ABSTRACT
At one level, one need look no further for explanation of why, legally and otherwise, ‘sexual consent’ remains such a difficult, contested issue. These definitions fail starkly to agree amongst themselves. Being ‘of the same mind’ connotes something quite different from ‘complying’ - while one implies spontaneous, uncoerced harmony of thought, the other implies adapting to another’s point of view. Similarly, ‘yielding’ need not entail ‘giving assent’ (or vice-versa). And it’s by no means self-evident that ‘agreement’ is synonymous with ‘accordance with the actions or opinions of another’. Any simple assumption that ‘consent’ implies free agreement might seem, then, to be scuppered at the outset by the very slippages and ambiguities of its dictionary definition.
