registers all their actions so that they couldn't be falsely accused of some "personal offense crime".
That includes people's apartments and them having sex. And of course the NEti records are sealed and secure - theoretically.
Computer chips will not solve societal problems.
Man's Lawyer: OK. Let's see. We're talking about a
standard one night arrangement, right?
Woman: I guess. Yeah.
Man's Lawyer: So we'll say a dinner, complete sexual
encounter, full penetraton, optional
episode in the morning, right?
Woman: Just slow down.
Man: You know I personnally thought it'd be nice.
Woman: Let me see this.
My lawyer better see this one.
For instance... the oral clause...
seems a little sticky.
Cherry 2000 may be a silly mess of a movie, but its depiction of the lawyerification of dating might have been surprisingly prescient.
There are few classrooms in china using bands to detect whether kids are focusing on the material or not. I wonder if that can be extended to consent too if it works. That will solve the problem of continuous consent.
The application of this stretches beyond the bedroom. It might be used in court, research, experiments, medical treatment, contracts, notarization, etc. You could add it as a layer in security or authorization systems.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMLsHI8aV0g
That seems like an interesting problem to solve.
(I’m joking, please don’t take it as an actual idea and make it real, the world is already crazy enough as it is)
A big part of human courtship and flirting is plausible deniability.
Alas, that's exactly the opposite of what your (or any formal) solution would support.
Am I the only one who thinks the whole world is absolutely crazy right now? Like, in general, nothing seems to make sense anymore. When did I get transported into a parallel reality? I think it was 5 years ago after that LSD trip. Ever since then, things are getting increasingly weird
/rant
Here's a thought exercise: treat every news article that talks about "proposal" or "suggestion" as a low-quality personal blog. Or even better: treat everything on the Internet as false and trust only what you have seen in real life.
The world becomes more clear when you realise that flat earthers don't really exist.
Why the whole world? Humanity ain't homogeneous.
Perhaps you might benefit from changing your bubble (or echo chamber).
See eg https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/03/my_beautiful_bu.htm... and https://www.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/make_your_own_b.htm...
Or for a more drastic step, consider moving to a place that's more aligned with what you like.
If only they'd do the same when some bone-headed policeman or similar says something equally stupid such as "we must weaken encryption"
All the same reasons.
But in practice with your pants halfway down... hard to implement.
The fact is that consent can be withdrawn long after the act for a variety of reasons. Let’s get folks.