A culture of "yes means yes" could expand opportunities for women everywhere. That's a battle worth winning — but the reaction to a new law in California suggests that it's going be a tough fight.

What you lose in nights of passion, you will gain in nights of not being a rapist.

California's new law is pretty straightforward. Universities receiving California state funds have to adopt an affirmative consent standard in their campus disciplinary policies, one that requires sexual consent to be "affirmative, conscious, and voluntary." A mere absence of a "no" is not enough: in the words of the bill, "lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent, nor does silence mean consent."

From the perspective of actually trying to have a genuinely consensual sex life, there's nothing particularly burdensome here. Don't take advantage of someone else's inebriation. Hold out for enthusiasm instead of resignation. You don't need to be a rocket scientist in order to have a conversation in advance about boundaries or to agree on a safe word. And if your partner sends signals that confuse you, stop. What you lose in nights of passion, you will gain in nights of not being a rapist.

And yet the law has been greeted with fear and loathing by many commentators, who apparently believe that genuine consent is too significant a burden to place on the pursuit of sexual pleasure. Reason blogger Shikha Dalmia, for instance, apparently prefers a system in which "much of sex is not consensual." Indeed, she argues that non-consensual sex is a boon to women's sex lives, because in her view, when women are pressured into sex acts that they do not consent to, that "doesn't mean that the final experience is unsatisfying." LA attorney John Werksman claimed that the new law "could lead to calamitous results," including prompting "behavioral changes" among students. (Anything but that!) And George Washington professor John Banzhaf warned that "under the law a female student could be charged with sexual assault if she offers oral sex and her inebriated partner accepts." (Won't anyone think of the blow jobs?)

The exhausting burden of presumed consent

The scope of the California law is limited. It's not a criminal statute, and it won't be sending anyone to jail. It only applies to university campuses and students. Its detractors are probably crediting it with more power for social change than it actually has.

But even if that weren't the case, the commentators' response would be misguided. The law didn't come out of nowhere. It emerged as a response to a status quo that has proved to be an all-too-powerful tool for sexual predators, because it enables them to claim to see consent in everything except continuous, unequivocal rejection. That status quo puts women in the position of having to constantly police their own behavior to make sure that they are not giving the appearance of passive consent. That's not only exhausting; it's limiting. It reinforces power imbalances that keep women out of positions of success and authority.

It amounts, essentially, to a tax that is levied exclusively on women. And it sucks.

Let's take the exhaustion first. As Mallory Ortberg of The Toast wrote earlier this week, we should not underestimate the burden that such attitudes place on women. When we pretend that determining consent is some sort of complex sorcery that mere mortals cannot be expected to manage, we implicitly condone the behavior of sexual predators who ignore their partners' clear signals:

Twice in my life I have had to fight for my safety. Twice in my life I have physically pushed a man out of my home. Twice in my life I have thrown a man off of me and locked myself in a room where he could not come after me, until he left, until someone else came to help me. It took every ounce of physical and emotional strength that I had. It was exhausting. It was frightening. Had I been the slightest bit more tired, had I been at someone else's house, had I not had the hope of someone else's arrival to sustain me, I might have fought and lost. To Ellen and her mother, I might be an example of a "good" near-rape victim. I should not have had to do it either time. The first time I said No, the first time I turned my head away, the first time I crossed my arms over my chest and walked away, the first time I said "What are you doing?", the first time I displayed a clear and obvious distaste for what was being done to me rather than with me should have been enough. That expectation — that the person saying No should be prepared at any moment to fight someone else off — is an undue burden. Pretending that active consent is ambiguous and confusing and difficult to obtain is a pernicious lie that has no basis in reality. It is abundantly clear when someone is eager and ready to sleep with you.

The risks of insisting on "no"

That burden isn't just annoying for women. It's dangerous. By exempting sexual aggressors from the responsibility of figuring out whether their partners are "eager and ready to sleep with them," we're asking their targets to either give in to sexual activity they don't want, or to run the risk that a firm, assertive, continued rejection will end in violence.

This week, a Detroit man murdered a 27-year-old mother of three named Mary Spears after she rejected him in a bar. Right now, a woman is in critical condition in a New York City hospital because a man slashed her throat on the street after she declined to go on a date with him. In April, a Connecticut teenager was murdered by her 16-year-old classmate after she turned down his invitation to prom. Stories like these (and there are others) should remind us that women have a lot of reasons to fear the consequences of saying "no." That's all the more reason why silence shouldn't be presumed to be consent.

Consent is more than just a pause in rejection

The attitude that anything other than a persistent "no" or physical resistance equals consent is all too common, and it causes real harm. This past week, a young writer named Sophia Katz wrote an essay accusing Stephen Tully Dierks, the editor of an online "alt-lit" literary magazine, of raping her multiple times. (Katz gave her attacker a pseudonym in her essay, but Dierks's former roommate has since confirmed, with Katz's permission, that the person the essay referred to as "Stan" was Dierks.)

