Consent is about more than sex

I played varsity soccer in high school, and I often think about how, when the opposing team took a penalty kick, my teammates and I would link arms, stand side by side, and defend the goal as a player on the opposite team kicked the ball. We used our bodies to block it — to form a wall.

I found myself forming a wall of women again this past weekend, although the circumstances couldn't have been more different. A group of mostly male students filled the porch of our house, where we were having a party, barraging us with pleas to be let in. They didn't understand why we had a "safe list," and why we couldn't let them in because they weren't on it. They cussed us out and refused to leave even after we repeatedly said no. Then they began to push us or otherwise try to sneak in.

Consent is defined as the act of giving permission for something to happen. Consent, or usually lack thereof, is probably most frequently referenced in our society in cases of sexual assault. However, we must learn how to use consent as a tool in every relationship to identify problematic behaviors in any relationship in which there are different levels of power.

Consent is often tied to someone’s, usually a woman's, personal space and bodily autonomy. It's generally gendered in this way — that men are expected to seek consent, and women are expected to give it. This is because women have historically been objectified in a sexual context: They have long been considered objects of male sexual desire rather than as people.

Consent is also often racialized. Not only are women's bodies subject to violations of consent, but so are nonwhite bodies. This is likely because of the historical conflation of women and people of color's bodies with property. In her book Whiteness as Property, Cheryl I. Harris argues that property ownership, which has been historically considered a fundamental right in the United States, also tends to be conflated with maleness and whiteness.

Given this context, it makes sense that our attitudes about consent mostly come from how we value personal space, and whose space, and autonomy over that space, our society values. It's still so common for women to internalize the ingrained cultural assumption that their privacy can and will be invaded at any time. Whether it's on an individual level, such as a person touching a pregnant woman's stomach without asking, or on an institutional level, like our current governmental administration's political attitudes toward abortions, our culture has normalized the right of others to invade women's bodies without needing their consent. We need to start normalizing consent in contexts other than sex in our lives. We need to identify and address behavior like trying to enter a woman's home after she's said no as a violation of consent.

It is clear to me that we have serious political and institutional work to do. At least in soccer, when the other team took the penalty kick, the invasion would end. We could experience relief knowing the rules of the situation, and consenting to them as agreed-upon rules of the game. I may not have been able to get rid of the groups of people who linger for an hour in our house driveway, unable to take no for an answer. But, as I stood with a wall of women blocking the entrance to our house, I realized that I stood with other women committed to these same values. At the very least, we had solidarity with one another.