That I even had to write that headline should tell you everything you need to know about the anti-campus sexual assault movement.
In a video that has been circulating since late October, sexual consent is compared to making someone a cup of tea. (The video was produced in the United Kingdom.) It’s pretty simple: If you ask someone if they want a cup of tea and they say no, do not make them a cup of tea and do not force them to drink it.
Of course, when it comes to sexual consent, there’s a lot more nuance.
Enter Cathy Young, a contributor to Reason Magazine and The Daily Beast. She wrote a great takedown of the video, noting how ridiculous it is to compare sexual consent to ordering (or offering) tea. Young uses cake as an example instead of tea, because this is America and because “cake has connotations of sin, temptation, forbidden pleasure and guilt (at least for the weight-watchers among us).”
Anyway, Young acknowledges that no one needs a consent class to know that it’s assault if someone forces cake down your throat after you said you didn’t want any. But what if your friend guilt trips you into eating some cake? Suppose the person who made the cake talks about how he spent hours making the cake or sulks because you didn’t try his new recipe.
“Is your friend being obnoxious? Sure. No one would blame you if you weren’t in a rush to visit that friend again, or complained to mutual friends about how annoying her behavior was,” Young wrote.
“On the other hand, if you suddenly decided that what your friend did was no different from grabbing you by the nose and force feeding you cake when you opened your mouth to breathe, or forcing you to eat the cake at knifepoint … well, your mutual friends would be likely to think there was something wrong with you,” she added.
I encourage you to read the whole article.
