How does classifying most consensual sex as rape help rape victims? As a lawyer who has handled rape and sexual harassment cases, I have no idea, but this radical result is what some want to happen in California. In endorsing a bill in the California legislature that would require “affirmative consent” before sex can occur on campus, the editorial boards of the Fresno Bee and the Daily Californian advocated that sex be treated as “sexual assault” unless the participants discuss it “out loud” before sex, and “demonstrate they obtained verbal ‘affirmative consent’ before engaging in sexual activity.” Never mind that consent to most sex is non-verbal, and that rape has historically been understood to be an act against someone’s will, rather than simply a non-violent act that they did not consent to in advance. Perhaps in response to the bill, the University of California, on February 25, adopted a policy requiring affirmative consent not just to sex, but to every form of “physical sexual activity” engaged in.

I and my wife have been happily married for more than a decade, and like 99.9% of married couples, we do not engage in verbal discussion before engaging in each and every form of sexual activity. Indeed, in the first year of our daughter’s life, when she was a very light sleeper (she would wake up if you merely walked into her bedroom and stepped on a creaky part of the bedroom floor), it would have been unthinkable for us to engage in any kind of “out loud” discussion in our bedroom, which is right next to hers (the walls in our house are very thin, and you can hear sounds from one room in the next room). We certainly did not verbally discuss then whether to have sex. Having sex quietly when you are a parent is a sign that you are considerate of sleeping family members, and have a healthy marriage, not of sexual abuse.

The affirmative-consent bill, Senate Bill 967, does not explicitly require verbal permission to demonstrate consent, although it warns that “relying solely on nonverbal communication can lead to misunderstanding.” But supporters of the bill are very clear about their desire to require verbal discussion or haggling prior to sex. The Fresno Bee praised the bill because “it adopts in campus disciplinary cases the ‘affirmative consent standard,’ which means that ‘yes’ only means ‘yes’ if it is said out loud.” The Daily Californian declared that “the proposal’s requirement that defendants in a sexual assault case demonstrate they obtained verbal ‘affirmative consent’ before engaging in sexual activity makes SB 967 a step in the right direction.” Since most couples have engaged in sex without “verbal” consent, supporters of the bill are effectively redefining most people, and most happily-married couples, as rapists. By demanding verbal discussion before sex, they are also meddling in people’s sex lives in a prurient fashion.

Requiring people to have verbal discussions before sex violates their constitutional privacy rights, under the logic of Supreme Court decisions such as Lawrence v. Texas (2003), which struck down Texas’s sodomy law, and federal appeals court decisions like Wilson v. Taylor (1984), which ruled that dating relationships are protected against unwarranted meddling by the Constitutional freedom of intimate association.

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It also serves no legitimate purpose, since even supporters of the bill, like Tara Culp-Ressler have on other occasions admitted that sexual violence is not the result of mixed signals: studies show that people who commit sexual violence are almost always aware that what they are doing is against the will of their victims, rather than the assault being the product of “blurred” communications.

The “affirmative” consent requirement would not help rape victims or prevent rape, since rapists, who already lie about whether they have committed rape, will just lie and claim the victim said “yes” to sex. A person who lies about committing rape will also lie about the presence of “affirmative consent.” A violent rapist is not going to suddenly change his ways just because someone tells him that consent (which he disregarded in the past by doing things against the will of the victim) must now be explicit or “affirmative.”

When I was subjected to unwanted intimate groping as a child, the perpetrator knew quite well that what he was doing was inappropriate. Defining sex as rape merely because there was no verbal discussion in advance trivializes rape and brands innocent people as rapists (including some people who themselves have been sexually victimized in the past).

Disturbingly, it’s not just sex they want to regulate, but also “sexual activity” in general. The bill may require affirmative consent before multiple steps in the process of foreplay that leads to sex, even between couples who have engaged in the same pattern of foreplay before on countless occasions. The bill states, “’Affirmative consent’ is a freely and affirmatively communicated willingness to participate in particular sexual activity or behavior, expressed either by words or clear, unambiguous actions. . . The existence of a dating relationship between the persons involved, or the fact of a past sexual relationship, shall not provide the basis for an assumption of consent.” This disregards common sense, since what people intend or consent to is often illustrated by the history or nature of their relationship, such as when courts determine the intent of the parties to a contract by looking at the past course of dealings between the parties.