Abstract
Sexual consent refers to people’s internal willingness to engage in sexual activity with another person—as well as their external communication of that willingness. Internal and external sexual consent can vary by type of sexual behavior; however, previous research on sexual consent has primarily only assessed “typical” sexual behaviors such as genital touching, oral sex, and vaginal–penile sex without providing further context or acknowledging people’s sexual diversity. Therefore, we provided an initial account of people’s sexual consent—and lack thereof—for a broader array of sexual behaviors and contexts in which they occur. Using an online cross-sectional survey of participants in the United Kingdom and the United States (N = 658, 50.5% women), we examined event-level internal and external sexual consent for 20 sexual behaviors or contexts. Women reported significantly lower levels of sexual consent feelings than men for 12 of the 20 sexual behaviors and lower levels of active consent communication for 7 of them. Almost a third of participants (31.0%) had experienced at least one of the listed sexual behaviors against their will. Of those, participants on average reported nonconsensual experiences with 3.1 of the 20 types of sexual behavior listed, ranging from 1 to 11. More women reported at least one nonconsensual experience with one of the sexual behaviors assessed compared with men (47.9% versus 22.3%, respectively). We discussed several behavior-specific findings regarding sexual consent and the lack thereof. We also made recommendations for initiatives aimed at promoting healthy sexual consent practices: embrace sexual diversity, emphasize sexual agency, and encourage active consent communication.
Highlights
In an exploratory manner, we provided a preliminary examination of how sexual consent is experienced for a diverse array of sexual behaviors that are frequently endorsed by people but not well represented in the empirical literature on sexual consent, which has instead focused on behaviors that align with traditional sexual scripts
Because gender has consistently been found to be associated with sexual consent (Jozkowski & Peterson, 2013; Willis, Hunt, et al, 2019), we assessed the extent that gender differences were relevant across diverse sexual experiences in the present study
Corroborating previous studies (e.g., Marcantonio et al, 2018; Willis, Hunt, et al, 2019), we found that people’s internal and external sexual consent varied across types of sexual behaviors and contexts
Summary
Research suggests that sexual consent varies by type of behavior; previous studies on sexual consent have primarily investigated only a small selection of behaviors (e.g., genital touching, oral sex, vaginal sex; Jozkowski & Peterson, 2013; Willis, Hunt, et al, 2019) Limiting research to this set of “typical” sexual behaviors without providing further context does not reflect people’s sexual diversity. The Sexual Experiences Survey (i.e., a widely used measure of nonconsensual sexual activity) asks about sexual behaviors such as kissing, fondling, genital touching, oral sex, vaginal sex, anal sex (Koss et al, 2007) Such narrow conceptualizations do not adequately encompass people’s sexual diversity across contexts. Given the consistent effects of gender throughout the literature on sexual consent (Jozkowski et al, 2014; Willis, Hunt, et al, 2019), we predicted that women and men would differ in their internal and external sexual consent to various types of sexual behaviors. Because women disproportionately experience nonconsensual sexual activity (Breiding, 2014), we predicted that this gender disparity would persist for nonconsensual experiences with various sexual behaviors
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