A few weekends ago, my friend visited a college a couple hundred miles away. When the keg was tapped at a party, she went home with a guy she’d been hitting it off with.
It wasn’t until she saw the cinderblock walls and lofted bed that she was struck with the sad realization that this fellow was an underclassman, and she was in his dorm room.
According to my friend, the age difference didn’t subtract from their encounter, but it did add an awkward element: He asked permission for every move he made.
“It was polite of him, I guess,” she said. “But it was more of a buzzkill.”
I sat across from her, nodding and agreeing wholeheartedly. In bedrooms, questions are cumbersome. They’re snags in the sheets. They delay and confuse, and if exceptionally peculiar, they can halt a hookup completely.
But if we don’t ask for the right to take off a person’s clothes, how do we know we have it?
According to V.O.I.C.E. (Violence Opposition in Community Education), a group of Marquette peer educators committed to promoting safe relationships, there are three main considerations in judging whether or not a sexual act is consensual: Participants must be old enough to consent (in Wisconsin, this means over the age of 18), have the capacity to consent and agree to take part.
The first is typically not a problem on a college campus. But the last two make the entire issue of consent especially grainy in the context of college hookups.
We all know when people hook up: after bar close, when neither person’s brain is functioning at its finest. In fact, in college culture, inebriation is practically a requirement for hooking up, since doing it sober qualifies you as a “creep.”
But did you know Wisconsin law asserts that since intoxicated people cannot give legitimate consent, having sex with them is rape?
I never learned this until my senior year, and although I easily could’ve Googled it at any point prior, I saw no reason to. In my head, consent could be expressed through implications; walking home together or kissing at a bar. There was no gray area or need for verbalization.
At Marquette, no one challenged my definition, which I’ve found many people share. During freshman orientation, sex was successfully avoided in discussions. Groups promoting awareness for sexual violence popped up on my radar during O-Fest, but I respectfully passed them over, thinking their causes had no real connection to my life.
Oh, to be young and naïve.
Being a student at a Catholic college doesn’t just mean hearing church bells every hour and having a priest down the hall in the dorms to bless our pencils every finals week. It means having to balance the binary of youth and tradition, of rules and exceptions, and trying to have safe and consensual sex in a place where nobody will come close to telling us what that really entails — let alone say the word “sex.”
Thankfully, Marquette is finally starting to take initiative. This year marked the very first in which all freshmen were provided with mandatory sexual misconduct awareness and prevention training.
The underclassmen with whom my friend spent the night had probably gone through this training at his school, and all the more power to him for actually applying his newfound knowledge.
We upperclassmen, and the scores of classes who’ve come before, may like to think our experience gives us the upper hand, but if we haven’t been practicing consensual sex, our experience is nothing more than a hindrance. It’s younger people who will be more in-the-know than we were at their age, who will ask permission before acting, who will know that sexual violence is everywhere on college campuses and not some abstract sociological problem. We might think of their new customs as awkward, but they’re right.
Still, the rest of us aren’t necessarily lost causes. Just as consent must be actively expressed, an education about consensual sex must be actively pursued. Although it’s still difficult to talk about sex at Marquette, adding your voice to the conversation will only make it easier.