Sometimes when I am having an argument with a complete twat about consent, they argue that consent is difficult and the fluid nature of it means that life is so hard for people that they might as well just NOT HAVE SEX AT ALL because they’ll never be sure if their partner likes it. At this point I smash my face repeatedly into whatever firm objects there are to hand, and explain to them that before throwing all their toys out of the pram they might like to instead try communicating with their partner, and watching/listening for those sexy clues (verbal, non-verbal, a combination of the two) that someone gives you when they’re keen.

At some point in the conversation, aforementioned twat might say this:

“Oh, I suppose you want me to get them to SIGN A CONTRACT or something saying ‘I declare that I consent to this sex’ before I even lean in to KISS THEM?!”

And it is at this point that my head explodes, spraying passers-by with the messy detritus of the by-product of their twattery. Because there’s a mistake here. A massive and fundamental one.

Good2Go app and consent

This week yet another shiny new sex app was launched. The aim of it was to get people thinking about consent, and the app itself does… well… some things that sort of miss the point. There’s a Slate article here that explains what the app does, but in essence the idea is that you and your partner both use the app to record the fact that you are ‘Good2Go’ (i.e. have sex, although there’s little detail about specifics) and then you have sex. And then… what? Magically everything you do is consensual and nothing can ever go wrong?

The app does flag that consent can be withdrawn at any time, which is useful, but not massively so, because fundamentally the app is based on exactly the same misconception as the idea of a consent ‘contract’: that consent is a tickbox. Once ticked it can be unticked, but it’s a firm and decisive ‘OK.’

How I like to get sexual consent

Perhaps the reason the contract idea sounds so tempting to twats is that it sounds a bit legal – a bit ‘official’. Of course the sex you’re having is official and totally A-OK: someone has consented to it. They have rubber-stamped your sex plans, signed their name on a dotted line at the end of a piece of paper, ticked a box, pressed a button on an app. You’re ‘good to go.’

Unfortunately, this is not the kind of consent I want when I’m fucking: it’s the kind of consent I want when I’m selling someone insurance.

“Do you understand the risks, sir? Have you read the small print?”

“Why yes I do, and I have.”

“OK, please sign the dotted line then prepare for the sexing to begin.”

It is the least sexy thing in the entire fucking world, and sexual relationships just don’t fucking happen like that. If they do, you are either a fetishist with a really niche role-play fantasy, or you’re doing sex wrong. If I want to fuck, here’s the kind of consent I’m after:

“Touch me. There. Oh fuck, yeah that’s it. Bit higher. Mmm. Bite my nipples. That’s good. Oh please put my cock in your mouth. Like that. Bit more gently. Aaah, perfect. Fuck. Fuck that’s good.”

Or, if you’re less chatty during sex itself, here’s the kind of consent I’m after:

“I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to get shagged with a strapon.”

“Sweet. Want me to show you?”

“Umm… would it hurt?”

“Maybe. Tell you what – I’ll use tonnes of lube, and we’ll start slowly and take it from there, what do you reckon?”

Note that he hasn’t explicitly offered a safeword or asked me if I’ll stop if he tells me to because for me that goes without saying. If it doesn’t go without saying for you, then say it. Anyone who thinks you’re a dick for saying it is not worth fucking.

Other forms of consent include guys begging me to fuck them, guys staring at me with sexy, sexy eyes, then raising eyebrows as if to say ‘do you want this?’ as they reach round to touch my arse. They include me telling a guy a story about a particular fantasy in which I struggle a bit against him while he fucks me, and that guy fucking me in that way, but stopping if I say ‘ooh, fuck, ouch, your elbow’s on my hair’ or ‘OK that was hot but can we switch round now?’ They include all of these things and more.

Crucially, consent in all of these situations is individual to me, and to the person I’m with: it’s personal. If any single one of you points at this blog post and uses it as an excuse to raise your eyebrow and grab the arse of a person you fancy, then scream at them “BUT GOTN SAID THAT WAS CONSENT!” you have utterly and completely missed the point.

But what is consent, exactly?

Consent may be hard to explain, because it’s individual, but that doesn’t mean it is hard to do. You communicate with your partners about what they want, what they need and what they are absolutely dripping hot for, and you keep listening. As you kiss them, touch them, fuck them, and cuddle afterwards. And yes, I am fully aware that this blog post is in no way helpful to someone who is stuck in the ‘contract’ mindset: someone who wants a blogger to give them a list of words and body language signals and phrases that they can tick off and feel comfortable that they definitely did all the right things and established consent.

