The failed promise of consent in women's experiences of coercive and unwanted anal sex with men

Consent and its critics

Consent is a “slippery concept” (Beres, 2018, p. 181; see also Beres, 2007)—there is no single definition or fixed understanding of what it is (Beres, 2007). It is largely interpreted as a form of agreement to sex (Muehlenhard et al., 2016), as distinct from sexual desire (Muehlenhard & Peterson, 2005). Some write about it as a mental process, while others emphasise the behavioural or performative expressions of agreement (Beres, 2007; Fenner, 2017; Muehlenhard et al., 2016).

Despite its fluidity as a concept, consent has increasingly been ascribed crucial cultural importance, promoted as the tool for sexual violence prevention and the standard for good and “healthy” sexual encounters. For example, it is prominent within campus rape prevention social marketing materials (Beres, 2018) and, in New Zealand, activists frequently call for consent education within schools in response to the problem of rape culture (e.g., Clark-Dow, 2022; Nightingale, 2017; see also New Zealand Family Violence Clearinghouse, 2017). Within feminist activism and sexual violence prevention discourse more widely, the framework of consent often emphasises “affirmative consent”—which requires the positive expression of consent. This has been represented in activist slogans by messages like “(only) yes means yes,” away from earlier slogans like “no means no” (Beres, 2014; Coy et al., 2016). In the United States, for example, a move towards affirmative consent has been adopted by several universities (Beres, 2018; Jozkowski, 2015; Pugh & Becker, 2018).

In contrast to this ongoing widespread attachment to consent, many feminist scholars have distanced themselves from the promise of consent as a useful tool for demarcating sexual violence from sex (see Beres, 2018; Cahill, 2001). Indeed, the concept of consent has been subject to feminist critique for decades for its failure to adequately recognise (and, in practice, override) unequal power dynamics between men and women (e.g., Alcoff, 2009, 2018; Beres, 2014, 2018; Cahill, 2001, 2014, 2016; Chamallas, 1987; Gavey, 2019; Jeffrey, 2024; Kessel, 2020; Lamb et al., 2021; MacKinnon, 1983, 2016; Pateman, 1980; West, 2020). The consensus among such critics is that consent sets the bar far too low for ethical sex, and that it obscures many of the insidious harms of those forms of coercive and unwanted sex that are, in some way, consented to. This critique suggests that the very concept of consent—in relation to women having sex with men—is premised on a structural relation of inequality between men and women, and it helps to reinforce and naturalise it.

Social science research puts flesh on the bones of these feminist critiques of the conceptual problems with consent, showing how consent does not operate as an antithesis to coercion. Gavey (2019), for example, raised concerns about consent as a suitable standard for sexual ethics, showing that coercion and consent can coexist. Drawing on women's accounts from her interviews, Gavey (2019) points to how social norms constrain women's sexual choices and agency in ways that mean consent can be blurred with acquiescence to unwanted sex (see also Alcoff, 2018; Cahill, 2014, 2016). Interview-based studies consistently show how sexual communication between women and men is deep-rooted in traditional gender norms and power relations (e.g., Burkett & Hamilton, 2012; Conroy et al., 2015; Jeffrey & Barata, 2019; Jozkowski & Peterson, 2013; Pugh & Becker, 2018), and that both young women and men still associate consent with a woman's lack of resistance to a man's initiatives (Baldwin-White, 2021; Beres, 2014; Conroy et al., 2015). Researching young adults’ formulations of consent in relation to how they expressed and understood their partners’ willingness to have sex, Beres (2014, p. 374) concluded that “the concept of consent does not resonate with the young people engaging in various forms of heterosex.” She argued that the concept has limited value in sexual violence prevention.

This body of research presents a discouraging picture about the transformative power of consent to overcome the gendered constraints within the normative discursive field of heterosex and the scripts it offers women and men. Not only does consent not reliably overcome dominant gendered power dynamics, but new formulations of consent can be co-opted and integrated into coercive scripts. Drawing on their interviews with men, for example, Jeffrey and Barata (2019, p. 102) found that “men sometimes work to incorporate new consent messages into old ways of doing heterosex” that uphold their sexual interests at the expense of women's.

Given how much is invested in the promise of consent as a marker for ethical and egalitarian sex, it is crucial to know more about how it operates in practice, particularly in relation to unwanted sexual interactions. In this article, we critically examine how women made sense of their own consent in relation to their experiences of unwanted anal sex with men.

