Consent: Zero Shades of Gray

Consent is part of our everyday lives, even if it doesn't seem like it. And it's going through a radical shift in American ideology right now.

Perhaps the most commonly recognized form of publicly acknowledged consent goes like this: A man who recently broke into a flop sweat bends down on one knee and offers a girl a sparkly token. He will now crow about her consent if he receives it. "She said yes!" is plastered all over my social media news. It's a blatant, emotionally thrilling acknowledgment of consent.

Consent is what creates the ebb and flow of our lives as one person interacts with another and they learn how to work together. A company consented to pay me a certain wage at which point I consented to wake up at a set time each day and bring a presentable version of myself to an agreed upon address so I can work with others for a common goal. This is often referred to as a job. It's less well-known as a complex web of collaborative consent or non-consent.

Simple moments of consent escape our notice. We walk into a restaurant and order coffee from a waitress who's consented to work in that place. The waitress asks if we want room for cream and sugar. We answer. Done. Simple moments of consent are easy, really. If a waitress goes directly against your requested way to receive coffee, this is acknowledged as a faux pas. Likely it'll get fixed and everyone can just move on.

Then you have the public, important, and life-changing moments of consent. Let's say a couple has been dating a long time and has discussed getting married. They don't just assume they're married because they got the impression the other person likes the idea of marriage. It's almost like our innocent-until-proven-guilty law: non-consent is acted upon until consent is clearly given. Think about it. The couple continues to spend time together, they love each other, they talk about their future. But until one party asks the other to get married and they both agree, they go on without any change. Shoot, just to start dating, there's a series of questions and affirmative answers. And if one person asks another to enter into a relationship and the other person says no, it is the responsibility of the asking party to back off and respect the wishes of the person who didn't consent. In very important and public things, consent defaults to the lowest acknowledged level of consent and no one moves beyond that unless both parties are in agreement. Except in the case of stalking. And I hope we can all agree that's just not okay.

There's a lot of hype that happens after one person asks the other to agree to get married. And even at that point of mutual consent, they still aren't married. They have to then decide how they will get married. Then the planning starts. Some people have short, sweet engagements, and others plan the wedding of the millennium and take all kinds of time to do so, but in all cases, agreeing to get married isn't even close to the same as being married. After all that mutual consent, part of the wedding ceremony includes asking both people again if they will consent to the marriage. That's a whole lot of consent.

But when we talk about consent in relation to sex, there's a total shift. What does that say about our cultural views of sex?

I have undergone a dramatic shift in thinking on this topic. I recall talking to someone when I was in high school. We were discussing a case at the local university where a girl had become extremely intoxicated and she later accused someone of rape during her time of intoxication. The person I was talking to said it was the girl's fault. She shouldn't have compromised her safety. And I agreed at the time. Looking back now, I can't believe I thought that! I've known too many precious women who've ended up in a situation not knowing whether or not they actually gave consent. It takes a long time for some women to even realize that they were raped. And the reality is, when consent is not given freely, openly, and enthusiastically, the only possible alternative is that rape has occurred. There is no gray area. There is either consent or there isn't. If someone took your cell phone without your permission, you'd know it was stolen. And you'd know whether or not you'd given consent for that person to take it. Sex is no different. But the way we see it is vastly different.

There's confusion about whether rape can occur in a committed relationship or even a marriage. Didn't she consent when she said "I do"? Nope. She agreed to be married.

When it comes to sex, there's this idea that coercion is permissible, even expected. That women have to be convinced, or that women don't necessarily want sex, so it's up to men to wheedle it out of them. I've seen countless articles about 50 Shades of Grey that talk about how romantic it was that Christian Grey knew what Anastasia Steele wanted better than she knew herself. Then there's Disney selling girls a Prince who will save them and change their lives. And soon we have this very entrenched idea that the right Prince Charming will come along for each of us sad women and he'll be able to anticipate our needs. He's somehow supposed to know us better than we know ourselves. And to get to that point, we have to cross a whole lot of really unacceptable boundaries.

The first boundary I notice is a woman's right to her own thoughts. In a previous post, I disclosed that 8 of my formative years were spent in a cult. It's been years since I was involved there, but I'm finding ways that my thought process is still growing up. Now, when I hear someone talk about another person knowing them better than they know themselves, danger signals go off for me. I've had the experience of someone else thinking for me. I won't ever go back to that. It's appalling. When we (ladies) compromise our own right to our thoughts by assuming someone else can know what we want, we let go of some of our own ability to give a meaningful "yes" or "no" answer to anything. And in doing so, we endorse a perceived dumbing down of women. If we're too self-unaware to know our own minds, then why do we think we can be CEOs or raise kids? The ability to give meaningful and intentional consent is critical. And it definitely extends beyond sex. I think the lack of understanding of consent for sex stems from this archetypal role we have for men and women in which no one really wins at all.