Dierks's behavior was, by any reasonable standard, a totally unacceptable way to treat someone. It's not okay to have sex with someone who doesn't want to have sex with you, and Katz made it clear that she didn't want to have sex with Dierks. Even Dierks himself has not defended his actions — in a now-deleted Facebook post, he said that "what I did was bad, regardless of my intentions."

If we accept that sexual coercion is the price young women have to pay for professional collaboration, they're going to collaborate a lot less.

And yet because Dierks claims to have been confused about whether Katz consented, an astonishing chorus of blame has been directed at Katz for not doing enough to fend off his assaults — or even inviting them. Elizabeth Ellen, the editor of literary journal Hobart Pulp, devoted a lengthy essay to criticizing Katz, at one point suggesting that it was "almost entrapment" for her to have stayed in Dierks's apartment. When Gawker covered the story, commenters criticized Katz for visiting Dierks in the first place, for returning to his apartment night after night (even though she had nowhere else to go in New York and no money for a hotel), and for failing to say "no" strongly enough, even though she said it many times, in many ways.

A tax on women

Which brings us to the ways in which these sorts of attitudes disadvantage all women. When our society treats consent as "everything other than sustained, active, uninterrupted resistance," that misclassifies a whole range of behavior as sexually inviting. That, in turn, pressures women to avoid such behavior in order to protect themselves from assault.

As a result, certain opportunities are left unavailable to women, while still others are subject to expensive safety precautions, such as not traveling for professional networking unless you can afford your own hotel room. It amounts, essentially, to a tax that is levied exclusively on women. And it sucks.

Katz went to visit Dierks because she was a young writer who was eager to meet him and other members of the New York literary scene. She arrived in the city with the goal of meeting people she had interacted with online, in the hope of building relationships with them. That is an obvious step for an ambitious young writer to take as she builds her career, because in creative industries, as in many others, there is a lot of overlap between friendship and professional collaboration. Dierks, by inviting her, held out the possibility of just such a relationship with him and other members of his professional circle. It wasn't wrong or stupid or irresponsible of Katz to take that opportunity when it was offered to her.

And yet those who criticize Katz for her role in what happened are not only saying that she was wrong to accept the opportunity Dierks offered; they are also saying that other young women should not do what Katz did. If other young women find themselves in her position, these people would argue, they should not accept the invitation, should not travel to a new place to make new professional connections, should not take that step to benefit their careers.

Who knows what we've missed out on because a woman felt she needed to stay home to stay safe?

That attitude nibbles away at the edges of women's opportunities. If we accept that sexual coercion is the price young women have to pay for professional collaboration, they're going to collaborate a lot less.

Consider another story of a young female writer who made friends online with an editor for a cult online publication, and who accepted not only the editor's offer of hospitality during a visit, but also money for a plane ticket to fly there. When she arrived at the airport, they "ran into each other's arms." And yet the editor did not conclude that the plane ticket and hospitality imposed a sexual debt on the writer, or even that the airport embrace was a signal of amorous intent. To judge from public accounts, they managed to complete the visit without anyone sexually assaulting anyone.

The happy result was a professional collaboration that has been beneficial not just to them, but to everyone who enjoys good writing and offbeat cultural commentary: the writer was Mallory Ortberg, the author of the quote I included above. The editor was Nicole Cliffe, then of The Hairpin. And since their fabled first meeting, they have started The Toast, a website that is both a successful business and a source of joy for thousands of people, including me.

I don't want to stray too far into Ortberg/Cliffe bizarro world here, but if Ortberg had been "smart" in the way that Elizabeth Ellen and her ilk say that Katz should have been, and not accepted Cliffe's invitation, The Toast might not exist. Their lives would be a little less successful, because they would not be the mistresses of a burgeoning internet empire, and the internet would be afflicted by a tragic lack of Ayn Rand's Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Perhaps you are thinking, as you read this, that Mallory Ortberg's decision was different from Sophia Katz's, because Nicole Cliffe is a woman, and Stephen Tully Dierks is a man. But why should we expect that women — not all of whom are straight — will be able to read consent signals and accept them, if we don't expect men to? And even if we were fine with that double standard, telling women to only network with other women is not a solution to the problem we're trying to solve — especially in a world where men still dominate most industries. (It is, however, a pretty good way to ensure that men continue to do so.)

When women can't take risks, we all lose

The Dierkses of this world, and their supporters, could cost us the next version of The Toast, or its analogue in another industry. When even a small number of people behave like he did, and we empower their wrongdoing by blaming their victims, that puts the burden on women to avoid the risk that they will encounter a Dierks, rather than a Cliffe. Who knows what we've missed out on because a woman felt she needed to stay home to stay safe?

The most important aspect of California's affirmative consent law is not that it's a law, but that affirmative consent is a good standard for all of us to incorporate into our lives. Doing that will keep us safe, and make us freer. And if we're lucky, perhaps it will also bring us many wonderful things, from women who feel safe enough physically to take creative risks.