Methods

We interviewed 23 people (18 women and five men; all resident in a New Zealand city) about their experience of unwanted or unconsenting heterosexual anal sex. The analysis presented in this article is derived from the interviews with women participants only, who were all discussing experiences of anal sex with men. Given the very different dynamics described by men, and the different language they used to discuss the experiences, we decided to analyse the sets of interviews separately.

Participants were recruited through flyers posted on university notice boards, distributed in central parts of the city, sent to community contacts and professional colleagues to disseminate among their networks, and through social media. Our recruitment flyers called for people who had “experiences of unwanted and/or unconsented heterosexual anal sex,” noting that “both partners are not always equally interested … and that tensions, disagreements and some forms of pressure do happen.” This wording deliberately avoided explicit reference to sexual violence, as we did not want to restrict the study only to people who understood and labelled their experience in these terms.

The study was approved by the University of Auckland Human Participants Ethics Committee. Interviews took place in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, between February and August 2019. Participants signed consent forms before we began the interviews, which were conducted by the first author and lasted on average around 1.5 hours. All the interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed by a professional transcriber, and checked for accuracy by the first author. All participants were given pseudonyms.

The women participants ranged in age from 18 to 64. The mean age was 27.7 years, and seven of the 18 participants were aged between 18 and 20 years. Most participants (14 out of 18) identified as heterosexual, three identified as bisexual, and one left this response blank. Participants’ ethnicities/cultural backgrounds included Pākehā/New Zealand European (11), Chinese New Zealander (two), Indonesian New Zealander (one), other European/South American/North American New Zealander (one), European North American (one), other European (one), South American (one). Nine participants were in a relationship, one responded “kind of,” and eight were single.

The interviews explored the umbrella category of unwanted and nonconsensual heterosexual anal sex. They were semistructured, following an interview guide with predetermined question domains, but were carried out in a flexible manner that allowed us to follow participants’ narratives. We asked them to describe in detail any such experiences they had had, and explored with them the nature of the experiences, including the relational context, the coercive dynamics that were used, and their views about if and how consent operated. To do this, we used open-ended questions and follow-up prompts to invite them to elaborate on the details of their experiences and their views. We also asked participants about their general views on anal sex between women and men. Women were asked how they would label or describe their experiences and were invited to elaborate and reflect on the labels they used. The interviewer emphasised that there were no right or wrong answers.

In seeking to understand women's experiences of unwanted anal sex in relation to the concept of consent, we used a form of feminist discursive analysis that blends a critical realist descriptive approach to women's accounts of their experiences with a discursive analysis of the patterns of language that women used to describe and discuss those experiences (e.g., Gavey, 2019). This method is grounded in social constructionist epistemology, which holds that sociocultural and discursive resources shape the possibilities for how people can understand and act in the world—and are therefore important to understand in order to intervene in the sociocultural conditions that enable unethical and exploitative sexual relations.

The practical steps we followed in developing our analysis started with the design of the study and the interview schedule, and included a collaborative and iterative process of observing, discussing, and reflecting on both patterns and exceptions as they arose both through the interviewing and later in the analysis of transcripts. The first author conducted close and repeated reading of the transcripts for familiarity, and underlined similarities across the interviewees’ accounts, taking notes of ideas and identifying patterns of language and experience. For example, several women used similar expressions to make sense of their unwanted experiences after being verbally pressured, such as “giving in.” Throughout this analytic process, both authors regularly discussed details of the participants’ accounts, including revisiting the transcripts, as we identified the most prominent patterns of language and commonalities in women's accounts of their experiences.

We identified two dominant discursive patterns that women used in relation to consent as it applied to describing and making sense of their unwanted experiences. In doing so, we were particularly attentive to the gendered dynamics that were revealed in women's accounts, and how these discursive patterns informed positions from which they could (or could not) act within the gendered dynamics of heterosexual engagement. These discursive repertoires that we focus on here were characterised by their frequency across participants and their analytic utility in helping to understand how consent operates in the context of heterosexual coercion. For a more detailed description of our general analytic approach, see Faustino and Gavey (2022), where we explore different questions, drawing on the same set of interviews.

Analysis

In this analysis, we explore the two main discursive patterns that women drew on when describing how consent operated in relation to their experiences of unwanted, coercive, and sometimes violating anal sex with men.

