The #MeToo and #TimesUp movements have sparked a major reconsideration of appropriate behavior between the sexes, both inside the workplace and outside of it. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before tech entrepreneurs, the geniuses who brought you Soylent food substitute and the Yelp-for-people rating app Peeple, would rush into the marketplace with a proposed solution to this problem as well.
The New York Times reports that apps with names like “LegalFling” can now provide instant, live contracts for people who sense an amorous encounter is about to unfold. The app, which legal experts note is a “documentation of intent” rather than an official contract, markets itself as helping discussion of consent happen in a “fun but clear way,” as its website describes. Such fun and easy discussions might include “condom use, bondage, dirty talk, sexting: The app lets users set their boundaries before an encounter—boundaries that can be adjusted at any time with a tap and shared with a potential partner,” the Times notes.
Imagine the possibilities as a date goes off the rails! Instead of an awkward face-to-face conversation about your feelings, you can simply tap-tap away on your consent app, surreptitiously applying a new layer of restrictions about what might happen on the walk home. The app obviously sacrifices spontaneity for legalese—but it also encourages a depressingly pessimistic view of dating: The Times notes that the app allows users a one-tap option for “triggering cease-and-desist letters.”
But apps such as LegalFling reflect a genuine problem in relationships between the sexes today: a deep confusion about what consent means. The Times’s “gender editor” Jessica Bennett recently used the paper’s MeToo newsletter to put out a call to college students to help the Times understand what she calls “gray-zone sex.” This is not, as the name suggests, a series about the surprising sex lives of the Times’s geriatric readers. “Gray-zone sex” is, according to Bennett, a way to describe our “ambiguous” sexual moment; it is “a particular kind of sexual encounter, one that may not be viewed as ‘sexual assault,’ but that constitutes something far murkier and more troubling than simply a ‘bad date.’ ”
In other words: Think of LegalFling and the other consent apps likely to come to market as Antioch apps—after Antioch College’s 1990s-era Sexual Offense Prevention Policy that required students at the school to give verbal consent to any and every physical interaction, every time one might occur. As the New York Times recently noted, the old Antioch policy (which was correctly and thoroughly mocked when it debuted) evidently no longer speaks to the post-MeToo moment and itself is being even more radically revised: “The current crop of pioneers at Antioch are moving the conversation beyond sex to discussions of consent in platonic touch,” the Times reported. What does this look like in practice? The reporter talked to a student at Antioch who, after three years thoroughly marinating in Antioch’s consent policy, was shocked when someone came up and gave her an unsolicited hug. The person was her mother. “If you don’t want to be touched and your mom wants to hug you, you should be allowed to say no,” the student said. “It’s about having autonomy over your own body.”
Unfortunately, there’s not yet an app for encouraging a less paranoid approach to human interaction.
