ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the communicative dimension of consent: how do the interview participants communicate their willingness to have sex and decode other people's sexual willingness – or unwillingness? The analysis sheds light on the subtle, continuous signalling process that typically forms the core of dynamics of consent and highlights the varied, context-dependent ways that consent may be expressed. The argument is made that the process of signalling consent is utterly simple and complex – simple in that it is a form of human communication that people tend to master, and complex in the sense that it is not translatable to simple formulae. The complexity of people's actual consent behaviour challenges orthodox and formalized understandings of consent. While the impossibility of creating watertight standards for assessing consent creates a risk of misunderstanding, it is argued that rather than seeking to eliminate this risk it needs to be acknowledged and dealt with. Relatedly, the impossibility of always knowing in advance whether a sexual act is wanted or not must be acknowledged, and a space needs to be opened for the possibility of correcting for and repairing mistakes in dynamics of consent.
