Indiscrete: How Typical College Student Sexual Behavior Troubles Affirmative Consent’s Demand for Clear Communication

Introduction Advocates of affirmative consent argue that such policies can change sexual mores rooted in entitled masculinity while shifting the burden of preventing sexual assault from women to men. Yet there is little research to date on the implementation of affirmative consent or analysis of whether the policy’s demands are feasible in contemporary college sexual culture. We compare undergraduate students’ descriptions of sexual norms and behaviors on one college campus to the norms and logics implicit in the school’s affirmative consent sexual assault policy. Methods Thirty-three undergraduate students from a mid-sized public university participated in one of eight same or mixed-gender, semi-structured focus groups in 2018. Results Affirmative consent assumes that sexual situations are a clearly definable category of activity, whereas student accounts suggest that sexual and non-sexual situations bleed into one another, making it difficult for students to establish consent via clear communication before sexual encounters begin. Students convey sexual interest through an accumulation of gestures exchanged over time, leading us to propose a cumulative model of consent. Students also report deliberately using ambiguous communication in sexual situations because it confers several social benefits, despite the risk of miscommunication. Conclusions Student sexual behavior and affirmative consent policies are at odds because they are logically incompatible, and because student sexual culture is influenced by factors other than rape avoidance. Policy Implications Policies intended to curb sexual assault on campus should be written with normative student sexual behavior in mind and should offer clear guidelines for implementation in the real world.