But that’s deliberate. I haven’t done it for the same reason I haven’t told you how to have the perfect conversation or work out whether this person you’ve approached in a bar definitely fancies you: sometimes things just don’t work like that. I need to stress wholeheartedly that I am not an expert in this. I am an expert when it comes to negotiating the kind of sex I want from my own partners, but I am not an expert in what you should do with yours. If you want some more considered, expert advice on this, do what I do and learn from Bish.

What I do feel qualified to tell you, though, is what consent is not: it is not a simple rubber-stamp ‘OK.’ Saying ‘should I have a contract?’ or ‘should I have an app?’ is based on the fundamental misunderstanding that because we have a legal definition of ‘consent’, that gaining it should be done in the same way as you’d go about gaining planning permission, or something equally tedious.

Do not ask your partner whether they’re ‘Good2Go’, like you’re a dodgy car salesperson trying to get them to sign off on a ropey deal. You’re not looking to get them to agree to something, you’re looking to find out if this is something they actually want. Ask them: is this fun? Do you want this? What’s great and what’s not working? Ask with your eyes, your hands, your mouth, and every tool you have to communicate. And keep asking.

That’s not just how you get consent, it’s how you get good sex.

I can’t quite put my finger on what it is, but we have a big problem with sex and morality. If something is sexual, we seem to want to attribute a moral action to it even when one is not necessary.

There are some acts which, by whatever standards of morality you hold, most of us can accept are inherently ‘good’ – helping people who are vulnerable or suffering, for instance, or sharing resources when you’ve got more than you need. There are some we can label ‘bad’ fairly easily: hurting a person deliberately and without any reason, etc etc.

However, with sex we seem to want to label things ‘good’ or ‘bad’ when – at best – they’re morally neutral. Masturbation, for example. It can be good for your health (mental and physical) but is it morally good per se? Not really: it’s just a wank. Some sex acts are morally bad, but they’re morally bad because they have other characteristics which are ‘bad’ – they exploit or hurt people.

All this is to say that I don’t think ‘sex’ is inherently good or bad. Like eating, sex is just something we do. It can be good (a delicious doughnut to sate you after a hard day’s shagging) or bad (eating the flesh of an animal you’ve just tortured for fun). But food is a good example, because we frequently apply moral actions to eating, as we do to sex. You’ll have a ‘naughty’ slice of cake. Or ‘be bad’ and eat a second biscuit. Realistically, there’s no moral quality to these acts, as there’s little moral quality to the inherent act of sex: it’s just a fuck. The context is what gives it moral weight.

On that general foundation rests my default position whenever ‘sex things’ come up in the news. I’d always rather be extra careful when making moral judgments about sexual things, because of this tendency we have to leap towards ‘that sounds icky to me therefore it must be immoral.’

Brooks Newmark and the nude pictures

And so, the story that prompted this blog: Tory MP Brooks Newmark has resigned because he sent some nude pictures to someone who was not his wife. The pics went to an anonymous reporter who had explicitly requested the pictures, so there isn’t an issue of consent there. He did a sexual thing that someone had asked him to do.

I do not think that was morally wrong.

However, what was morally wrong is that he (from the sounds of it) did something that was not acceptable within his relationship. He and his wife did not have an agreement that naked sexting was OK. So that’s pretty crappy.

But I don’t think he should have resigned. I don’t think he should have been fired. And I certainly don’t think that his inability to resist the urge to send naked pictures of himself to someone who asked for them means he is incapable of being a politician. If we held politicians to high standards of morality in their private as well as their public life, based on the decisions of an angry mob/press, then the number of us who’d be qualified to be politicians would be vanishingly small. But it’s not just practical reasons that make me a bit uncomfortable with the torches and pitchforks that come out whenever there’s some sort of sex scandal.

It’s the fact that this argument is so often thrown out:

It’s about integrity!

Well, sure. We want politicians (and other people who work in roles that affect us) to have integrity. My doctor, for instance, should have great integrity. I expect her to be honest with me, to choose the right treatments, and not to sell out to Big Pharma for a fiver if she knows the better remedy is cheaper. Integrity is vital. But there’s a massive and overwhelming difference between saying to someone: “You are in an important job, and we need to trust you to perform your role with integrity” and saying “by the way this includes everything you do from now on even when you’re not on the clock.”

