Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention

by Donna Freitas

Our lives are generally tuned to consent, and it hums as we move about the world like soft radio static, a buzz underneath everything we do and all the people with whom we spend our time. This default mode of consent changes only when we get into situations of sexual intimacy (and sometimes not even then), situations of sexual and romantic relevance. Only then do we start constructing walls to block a person from reaching us, often from literally reaching us, physically, bodily. Only then does consent become an act of which we become self-aware because the rest of the time our consent is unconscious. It is “ready-to-hand,” as Heidegger might say. I loved Heidegger as an undergraduate. I loved most of all his concepts of “ready-to-hand” and “present-at-hand,” concepts I’ve gone back to repeatedly over the course of my intellectual life, because they seem to apply to just about everything. For Heidegger, things are generally ready-to-hand and become present-at-hand only when we are forced to notice them. Ready-to-hand things are ones we don’t have to worry about because they are performing their everyday functions without fail. For example, a door is typically ready-to-hand. We walk up to a door, we go through it without noticing what we are doing, without thinking much about the door, as though we don’t even see the door. The door becomes present-at-hand only if, when we are trying to get through it, we grasp the handle and it falls off, and we can’t use the door as expecte...