Questions about consent arose during the flow of the interviews. A few women described their experiences in terms of consent, unprompted; for instance, Caroline started the interview by noting that she had had different experiences with anal sex and differentiated them in terms of consent. Most women, however, did not raise the concept of consent, or lack thereof, when describing their experiences. In these cases, the interviewer typically prompted the question by asking, for example, “how would you label it, in terms of consent?”

When questioned about consent, most women's answers suggested that it was complicated. Despite being clear about their lack of sexual desire and enthusiasm for the unwanted anal sex they had described, most women (13 out of 18) assumed some notion of consent and/or did not rule out consent completely in making sense of their experience.

Discussion

In this study, we have discussed women's accounts of their experiences of unwanted, and in many cases hurtful, anal sex with men, specifically focusing on those experiences that women described as, at least in some ways, consenting. Women's accounts clearly showed how consent did not safeguard against coercion. On the contrary, women's narratives of unwanted anal sex with men showed that consent can operate alongside gendered dynamics of coercion, and that it can coexist with unwanted and painful sexual experiences. Consent was scripted as an act—or the absence of an act—within such gendered interactions in ways that replicated and reinforced gendered dynamics of heterosex, such as the naturalisation of male desire as needy, initiating, and sometimes aggressive, and women's role as sexual caregivers and gatekeepers whose own desire is optional. In these coercive dynamics, some notion of consent seemed at best to discipline the form that male sexual entitlement might take, rather than directly counter it. As such, in the context of these gendered dynamics, consent not only offers women no protection from pressure by men to engage in sexual acts they do not desire, but it can contribute to self-blame when this occurs: women questioned and scrutinised the ways they had responded to male sexual initiatives or demands (see also Jeffrey, 2024). Such enduring discourses about men's and women's sexuality are sometimes overlaid with newer postfeminist notions of individual choice, agency, and individual responsibility (Bay-Cheng & Eliseo-Arras, 2008; Burkett & Hamilton, 2012). Such notions seem to invite women to find fault with their own behaviour, rather than with the man coercing them. They are also overlaid with newer pressures on women to be sexually adventurous and the expansion of sexual imperatives that increasingly include anal sex (Faustino & Gavey, 2022). Consent's compatibility with a postfeminist lens (Burkett & Hamilton, 2012) individualises structural inequalities and sanitises the power differential underpinning gendered positions (see also Cahill, 2001). In so doing, consent provides a misleading promise of safety-in-sexual-liberation that in practice fails to address men's coercion of women for anal sex (see also Kessel, 2020).

A general theme running through the women's accounts was the inadequacy of language for making sense of what they had experienced (see McKenzie-Mohr & Lafrance, 2011; see also Gavey, 1999; Karlsson, 2019). Several women used qualified descriptions of consent, such as “reluctant consent” (Amber, 20), “begrudged consent” (Amber, 20), and “levels” of consent (Caroline, 25). Moreover, these women's descriptions of sexual experiences they described as, at least in some way, consenting—such as “giving in” to verbal pressure (Daniela, 23; Caroline, 25; Tracey, 48), “[going] along with it” (Caroline, 25; Fleur, 18), and making “a sacrifice” (Katie, 38)—are illustrative of how consent can operate in sync with coercive dynamics women felt they could not evade.

Several of the women we interviewed labelled their experiences of unwanted and/or coerced sex as consensual in some way, even when recognising the constraints that shaped those experiences. Research has consistently shown that a significant proportion of women who have experienced unwanted sexual intercourse, without their consent, avoid labelling their experiences as rape, even when it is technically consistent with legal definitions (see Gavey, 2019; Koss, 1985; Koss et al., 1987; Peterson & Muehlenhard, 2004). While the concept is arguably problematic, such women are often described in research as “unacknowledged rape victims.” The current study further complicates this picture, to show that in a contemporary discursive landscape where consent is elevated to such importance, women may be unwilling to describe their own unwanted, and in some cases explicitly violating, experiences as nonconsensual—because to do so has serious potentially adverse consequences for the way women make sense of themselves, their agency, and their own sexual and romantic partners. Remarkably, instead of providing a conceptual tool that helps to clearly demarcate and prevent coercion, the binary nature of the concept of consent (which renders its absence criminal sexual violence) may instead socially and psychologically back women into a corner in which they are stripped of any meaningful language for naming their experiences of unwanted and coerced anal sex.