I’m sorry, but bollocks to that.

Allow me to clarify for those of you who’ll think I’m excusing any kind of immorality outside the workplace: I’m not. I’ll happily join in a bit of chit-chat calling someone a bastard if they cheat on their partner (and I’ll put my hand up and call myself a bastard too, for I have made myriad mistakes and cock-ups in my life) but there’s a big difference between saying ‘I don’t like that’ and extending it as far as ‘you’re fired.’

Here’s the thing: it’s the easy answer. I get that it’s far simpler and more satisfying to say ‘this guy sounds like scum, so he doesn’t deserve a job.’ But I’m suspicious of easy answers, particularly around sex, because I think with anything sexual we’re so desperate to assign morality to every single act that we forget what I said above: sex isn’t inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – it’s something for which the moral consequences must be weighed up depending on the context.

Simple answers sound awesome, which is why they are often the best way to deprive people of freedoms. Saying ‘if you’ve nothing to hide you’ve nothing to fear’ is a nice, simple, memorable way to get people to agree to quite drastic infringement of their liberties. Likewise saying ‘well, if you’re in a position of trust you need to be held to higher ethical standards’ may well be a great way to curb politicians who do things we find icky.

But ‘a position of trust’ is easily interpreted to include headteachers, teachers, bankers, doctors, lawyers, journalists, carers, anyone who leads a team of more than two people…. etc etc ad infinitum. We all have responsibilities, and we all need to have integrity in order to perform particular tasks in life. The issue I have is with treating people as if they cannot possibly distinguish between different areas. That if they’re dishonest in one area – that has nothing to do with their job – they will naturally be dishonest elsewhere. That if they spank people in their spare time they’ll be a sex pest in the office. People aren’t that misguided, and even if they were I can think of far better institutions to police it than their employers.

In conclusion, then: I don’t think we should sack people for doing sexual things outside of work. There are plenty of immoral acts for which I’d want a politician to be fired. Sexual harassment, for instance, is not only immoral but has genuine and serious ramifications for how that person performs their job (it implies a deep lack of respect, and often actual harassment, of people they are working with) – it’s also illegal. But unless a politician is going to make a cast-iron pact with their colleagues or the electorate to never send nude pictures of themself to another consenting adult, then holding them to account for a private promise they’ve made to their loved one makes no more sense than firing them for getting divorced.

I appreciate some of you might disagree vehemently with me on this, and please do feel free to: I’m particularly interested to explore the grey areas of this to see if my gut instincts hold up to scrutiny. So disagree, tell me I’m wrong, and get all angry in the comments if you like: just please don’t have me fired.

People ask me for advice sometimes, and I find this a bit terrifying because ultimately I am just a bumbling nobhead, who stumbles through life trying to work out how to look like a grown up without anyone noticing that actually I am a ball of bluster and panic. I expect some of you feel like this too, but because I am human I think that I have it much worse: that I am surrounded by functioning adults who have brains and wisdom and the ability to fill out mortgage paperwork, while I still struggle with the concept of having to throw milk away when it starts to get smelly.

So when you ask me for advice, know that I am doing one of two things:

1. Making it up, based on ‘what I reckon’, and given that I often come home half-drunk and ‘reckon’ I should lie face-down on the carpet until my partner covers me with a blanket, my reckonings are unlikely to be particularly insightful.

2. I give advice that other people have given me before, which struck me as wise and thoughtful and far better than anything I could say.

Today I am doing the latter, and I present to you the 3 best dating tips I’ve ever been given.

Dating tip 1: say yes

A long time ago I had a horrible break up. I did that thing where you hide in your flat in your pants, crying to old episodes of Scrubs and eating cheese until you almost stop liking cheese. It was pretty serious. My life was never going to be good again and everything was awful and I couldn’t see myself doing anything at all because he wasn’t by my side.

Then my Mum called.

She told me to pull myself together and stop moping and all those comforting things that Mums are supposed to say. She told me I was beautiful and that I’d find someone else in no time if I wanted to, but that I didn’t need a man to complete me and yada yada etc. I cried some more, because all of this stuff was just clichéd and obvious bullshit which was instantly swallowed by the pit of my misery. I wanted something practical. Something useful. Something I could go out and do rather than just repeat to myself as a wishy-washy happiness mantra.

“Say yes,” she explained.

“Yes?”

