Monday 31 December 2018

signing a consent form

Signing a consent form - make sure you do it in front of a witness!
Sign the form that is.

  • BBC Woman's Hour continue to push there abnormal views of all things perverse.

Consent



With an hour's drive ahead of me last Tuesday, I switched on the car radio to see if I could find something interesting to listen to. What I found was Radio 4's Woman's Hour, and specifically a two-person discussion (interviewer and interviewee) on the subject of consent. Consent, that is, to sexual activity, this having recently become a rather sensitive topic as many men have been accused by women (and maybe by other men, who knows?) of rape or sexual assault; while the accused men themselves claim that although they had sex, the activity was consensual.



The interviewee's age was not given, but she sounded like a young woman, maybe in her twenties. She told the interviewer (also female, probably older) how she had gone with a man whom she described as “a friend” to his home, where they had agreed to have sex (they had had sex before, she said, though only once or twice) and he had then produced a consent form for her to sign. This was so that if she subsequently tried to accuse him of rape or sexual assault, he could prove that she had agreed to the activity. She had never come across such a thing before, and was a bit surprised; but signed anyway (after which, presumably, a good time was had by all).



The discussion which followed was about the nature of consent in such circumstances. For example, a woman might consent in general terms, and then the man might introduce some unexpected variation which she was not happy about but which he forced on her.



But I was still musing on the intial circumstances.

The man was “a friend”. This was not a love relationship.  It was not even an alcohol-fuelled spur-of-the-moment impulse.  It was a coolly-chosen decision: shall we go out for a drink, shall we watch a film, shall we wander round the streets looking at the Christmas lights, shall we have sex? The man's producing a consent form underlies still further the cold-blooded nature of the transaction, as does the woman's agreement to signing it (after her initial surprise).


Is this really how the majority of young people in the UK are living these days? Or even a sizeable minority of them?  Or have the makers of Woman's Hour found a relatively unusual case which it is presenting in matter-of-fact terms in order to “normalise” a view of sex as no more than one form of entertainment among any number of others?   (And if so, why? What's in it for them?)   

3 comments:

  1. I had a look on the internet for an image for a consent form to put up on the blog, typing it in with some trepidation, you never know what might come up, but low and behold there it was the - Sexual Consent Form! From eforms together with images of nice smiling people

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  2. The only real sexual consent form is the marriage licence, and only then if its between a man and a woman

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  3. As we know, sex is God's wedding present to a husband and his wife.

    ReplyDelete