Abstract
Teaching women’s studies and sex and gender courses, one of the biggest challenges I have faced is getting students to understand the nature of consent in sexual relationships. This proves especially difficult when referring to heterosexual dyads. While society continues to clarify the boundaries around rape and clearly nonconsensual sexual assault, getting students to truly understand that women and men can have completely different interactional understandings and experiences of typical sexual intercourse is challenging. Even though many women can relate to the experience of having intercourse when they felt pressured or did not exactly want to, unlike other forms of experiential or active learning, this is not a topic to engage in that manner. Social and cultural resources are growing to address the public and organizational cultures that endorse and perpetuate sexual abuse and harassment and how public or celebrity power contributes to exploitation. We also see growing concern for how social inequalities are reflected in the punishment and public reaction to high-profile cases of rape and sexual assault. But how do we help students understand that the feeling they have after a night of mediocre, not-exactly-wanted sexual intercourse is actually, as Simone de Beauvior ([1949] 2011) noted over a half century ago, very socially patterned? In this review, I highlight the pairing of the In the No (2018) podcast with the novel What Red Was (2019) to highlight both strengths and weaknesses of each as well as provide some information on how I paired these tools to help teach about consent, power, sexual assault, and rape.
In the No is a three-part podcast from Radiolab. As discussed in the part 1 segment, the podcast’s origin is from a previously produced podcast featuring Kaitlin Prest, where she discusses her experiences with sexual exploration, agency, and consent. In the first episode of In the No, Prest confronts a former partner by engaging in an uncomfortable dialogue that demands recognition of the way that he pushed and broke the boundaries of consent when they had intercourse.
In part 2, Prest and the podcast creator, Jad Abumrad, interview Hanna Stotland, an educational consultant who has experience in helping men accused of assault in cases that do not rise to the unequivocal level of assault or rape. Because Stotland works with college students, she has a particularly compelling, and sociologically relevant, analysis of how expelling men from colleges for sexual impropriety that is not criminal supports an implicitly classist narrative that as long as these men are not around middle-class college women, everything is OK. She pushes back on this by arguing that the men will work and live somewhere and challenges the idea that college women need “special attention” over other women, particularly, poor and working-class women.
In part 3, Abumrad considers the way that consent has been a focal point of the BDSM (bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, and sadism/masochism) subculture and the limitations within and around BDSM as a public community, featuring an interview segment with sociologist Julie Fennell, associate professor at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. In all three episodes of the podcast, dialogues, sometimes with college students and between former sexual partners, expand and enrich the content. While the podcasts understandably contain some triggering content, the creator and producers address this in their presentation. However, instructors should also preface the presentation of materials and inform their students of any Title IX reporting requirements at their own educational institutions, if applicable, and especially in the case that students may disclose their own experience. These caveats on triggers also apply to the novel What Red Was.
The podcast episodes can be used in sections, as separate entities, or all together to parse out dynamics of this topic. Particularly well addressed in the podcast is the idea that women and men experience all forms of sexual activity differently. In part 2, Prest reminds listeners that studies show that many young women gauge how good sex is by trying to read how much their partner is enjoying it. She raises the point that for heterosexual sexual relations, this means that part of sex education should include making men aware of this power and how easily it can be turned to abuse. That this power manifests itself in the interactions that create consent should be no surprise if we consider that, according to sociologist Jill D. Weinberg (2015), our collective understanding of consent is largely intuitive. In other words, when we are considering informal consent, we use interactional cues to determine if consent is reached. This requires an iterative number of interpretations by all of us as social actors that are constantly being created, and recreated, in real time. Since men and women are socialized to interpret communicative cues differently, this makes the interactions of sexual activity extraordinarily open to subjectivity and highly impressionistic. The very idea that varying interpretations of the same event would create tension, some of which boils over in both the part 1 and part 2 episodes of the podcast, can become an instrument for helping students learn about consent in and of itself. These interactions are uncomfortable and difficult to listen to, and sitting with that discomfort as we muddle through the importance of the topic is as instructive as the content. Part 3 of the podcast also contains a reference to the literal definition of and language of consent, which means to agree to have something done to oneself. Since sexual interactions are supposed to be something done with another person, this comment provides an opportunity to tease out the symbolic meanings of how language socially constructs experience and reality.
Because the podcasts also feature college-aged men and women (in parts 2 and 3) reflecting on their own concerns and thoughts about consent, the content is very relatable for college students across the board. Without asking one’s own students to share, we hear men worrying about how to “take a chance” with someone and enact the gender and sexual scripts that often require men to be “active” in sexual behaviors without crossing the line and violating another person (in part 2). We also hear “a lot of stories of people having sex they didn’t want to have” (part 3), mostly from women. That some of these young, college-aged women were both instructors and facilitators within high school courses teaching about consent—but also end up in some of the same awkward and unsatisfying, on-the-boundary-of-active-consent, sexual situations themselves—powerfully shows the difficulty and struggle of enacting clear messages of consent.
