Amid all the concern lately over what constitutes sexual consent, someone finally had the idea, why not make an app? (Kids use apps for everything these days!)
“Good2Go” is, by its own description, “a simple consent mobile phone app that targets college-age adults.”
The app allows the sex-initiator to forego outdated modes of courting, like foreplay or talking to your partner—instead they can hand you their phone and ask you to answer a series of questions, including whether you are “Sober,” “Mildly Intoxicated,” “Intoxicated but Good2Go” or “Pretty Wasted.” If you’re “Pretty Wasted,” the phone will tell you not to have sex, and then since you’re wasted you will definitely listen to it.
At Slate, Amanda Hess tried out the app and was unimpressed. The app involves a complicated series of code-verifications and phone-number exchanges, which resulted in Hess and her partner taking “four minutes to navigate through all the screens, mostly because he kept asking, “Why are we using an app for this?” and “Why do I have to give them my phone number?’”
You can watch a video demonstration of the whole painful process here.
And, Hess pointed out, the app never asked the sex-initiator any of the same pertinent questions, like intoxication level, and never asked to specify what, exactly, the partner was Good2Go for.
Of course, the app would also track your consensual escapades and could open up your archived sexual history to a court. The app’s creator admitted to Slate, “It wouldn’t be released except under legal circumstances…But it does create a data point that there was an occasion where one party asked the other for affirmative consent that could be useful in the future.”
As the Washington Post’s Caitlin Dewey put it: “Incidentally, you’re also telling a new mobile development company with no Internet footprint or track record to speak of (a) who you’re sleeping with, (b) when you did it, and (c) how drunk or sober you were at the time.”
Most of all, it’s unclear who, exactly, will benefit from this app, since someone unwilling to ask “Do you want to have sex?” is probably even more unwilling to go through a four-minute virtual interrogation instead.
