Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture--and What We Can Do about It

by Kate Harding

But there’s an equally plausible and far more troubling explanation for this insistence that a momentary pause is an unreasonable burden to put on a person having sex: to wit, that those objecting have a good reason to expect their partners, given a window, would verbalize their lack of consent. It’s not that they don’t want to risk killing the mood; it’s that they benefit from the misconception that consent is a murky, complicated thing. If we, as a society, actually expected people to be 100 percent certain they had enthusiastic consent from all sexual partners, then we might not be so quick to accept “She wanted it” as a defense. And where would that leave folks who like to rape?