We need to talk about consent.

Says everyone, everywhere, especially since the MeToo explosion

The aftermath has since seen a rise in men’s apprehension in approaching women for fear of breaching their boundaries and straying into non-consensual turf.

Human Resources manuals are being rewritten, creating more and more elaborate rules and scenarios about what constitutes sexual abuse vs appropriate behavior.

I’ve spoken to men who are concerned to even approach women – not just because of your old school fear of rejection – but of the fear of actually being labeled a harasser and being lumped with the predator archetype being illuminated by the media on the back of the MeToo movement.

The trouble with these rules is that it only manages the surface level of the issues underlying consent.

The guidelines being drawn up are based on a misunderstanding of consent. It is built on the foundation of a shallow consent paradigm.

To gain a deeper understanding, let’s look at the anatomy of consent.

The current foundational principle is based solely on individuals overt expression of a desire to engage in a way that is more personal or intimate.

In other words, if the advance has been verbally welcomed, then it is permissable to go there.

However, if that was the absolute truth, we wouldn’t have women or men for that matter feeling violated from a distance, in silence, through gazes, or mere presence.

Or, individuals feeling violated, even though they had at the time verbally welcomed the interaction, after the fact.

The truth is, consent goes deeper than our intellectual realm.

It exists on an emotional, energetic and embodied levels.

Intimacy, whether sexual, emotional or physical (touch for instance), play out on these channels of experience.

This means that our mind may feel like we want to explore an interaction, but our body, which has an intelligence of its own, may not feel safe to do so.

The trouble is, we are often disconnected from our bodies and our emotional selves (which lives in the body) and do not feel what these parts of us want. Sometimes, we may feel the shame, guilt, blame or shutdown, after the interaction has occurred, and at other times, not even then.

To complicate matters, we often have certain emotional conditioning that says such things as – if we have given a verbal go ahead, we should not stop or back out, even though the interaction is starting to feel uncomfortable for fear of leading the other on, being judged, shamed or otherwise rejected for stopping a process we seemingly invited or welcomed.

The result of this disconnect from our bodies is that we lose our ability to feel what they want, desire and are ready for.

The other costly expense of this dissociation is that we lose our connection to our empathy, as empathy lies in the domain of our emotional and energetic selves. When we do not have that, we are not able to empathize with where others’ emotional and embodied selves are at – in other words, what they are ready for and open to. Empathy is the ability to sense emotionally where the other person is currently at. Are they scared, shut down, or open and inviting?!

This leaves us reliant on purely the intellectual level of relating. We therefore base our conclusions of right and wrong, consent and non-consent on what another tells us. Or the constantly refined laws and policies of what words and actions are and aren’t acceptable.

This is all to evident in the social spaces of relating like night clubs, bars and pubs. Where people tend to get drunk just to find the courage to stumble over and make awkward attempts to engage in conversation. Or hit on others in work spaces without any sense of a welcome-ness to the advances.

The solution? To reconnect too our bodies by melting the numbness we have created and starting to feel what is alive in ourselves. This is the gateway for also developing a greater ability to truly sense when another person is open to our relating on any level.

I know that in my journey of embodiment, as I have begun to feel more of myself, I have found that I have also become more attuned to others. And this has guided me allot more accurately to engage in interactions where it’s been appropriate and welcome. This has felt like the deepest level of consent.

I have also had the interesting experiences of intimate partners inviting sexual interactions, yet feeling and noticing that their bodies freeze up or numb out, which to me has been a clear sign of non-consent.

It’s like a different conversation is happening on these levels. Dialogues on a embodied, emotional and energetic levels. More deeply true than purely relating from disembodied heads.

It’s as if there’s actually several parties (in ourselves, and in the other) involved in an interaction between two people and when we are unaware of the other parts of us, we tend to drag them into experiences they are not willing or ready to have.

Which inevitably leaves others or ourselves feeling abused. However, we tend to blame the other (or ourselves) rather than owning the responsibility to be aware of and speak from our wholeness. In that way, we have not given ourselves consent and unless we do, on these deeper levels, we will always feel violated in some way or other. But only secondarily by someone else. Mainly by ourselves.

The Pick Up Artist scene in the last decade has become quite popular, running workshops – largely for men – on how to manipulate social situations and individual conditioning to at best force ones way into an interaction, and at worst find a way into sexual intimacy. I feel this is another way around those defenses that people carry to protect themselves. Moreover, it’s another way to avoid having to do real inner work to then be able to intuitively find connections that are respectful and organic.

So instead of rules created to govern our intellectual sphere to police actions, my experience informs me that consent is about doing the hard work of reconnecting to our emotions within our body.

With this hard inner work, comes the pay off of self and other respect and consent.