It can be hard to ask for something—help, advice, even an extra ketchup packet sometimes. But asking gets us one step closer to what we want, and that is what consent is all about.
NO MORE is proud to join the National Sexual Violence Resource Center in celebrating Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM) with their I Ask campaign. Asking for consent is healthy, normal, and a necessary part of everyday interactions—and that includes in personal relationships.
The truth is that is feels easy to use consent in small everyday interactions, versus our most intimate and often most vulnerable moments. We explored this last year after Babe.net published a piece detailing an anonymous woman’s account of being violated by the comedian Aziz Ansari. That piece tipped off an important, and sometimes frustrating, online and offline discussion of what consent means and how to ask for it—or even whether or not it’s needed.
We won’t rehash that debate, because we—like so many others celebrating SAAM —believe consent is important at each and every step of a sexual encounter. Talking openly about sex is integral to understanding consent, and to learning how to communicate, understand, and respect sexual boundaries. Unfortunately, sex is still a very taboo subject — but if we can’t talk about sex with our clothes on, how are we ever going to be comfortable talking about it with our clothes off?