ABSTRACT
Important as these discussions are, they are not definitive of concerns about sexual consent, and in this chapter I wish to shift focus and develop a critical discussion on and exploration of the quality of sexual consent. The focus of this discussion is therefore upon sexual acts or relationships where there is no legal basis for claiming an absence of consent, where subjectively the participants would
both agree they consented and where consent would be recognised as having taken place within contemporary social and cultural norms. Of course, this would not satisfy radical feminists like Jeffreys, who would argue that social and cultural norms are intrinsically hetero-patriarchal, and women’s consent in heteropatriarchal society is always the less violent end of a continuum of sexual ownership, control and use of women by men (Jeffreys, 1990; also Dworkin, 1981 and 1988; MacKinnon, 1989). Such structural and cultural analyses provide a strong caution against assuming that sexual consent is ever ‘free’, and will be reflected, to a degree, in this critical discussion. Nevertheless, this analysis will make the assumption that women’s sexual consent is not simply predetermined and has a value in itself (for an elaboration of this argument, see Moore and Reynolds in this collection). Further, it will assume that part of the development of critical analyses involves a critical recognition of degrees of autonomy and freedom of expression in consent in contemporary society - that is balancing degrees of subject agency and autonomy with structural and cultural shaping or determination.
