Flutterby™! : Beyond Consent

It requires registration, but it's really good. Via Elf Sternberg: Consent and Refusal Are Not the Only Talking Points in Sex — The language of sexual negotiation must go far beyond ‘consent’ and ‘refusal’ if we are to foster ethical, autonomous sex/a>

I propose centring invitations rather than requests in our model of the language of sexual initiation. This opens up a whole set of new ethical and pragmatic questions. When are sexual invitations felicitous and appropriate, and who has authority to issue them to whom? Since invitations strike a complex balance between welcoming and leaving the recipient free, what maintains this balance and what throws it off-kilter? An invitation might be degrading by being insufficiently welcoming, for instance. Or it might be coercive by being too pressing. Notice that if I invite you, appropriately, to have sex with me, then consent and refusal are not even the right categories of speech acts when it comes to your uptake. It is not felicitous to consent to an invitation; rather, one accepts it or turns it down. So the consent model distorts our understanding of how a great deal of sex is initiated, including in particular pleasurable, ethical sex.