The second boundary I see us crossing is for the men. We women often tell men they're supposed to know what we want without us having to tell them. In the hopes that they'll figure us out, we sever communication. And then we're angry (in a passive-aggressive sort of way) if they're closed off. News flash for us all: the only one who knows what's going on in your head is you. So when guys are suddenly expected to tell us what we want, everything goes backward. And we've covered why that doesn't work, but it goes further. It dissolves communication and puts a lot of pressure on a man to "know what women want" all while we pretend to be very confusing. Really, though, people aren't confusing when they communicate openly and when they start by knowing their own minds. It's just as messed up to expect your man to know your thoughts without having to be told as it is to expect that a woman doesn't know her own mind. Good men might be relieved to find women who know themselves and are willing to communicate about themselves and their own thoughts. Then the men are off the hook and don't have to constantly guess what's going on. Consent is vital to men, too.

I used to think that a girl could change her mind and be fickle and it didn't matter. She was basically just not to be taken that seriously in the first place because the one thing you could count on is that she was inconsistent. That's being a woman. And a man had the task of figuring out what his girl wanted or meant at any given time. And by the nature of the setup, he was going to fail just about every time and she was going to be angry and feel undervalued. Thus, men are either buffoons or jerks and women weave webs of confusion. Well, I don't think I like this world of fickle women and buffoon men. Count me out. That way of thinking erodes the pathways for healthy consent and even for good communication.

To make matters more confusing, we flaunt consent for the big things like engagement and marriage, and then we muddy the waters for the things that we don't like to talk about. Most people in this culture don't like to talk about sex. So consent for sex has become anything but simple. It's become a religious thing, a matter of coercion, and no one can delineate rape from anything else. If the guy is supposed to tell the girl what she wants, then how can rape occur? And in my opinion, that's the pathway to victim blaming. As shown above, consent isn't just vital for women. Everybody needs to be on board and everyone benefits. You wouldn't suddenly start a marriage without your partner's consent, right? So don't assume sex is a given. Ever. It's just like anything else. It must be talked about. We have to break down those walls that keep sex a taboo topic.

I love this blog about how consent is like a cup of tea. It boils it down to something that makes sense. Really, if we weren't so afraid to foster actual communication about consent, it would be this simple. Equating consent to offering a cup of tea takes away all of the emotional and cultural baggage from the question. And it works. Since this culture is so afraid of sex and of talking about it, can we at least think of it as a cup of tea. But I think it would be best if we could take the shame out of sex. Instead of unfolding sex in one horribly shocking conversation between a parent and child, why not let sex be an ongoing conversation just like talking about any other aspect of growth in your child? It's just one facet of who we are, but when it's made shameful, it gets really warped and sort of takes over our thought process. A friend gave the example of telling me not to think of the color red. Suddenly, all I could see were all the red things in the room. Let's get sex in its proper place, along with consent. If we can stop over-emphasizing sex and start actually talking about it in a healthy way, consent can be a natural thing for us rather than a befuddling question mark.

Above all, please know your own mind. You're the only one with any right to speak for yourself. So do a good job. Represent yourself in a way that will make you proud of yourself. And talk about consent with your kids. Boys need to know. Protect them so they don't become inadvertent sex offenders. Girls need to know. It'll help them know the difference between a healthy situation or a risky one. Protect your kids and inform them about consent. Don't leave it up to our culture to inform them.

From Legalism to Dandelion Wine

Recently, I've been embroiled in a very personal journey in my heart, my faith, and my definition of myself. Looking at my past, I have two diametrically opposite experiences. Each lasted several years. They occurred back to back. And they made me who I am.

I took a wide-arc journey from religious fundamentalism and legalism to far outside-the-box free thinking. I filled out the majority of my pre-college education at a small private school. From the outside, it looked great. Hell, from pretty close, it looked fine, too. My parents searched hard to find a school that allowed independent learning while fostering good values. And we landed at Cornerstone Christian School in Fort Collins with Randy Whitten at the helm. I attended this school for 8 years beginning in 1990 in first grade.

Myself and my early classmates adhered to a strict uniform code. We had routine checks to make sure our uniform jumper dresses were decent, we were wearing shorts under our skirts in case, heaven help us, someone's skirt flew up and the world saw our cable knit (and I mean KNIT, like very thick and itchy) tights. We wore starched shirts under our jumpers and undershirts under that. Every day when I got dressed, my clothes reminded me that my body was an innately sinful thing. Boys had haircut checks and misguided moral compass interventions. And spankings were doled out frequently. We were taught to absolutely fear any appearance of evil. The opinions of others were the primary motive for doing anything. If someone could possibly make an inappropriate supposition based on something innocuous, then that innocuous thing was wrong and it was my job to keep people from ever thinking inappropriate things about me. There was even a special rule to prevent the evil of sexuality...well, there were many, actually, but the six-inch rule supposedly prevented boys and girls from touching each other. Because that's a gateway to sin, apparently, even for first graders.

