Consent as Cross-Cultural Communication: Navigating Consent in a Multicultural World

Abstract

Sexual consent is navigated in many different ways. The experience of sexuality is tightly bound to a cultural experience. This includes the way people communicate (or do not) about sex and sexuality in their lives. When discussing consent to sex within North America, people encounter many different cultures at a time: the culture of college, a culture of hegemonic masculinity, rape culture, a culture of feminist informed dialogue, a culture of varying degrees of sex-negativity or erotophobia, etc. When sexuality professionals educate about consent, they are embarking on cross cultural work. Encouraging an enthusiastic, verbal consent policy risks being culturally incompetent based on how people have been shown to communicate their sexual consent in the research. In this article, I will discuss the conceptualizations of sexual consent in the sexual science research literature and examine them alongside models and theories of cross-cultural communication. This comparison makes evident the cultural context of sexual consent and the need for more culturally aware education around consent communication.