In response to women's formulations of consent, some might suggest they reveal a poor understanding of consent, thus pointing to the need to clarify affirmative consent and reinforce the core message about what it is and means: that it is mandatory for every sexual act, should be always freely given, and never be taken for granted. While the need to reinforce those ethical and practical requirements remains important, and such a clarification could work in some cases—for instance, in highlighting that it is problematic to frame women's experiences of nonresistance to coercive sex as consensual sex—we argue that women's accounts of consent reveal crucial fragilities in the concept itself, rather than women's (mis)understandings of it. In fact, some women contrasted their subjective experiences of consent and coercion with an “ideal” form of consent, while still labelling their experiences as weaker forms of consent (even though in complicated ways). But this shows that, even when women know about other conceptualisations of consent that emphasise it as a more affirmative act, such as “definitely proactive and definitely willing” (Amber, 20), a broader, looser conceptualisation of consent persists as an underlying normative framework that is difficult to reject outright. This suggests that these disappointing ways that consent can operate will not be corrected through efforts to reformulate the concept as more positive and enthusiastic, at least in relation to sex between women and men. That is because, at its heart, the concept of consent presumes a relation of structural inequality between the persons seeking and giving consent (Gavey, 2019; MacKinnon, 1983, 2016; Pateman, 1980). As Pateman (1980) noted in her classic text on women and consent: “Consent must always be given to something; in the relationship between the sexes, it is always women who are held to consent to men” (p. 164). Overall, the accounts of women we interviewed support MacKinnon's (2016) assertion that the everyday social meaning of consent poses inherent limitations for its utility as a marker of ethical sex. It is not a term we naturally associate with enthusiasm or welcomeness:

Consenting is not what women do when they want to be having sex. Sex women want is never described by them or anyone else as consensual. No one says, “We had a great hot night, she (or I or we) consented.” (MacKinnon, 2016, p. 450)

Finally, we are aware that in emphasising how consent and coercion coexist, an uncritical attachment to the promise of consent could function to minimise the seriousness of sexual coercion and even, potentially, obscure violence against women. In fact, it often is: the idea that sexual communication and consent are murky terrain is often played to deny male responsibility for sexual violence and coercion of women and girls. As such, it is vitally important that, while exposing the limitations of consent, we—collectively—fight the very myths and excuses that surround sexual violence. This implies, first and foremost, de-natualising the dominant discourses that continue to shape heterosex in ways that make women's acquiescence to unwanted sex appear natural or “just the way things are”—a sense that underpinned several women's accounts in this study. It is also vital to deconstruct the idea that men are unable to read women's signs and expressions of sexual (dis)interest and refusal. In this context, Frith and Kitzinger (1997), for instance, have shown that sexual refusals follow normative communication dynamics and should not require the verbalisation of a “no” to be effective. O’Byrne et al.'s work (2008; see also 2006, Hansen et al., 2010), which explored how men in focus groups talked about sexual refusals, concluded that men were perfectly able to recognise women's disinterest, communicative cues, and refusals. Importantly, though, they found that the men in their study mobilised and relied on a miscommunication model for its utility in avoiding men's responsibility for their own coercive behaviour. In other words, men can rely on the idea that sexual communication is murky to rationalise and justify their own coercive pursuit of sex and reject accountability for perpetrating sexual violence, even when they should normatively be able to read the signs of sexual interest and enthusiasm if they are encouraged to look, listen, and care. Ultimately, therefore, a critique of consent should be intertwined with a critique of the normative dynamics of heterosex. As Kitzinger and Frith (1999) noted, “the root of the problem is not that men do not understand sexual refusals, but that they do not like them” (1999, p. 310; see also Beres, 2010; Jeffrey & Barata, 2019; Siegel et al., 2021).

Conclusion

In stark contrast to the promise of consent as the necessary and, implicitly, sufficient tool to navigate “the normalization of anal sex” (Engle, 2017b), the women we interviewed described unwanted and often hurtful experiences of anal sex with men in ways that reveal how inadequate the concept of consent is for protecting them from harm. Not only does a focus on consent as the safeguard against sexual violence risk invisibilising normative masculine patterns of coercion, it also helps to reinforce women's sexual self-scrutiny and blame. We suggest the focus instead should be on encouraging men to attend to their sexual partner's desires and wishes, and on challenging the cultural tolerance for men's sexual coercion of women.