Is consent supposed to be sexy?

Ooooooo I hear this talked about alllll the time in the sex education world and there are SO many opinions! Honestly, I like a lot of them... But I have my own opinions too.

SO- "supposed to be" is pretty heavy. Because first of all, who gets to decide what consent SHOULD look like? I don't think it should be up to one person or even a group of people because my goodness is this topic massive and nuanced and personal. So, I don't really think there is a 'should be' or 'supposed to be' here. Can consent be sexy? Yes. Is it always sexy? No. Should consent be sexy? Depends.

Here's an important question for you- will you be more likely to 'use' consent if it feels sexy? If the answer is yes, then I want you to start doing that work to make consent sexy in your life. But here's another thing to consider; can, or should, someone make consent sexy when they are saying no? Can someone make consent sound sexy when they need to say "sorry, I'm just not in the mood tonight?" What about when someone has to set some boundaries like "I'm totally up for sex tonight but we need to use a condom, and I really need you to be gentle with me.". There are probably ways to make those things sound a little sexier... but I don't think someone SHOULD have to. You can if you want to. But for a lot of us... or maybe just some of us... some of these things feel, and are, serious. They aren't things we WANT to communicate in fun and sexy ways.

Okay, so that's boundaries and "no's". What about yeses? What about describing what we want or what we like and love? Those are probably a lot easier to make sound sexy! Going back to my question from before; "are you more likely to "use" consent if it feels and sounds sexy?". And what do I actually mean by this? Well, from both my personal AND professional experience people aren't utilizing some really great consent practices because they don't feel or sound sexy. I'm talking about the scripts we're often handed from media, and often sex educators. When we're only taught about verbal consent and given specific scripts and times to use them... well, sex starts to feel robotic and can lose a lot of erotism. Most of us aren't willing to even admit that because then that must mean that we aren't 'doing' consent. And honestly, some of us aren't because we don't realize there's so much more to consent than verbal communication! But some of us are very much still practicing consent, sans the robot scripts. I get into ALL of this in my class, Real Consent for Real People, and unfortunately, I can't get into it all here without literally writing you a book BUT what I will say is...

-Consent can be sexy.

-It doesn't HAVE to be.

-If you will communicate more verbally if it sounds sexy, then I WANT you to start making consent sexier for you!

-There's so much more to consent than just asking for a verbal yes and understanding that and the ways to navigate them WILL make consent sexier!

• We need to remember that the point of communicating with someone is NOT so that we can get a Yes out of them. The entire point of communicating, asking, checking in, is so that we can get an honest and real answer from someone and respect their wishes.