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Consent: A word with multiple definitions
By Connie Lauerman
Tribune staff reporter
Published December 18, 2002
In the 1963 movie "Beach Party," Annette Funicello and her film boyfriend Frankie Avalon are on their way to a beach house to spend some private time together, he thinks. Unbeknownst to him, Annette also invited all their surfing buddies, thus short-circuiting any notion of sex.
Fast forward some 40 years. In this year's "8 Mile," Eminem, playing a version of himself, has sex with his movie paramour Brittany Murphy in a metal stamping factory on their second date.
We live in a culture that heavily promotes sex, making it seem as if anything, anytime, goes. In the aftermath of the so-called sexual revolution, an unprecedented freedom has resulted in young people experiencing first-time sex at earlier ages than many of their parents did. They also must contend with a peer culture that pushes sexual activity a lot harder.
The absence of strict dating and courtship rituals has made the rules of engagement less clear. Every sexual encounter or any kind of meeting between two people then requires some sort of negotiation. If that is not verbalized, the result can muddy the definition of consent.
Everyone agrees that forced sexual assault by a stranger on a dark street is rape. But with date rape, the situation often is less than clear.
While not excusing any form of sexual violence, Edward O. Laumann, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, suggests that date rape is "a social construction."
He asked: "How do you go about labeling what happened from both points of view?
Different definitions
"The girl may have a definition of it that differs from the guy. Which do we think is the correct one?
"The woman may have started to neck with a man or do stuff, and he, assuming that is a yes, starts running down that line and trespasses. She may have expected not to do it on this particular date ... She is offended and outraged by it and apt to label that as a rape situation because she has lost her control over the situation. He may feel that she misled him and that's unfair. So there is a lot of self-justification going on."
Laumann, who is an editor of "Sex, Love and Health in America," an analysis of data collected in the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey, the nation's most comprehensive survey on sexuality to date, believes ambiguity has resulted from people who are younger and less mature engaging in sexual activity.
"One could imagine that there might be changes in ... expected behavior," he said.
"College kids are embedded in a culture that [suggests] everybody is [having sexual intercourse], And that it's actually expected of everybody.
"Men may be expecting that if you're going out on a date, [sexual intercourse] is one of the things that may happen or should happen. The parties coming into the date may have very different expectations.
"Boys may believe that when girls say `no,' they really mean `yes' and it's a part of the negotiation, that the woman preserves her purity or whatever by being a little less eager to do it. And the boy has to push a little harder, and that's where you're going to get [problems].
"He feels he asked and she didn't really say `no' and the girl feels that she was pressured. It's decidedly clear that there are labeling problems going on. People have not worked out the rules in a way where it's very clear."
Mixed messages
Paula Kamen, author of "Her Way: Young Women Remake the Sexual Revolution" (Broadway Books, $13.95), said: "No doubt about it, there certainly can be misunderstanding between men and women about what [constitutes] consent. We are raised with all these mixed messages. Men can grow up watching movies that show women are always available and sex is supposed to be a silent thing with no communication.
"So both men and women have a responsibility to communicate with each other. We can't depend on external cues. That could be seen as radical to older people, could be seen as ruining the spontaneity of sex."
Laumann notes that in the 1950s and early 1960s the social rules were clear-cut. Contraceptives were not readily available and middle-class parents were concerned about their daughters and sons jeopardizing their futures by risking pregnancy and a forced early marriage.
"There was a very elaborate courting ritual," he said. "People were paired off. They got `pinned.' They did `heavy petting,' everything but [sexual intercourse]. That was the barrier line due to the vulnerability to pregnancy. Oral sex was not on the agenda either."
Indeed, data from the Centers for Disease Control 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, showed that among women born from 1951 to 1955, 23 percent were married to their first sexual partner.
In contrast about 2 percent of women born from 1971 to 1975 were married to their first partner.
In general the survey revealed that staying virginal until marriage is less valued in our culture.
For example, about 69 percent of those first married between 1965 and 1974 had their first intercourse before marriage, compared with 89 percent of those first married in the 1990s.
Today's teenagers seem to have developed their own protocol for sexual activity that might strike their elders as out of kilter.
`Safe sex'?
Kaiser Family Foundation research data released in October show that among many teens, casual relationships with little emotional investment and longer term relationships were equally likely to include sexual intercourse.
Julia Davis, Kaiser senior program officer, said that one of the interesting findings was that young adults were likely to consider kissing and touching more intimate than more overt sexual activity.
"Those sort of intimate [behaviors], what we might know as first-base activities, were part of the dating relationship with a boyfriend and girlfriend, and less so in a casual relationship, but oral sex and intercourse appear to be happening at the same rates in both types of relationships."
Davis said that many young people view oral sex as "safe sex" because it cannot result in pregnancy, but many don't realize they could contract a sexually transmitted disease such as gonorrhea.
"Young people also think that oral sex is not as big a deal as intercourse, meaning they consider it maybe not as intimate and that's probably related to these issues about risk," Davis said.
Culturally there are different standards for boys and girls, she said.
When young people were asked whether there is a lot of pressure to have sex by a certain age and whether sex is something that just happens in teen relationships, Davis said boys overwhelmingly agreed with those two statements more than girls.
"Boys are conditioned differently than girls in terms of thinking that sex is an essential part of adolescence," she said.
Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune
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