“Yes. Say yes to every single thing you’re invited to from now on. Evenings in the pub, trips to the theatre, weekends away – everything.”

“Why? To meet someone else?”

“Don’t be a tosser,” she replied. “You do it because it will make you that ‘fun’ person: the one who always says yes. The one who gets excited about life and wants to join in with things. The one who’s always got something exciting on the go.”

“Will it win him back?” I asked, like a pathetic loser.

“Who gives a shit? You’ll be too busy rock-climbing or something.”

So I did: I said yes to everything. And so followed one of the most enjoyable three months of my life. I was skint, of course – all this socialising gave my wallet a thorough hammering – but by God I was having fun. A few weeks after she gave me this advice I was having dirty tent sex with a hot guy, and drinking vodka with strangers on a beach. Thanks, Mum.

Dating tip 2: approach people you fancy

We focus so much on how to ‘capture’ the man or woman of our dreams, and how to entice other people, that frequently we forget that the whole point is that we should like each other. I’ve heard a few variations on this piece of advice before, but none so brilliantly put as that posted by @ArchedEyebrowBR yesterday. In her post – online dating tips for the fat babe – she laid down some pretty significant wisdom that I think is relevant to everyone:

Don’t be at the mercy of everyone else: ask out the people you fancy, not the people you think will fancy you.

Hell yes. Something I have repeatedly and miserably failed at for most of my adult life, in part because I see so many things that give me pause for thought. He won’t like me – I’m too tall. He’ll probably think I’m too common. He goes for blondes.

Why is this stuff in my brain? It didn’t fall in there by accident – it’s there because I’ve had experience with similar guys that has led me to be wary of a particular reaction. It’s also partly down to the media constantly telling us what we need to be like, and down to my youth, during encounters at school which made me believe that like should stick to like. Goth kids with goth kids, fat kids with fat kids, clever kids with clever kids, and God forbid you should have a boyfriend who plays rugby when you’re a glasses-wearing sportphobe.

Anyway. Sometimes this stuff will be true – sometimes the person you fancy really will turn you down because you’re too tall, or whatever. But that is because they may well be a douchebag. And how much fucking better to know that you’re picking from a pool of people you have a genuine attraction to, than ‘settling’ for someone you think you might be able to get because you’ve always been told you can only have one thing?

Imagine if you were vegetarian and you’d been told that the buffet was 90% meat. You arrive at the venue expecting to be fobbed off with some crappy spinach and ricotta bullshit and a measly side-salad. Then you discover, to your delight, that the meat is actually cheese and you can have your pick of anything on the table.

ArchedEyebrow has literally just announced that, but for dating – tuck in.

Dating tip 3: you will never be happy ever after

Please don’t think ‘oh God what a depressing tip to end on’ – this is actually one of the most positive and uplifting pieces of advice I have ever been given, and it applies to LIFE as well as dating, because dating is basically part of life and is not some special expert subject on which only people who tell you to ‘play hard to get’ are qualified to comment.

This advice was given to me by the amazing Justin Hancock, who is wise. He was explaining mindfulness to me, and talking about being present in the moment. I’m not an expert on mindfulness, but this bit really struck home (I’m paraphrasing):

We often think of happiness as this big end goal – like we’ll get to a point in our lives and we’ll be happy. We’ll have a nice home, family, job, whatever, and by that point we’ll have reached peak happiness. Then we get sad about something and think OH NO I’VE RUINED IT and WHY CAN’T I JUST BE HAPPY. But it’s normal: happiness comes and goes, and we’ll never reach this ‘peak happiness forever’ – it’s a myth.

Actually, happiness is always a temporary thing. It’d be weird if it was just a climbing scale and, at a certain point, we reached a state of irreversible bliss. Even when we achieve our ‘dream jobs’ we’re not stagnant – we’re usually not content to just turn up from 9-5 and work to rule every day for the rest of our lives: we have ups and downs, fights with colleagues, deadlines that are unreasonable or realistic, new ambitions or needs or desires.

Likewise with dating: you can meet someone you love so much you want to lick their used socks and snuggle so hard into them that your face becomes melded to the crook of their neck, and still you won’t be happy forever. That person will eventually piss you off, and you’ll piss them off, or you’ll have to go for Christmas lunch with their parents or something and you’ll be miserable because their dad makes shit gravy and doesn’t do the sprouts properly.

The point is, no one will ever be happy ever after. Knowing that makes me much happier today.