Over 45 years ago, Robert Blauner (1964: 425) wrote that using literature to teach sociology had become “a cliché to which most sensitive sociologists nod assent.” We are early in recognizing the full role and utility of podcasts, with Teaching Sociology relatively recently publishing the first podcast review (see Munasinghe 2020). Nevertheless, we may soon reach the same point of acquiescence referred to by Blauner and certainly recognize the continued relevance of literature as salient, so much so that the very same issue of Teaching Sociology also contains a review of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (Sumerau 2020). On the subject of rape and consent, What Red Was, a novel about a young protagonist in England whose friendship with a university mate, from a well-to-do background, leads her into deeper relationships with his family, draws out many relevant and interrelated themes around consent. As the story progresses, she is subsequently raped by his cousin at a family gathering in an interaction the cousin does not define or see as a rape. The novel also explores themes of classism, drug and alcohol abuse, social ties and networks, masculinity, and self-harm, to name some of the most prominent.
The driving question of the novel, and one that I ask my students to focus on, is, “Who gets to the tell story of a rape?” In the novel, the protagonist, Kate, is challenged in this question as she struggles to recognize and validate the rape within herself—so much so that near the end of the novel, she thinks to herself that “[i]f it happened again, she would get it right” (p. 314), thinking that she would scream and fight back to legitimize her experience of being raped. Of course, we know that this legitimacy is needed only because of society’s scrutiny and delegitimizing of rape. We experience her journey to face a bifurcated world where there are “only the raped and the un-raped” (p. 103), as her struggles with posttraumatic stress disorder, alcohol, and self-harm increase throughout the novel. When Kate does experience consensual sex again, she is at first intoxicated, and later, with the same partner, she is sober. The descriptions of these sexual encounters by Price are both detailed and ambivalent. Kate is consenting but struggling. Though her new partner, Andrew, does not have direct power over her, power, which Weinberg (2015) reminds us is “not inherently good or bad,” frames Kate’s experiences as she cannot separate the painful and pleasurable parts of sexual intercourse. She reflects that being sober made it harder to “slip back into the safety of submission and self-relinquishment” (p. 211), which is tellingly intentional language about the way power, nevertheless, continues to structure her sexual experiences. This also echoes the idea from In the No’s part 2 episode regarding how much power men just have, whether victimizers or not. In teaching this content, a framing activity about male power and privilege can help create context toward greater understanding (see, e.g., Hoffman 2014).
Kate also faces external challenges to owning and telling her own rape story, as her friend Max’s mother, Zara, a filmmaker and former rape victim herself, appropriates the story of Kate’s rape for her new film. Then, there is the way that cultural narratives and stereotypes buttress her experience with the social identity of her rapist. For example, when the identity of Kate’s rapist is revealed to be Max’s cousin, Max “had always thought that he would be able to recognize a man capable of rape. But Lewis. He had never thought that a handsome man would need to rape anybody” (p. 296). How many times do we hear or read a similar story where good looks, money, privilege, or charm, as the variable, seems to be used to challenge or disqualify someone as “a rapist”? As both the podcast and novel reveal, the power of male privilege is difficult to undo or change.
The novel also provides some illustrations of concepts related to gender beyond those directly pertaining to Kate’s rape. For example, when Max’s uncle Rupert tries to kill himself by taking an overdose, Max’s father, a physician, labels the method of suicide by overdose as “effeminate” (p. 64). Though portrayed as a good, if sometimes inattentive, friend to Kate throughout the novel, Max also comments toward the start that a set of books on her selves shouldn’t be bothered with and are “bullshit,” to which Kate replies that some of it is “feminism” (p. 4). Zara, Max’s mother, is described by Lewis, the rapist and cousin to Max, at one point in the novel as having the smell of “a middle-aged woman” (p. 28), and Zara’s quibbles with aging and her husband are explored as a metaplot of the novel, introducing ideas about women’s and men’s gender roles in relationships, the effect of age and time on love matches, and how successful career women balance their family obligations.
Both the novel and podcast can be used, in part or whole, in classes beyond women’s studies and sex and gender. Courses on social deviance, social problems, drugs and alcohol in society, and intersectionality with class and race are some of the more likely applications. There are some limits to both the podcast and novel in terms of age diversity, racial/ethnic diversity, and religious diversity; as well, the baseline, taken-for-granted subculture of the college or university subtext may limit the generalizability of the experience and applicability. Making sure to preface and contextualize the experiences of a diverse range of people by age, race/ethnicity, and religion—as well as acknowledging the limits of considerations of power and consent in cisgender, heterosexual contexts—is important in creating a fluid learning experience for students.
In my own experience, teaching these materials together greatly enhanced students’ ability to recognize the different social worlds of men and women when it comes to the experience of sexual activity. They marveled at how men and women could interpret consent, in some cases including examples from the benign and boring to violence and rape, almost completely differently. It also created richer discussions of all the concepts (consent, sexual behavior, sexual assault and rape). While my accounts of student engagement and understanding are impressionistic, I encourage others to think about pairing media in creative ways to teach difficult and challenging subjects.