How do you ask?

I just saw this post following an article about an anti-rape campaign targeted at men.  The campaign is called ‘Don’t Be That Guy’ and emphasizes that when someone is passed out, or drunk, or incapacitated, they cannot consent to sex.  Since non-consensual intercourse = rape, what may be commonly considered ‘sex with a drunk chick’ is in fact rape.  So, the follow-up question is, naturally, what if the guy’s drunk too? 

To answer that, we have to do a little more work on the whole consent thing.  Consent is agreement, right?  And in the interest of fairness, we want both (or all, whatever works for you) parties involved to be agreeing to whatever is happening.  So if both people need to consent, but you can’t consent when you’re drunk, then how can two drunk people hooking up be considered rape?  Excellent.  The answer is this: gaining consent is the responsibility of the initiator.  Whichever person is actually initiating intercourse—as my friend C likes to say, whoever is inserting tab A into slot B—that is the person responsible for getting the other person’s consent.  Even if that initiator is drunk also. 

The word is consent. 

Allow me to be clear: this is not a blog about a concept.  This is not a space to debate the value of consent nor its definition.  For the sake of this blog, consent is defined as agreement—in its simplest form, consent is a ‘Yes’.  It is active, ongoing, sober and freely given.  It is also fucking sexy. 

The word consent needs a makeover.  Let’s do it.