This bred all kinds of fear-based legalism from the highly impossible six-inch tag (only possible if everyone runs around with a ruler, and then that gets a bit legalistic itself...even playing was legalistic) to a school-wide ban on dating of any sort, public destruction of secular music and shaming for individual thought. And sex? From what I could tell, it was the worst sin you could commit. Sex was a cardinal sin. No, not lust, not adultery, just sex itself was so bad, you weren't even allowed to think of it, let alone be a sexual being. It's a wonder we were even allowed to be male and female. The strictest rules were to stamp out any shred of sexuality. Because if you shame people for it, then it won't happen, I guess? Mixed into that, I memorized Bible verses and history classes consisted solely of learning about missionaries. Science was all about rocks and Christian discoveries. I kid you not. It was geared at teaching us to fear free thought.

Some school staff literally threatened kids and bullied them for questioning what they were taught. Those kids were held up as public examples of sin and we were taught to fear our own thoughts. School staff did much worse than threaten some kids, and the most fearsome monsters were the ones in charge. Worse than latent sexuality were the predators that kept watch.

"Education" was conducted individually. So I read for hours every day and then answered regurgitated questions in a little booklet and then graded myself. I literally never had a traditional class, except one semester of Colorado History after the church split and the iron curtain began to lift. I had no idea what a real learning environment would look like. I knew I was bored to death, but that's what school meant, right?

Bullying left me with physical and emotional scars that ran really deep. I was falling apart, but I was terrified to leave. I'd been assured that if I ever stepped toenail in a public school, my soul would be eternally damned. I begged my parents to let me stay. If a private school with Christian kids was so bad, I didn't want to know what a public school would be like.

I was your perfect picture of a broken little kid with disfigured social skills and a very small, closed, and fearful world.

My parents didn't realize what was going on at the school. The entire program was designed to keep the parents from knowing. I'm sure they can't have known because if they had known and were okay with it all, they never would've done what they did next.

After 8 years, the most extraordinary thing happened. I was somehow accepted into the International Baccalaureate (IB) program at Poudre High School starting in 9th grade. I was terrified. Other kids from Cornerstone told me I'd be eaten alive. Some teachers and other staff at the school told me I'd compromise my eternal salvation if I went to public high school.

Let's just say that moving from a school of 35 people K-12 to a school of 2000 teenagers was an adjustment.  It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I flourished and struggled. I transferred from fundamentalism, legalism, control, and fear to a program known for expanding kids' horizons and encouraging them to look beyond their preconceived notions. And I had a lot of preconceived opinions and rhetoric. I was like that place in the political spectrum where the two ends are so far apart, they almost meet.

I read books with swear words in them. I sat next to boys. I even had crushes. I made friends. I listened hungrily to some of my first non-Christian music: Blink 182 and Backstreet Boys. And I was totally shocked to find that the people of public school were better reflections of love than the Christian environment I came from.

My teachers unlocked my mind and helped me in ways I'm still discovering. My high school classes were college-preparatory classes. And I struggled hard. I was dropped into Biology and had no idea what a cell was. I didn't even know what biology meant. I brought this terrible looking mess to class with me the day we made marshmallow and toothpick models of double-helix DNA. I had to redo every single assignment for almost a year. I cried when I was assigned to write my first essay because I had to look up the definition to even know where to begin.

So I stuck with that program because I had literally no idea what a colossal undertaking it was. I didn't realize it til I was out of college. I'd received a year's worth of college credits due to my work in that program. And I began to understand how far behind I'd been when I began high school. The only skill I had to my name at the end of 8th grade was sentence diagramming. I can break down a sentence with the best of them.

IB challenged every norm I had. I was defensive. But classes like Theory of Knowledge kept me on my toes. It cracked the door to a new world. A free-thinking utopia of the mind.

And this year, that door has blown off its hinges for me. Things I thought I knew have blown up in my face. I've had to press the restart button...again...and again. To be honest, when I embarked on IB, I basically just put everything in my past on a hard stop. I didn't think about it. I basically never talked about it. I pretended with all my being that it wasn't there. A couple of other total "sinners" from my elementary school also went to my high school. We behaved like perfect strangers when we saw each other in the halls. It was almost like we were afraid that other people might know how insane our background was if we associated.

This year, someone from that early school experience has gone looking for truth in all that mess. She's brave, and she's also rallied 160 brave souls who are slowly sifting the wreckage together. We're finding that we have a lot of preconceived ideas that we can get rid of. There's more to toss than to keep.

I, for one, have become a child again in my spiritual journey. I've decided that there's so much wreckage, I need to toss what I can and start to rebuild. If you've never been through this, you won't understand. And I'm glad for you. If you have been through it, I'm sorry. And I know you'll get what it means to be an adult who's not sure of anything. I'm believing that I can rebuild. And some days are harder than others. I'm finding the things that resonate are the ways I learned to challenge truth. IB was the exact medicine my soul and mind needed after such a painful encounter. Given my starting point, I needed the jolt of being forced to look for myself. And it's still rolling in. The jolt comes in waves, just as the waves of realization of what I've actually come out of.

Recently, I've begun to allow myself to roll around the "C" word: cult. The realization of a cult is painful. It's like waking up to find that everything inside you is suddenly filled with venom and sickness. It's vile and it's impossible to expel it quickly enough. When someone is lucky enough to get out of a cult, they find themselves blinking in the sunlight, not even noticing the world going by. It's like being spit out of a time machine in the wrong era.

My IB community was understanding in ways I now am stunned to realize. I can't have seemed even remotely normal, but people befriended me and I was accepted. Teachers worked with me despite all the things I didn't know. My rhetoric wasn't my own. People also have to have known that. But no one treated me like they knew my past. I tried to hide it, but no doubt, it's been written all over me all along. The difference is now I get to punctuate that reality with the strength to overcome it. I can't say "Thank you" enough to my friends and teachers from high school. Thank you for challenging my beliefs, for accepting me as I was, and for letting me change over the years.

To my brave Cornerstone community of former kids, I'm thankful. I'm glad we're all on this side of the rot. And I'm glad to be able to begin to reconnect with you. I know we were all terrified of each other for a long time. And it makes sense. But there's healing when we get together.

As for me today, I'm wading through it. I have been for a while, and I don't expect to wake up with it resolved at any point soon. I've made progress. I'm using the tools and skills I learned in IB for evaluating information to find reality and truth. With those tools, I'm able to tackle this and feel like I somehow have a sort of guide to lead me out of the confusion. This blog post is a sign that I've moved beyond letting this sit inside me like an intangible ball of sickness. Perhaps it's a bit stream-of-consciousness. But it's here.

Each time I find something nasty lurking in my own ideology, I take it apart and do everything I can to shed it. It's been a painful experience. But I'm not holding on to the "god" that was created by a small man with too much power. I'm not clinging to some cruel and strange patriarch who despises the people he created. I'm working right now to wrench those horrible versions of god and some of the endemic Christian culture away from the God who's actually touched my life. My understanding of who God is has shifted radically, and I'm sure that shifting isn't done.

Today I made dandelion wine. I read a book by that name during my first year of IB in high school and it opened up my world somehow. I hadn't realized the craziness of the polarity in my past until I made this wine. At first I was worried someone would think I'm a terrible heathen for making wine. Then dawned the comforting thought: I don't care what any person thinks of the things I do, say, think, or create. I care about integrity and truth. And making wine doesn't impact that a bit. In a way, this wine is my link to safety; to mental and spiritual healing. This is my water at Cana. And that water is wine.

A little catching up

Hello my estranged readers and friends and fellow journeymen! It's been a long time. And a lot has happened. In the space since I last wrote, I took on the beginning of my dream career. In doing so, I discovered that careers are needy, exhilerating things that can suck your entire life into a vacuum if you're not careful. And apparently, I wasn't careful. It was exactly what I wanted, just way too much of it. I went from gardening and dairy cows to driving 3 hours per day and working no less than 10 hours each day. It escalated to us moving to a new town for my job after Jason lost his job and the commute no longer made sense. Now we're selling our house Golden and we've renovated a space in Loveland, CO. I'll give updates about each of these things. Just think of this as a synopsis so you know what's coming!

Jason found work in Fort Collins, we rented the Golden house to amazing people, and I got a promotion. Jason lost his job, my promotion began to eat my entire life and I started working between 60 and 80 hours every week with basically no weekends and no life. Our renters moved to a different state and we were tired of all the work the house requires, particularly with the drive. So we made the choice to put it on the market. Any takers?

After Jason found a new job (an amazing job, might I add), I decided to disembark the career train and find out what life was like in a slightly slower lane as I hone my skills for a more precise career move. So here I am, a few weeks after leaving that train and I am finding that I really like life. It's good.

I'm wrapping up projects around the house, and I'm learning to write again for the love of writing. I am contemplating what I might do for journalism if I could freelance effectively. I'd love to work in Africa as a journalist somehow.

And I just began a juice fast. That's on another blog altogether, but you can find and follow my journey there. This is day 2 of 75, for what it's worth.

For now, I'm writing about travel. I'm starting a garden. And then there's reading, walking, exercising, hiking, and just feeling human. I'm so thankful and blessed that Jason and I balance our lives to allow the freedom for all of this. In return, I want to make the house projects zip by for him so he's less stressed.

I'll do a series of back-log updates and then launch into current stuff!