This episode is brought to you by the letter 'C'. It stands for consent which just so happens
to be a stuff that my mom never told me about. So I'm going to tell you about it. Okay? Nod
your head and say yes, let's do this consensually.
The reason that I wanted to talk about what capital 'C' consent is and what it means for
both women and men was in response to a recent video I did called '216 reasons humans have
sex'. Some of the reasons cited did not have to do with people actually wanting to have
sex. Instead as viewer @Ali Ellendorff pointed out, 'So many are rape related. It makes me
so sad that this is part of our reality.' I'm going to need my teacher glasses to give
you a definition of consent, which is when two parties come together in agreement on
a sexual behavior, an understanding of what is allowed within that sexual behavior, and,
and! This is crucial. The understanding that one or both people can say stop at any point.
It doesn't matter whether you're just barely, your lips haven't even touched and all the
sudden you're like, no, I can't! No, no, no. Or if you are completely naked, you are halfway
between third base and a homerun and you don't want to do it anymore, guess what? You can
say stop. And that's totally fine. Allow me to illustrate what I mean with chocolate chip
cookies. Oh my god I love chocolate chip cookies. They are so good. Me too. Can uh, can I get
one of your chocolate chip cookies? Ummm, okay maybe like a bite? A bite?! Are you some
kind of chocolate chip cookie tease? You walk out here waving your chocolate chips all up
in front of my face, showing them to me and you're all like oh yeah, you can have some
of my chocolate chip cookies. A bite, a taste, a nibble. You are nothing but a tease. Listen.
You can go home, cause you've got an oven and you can make chocolate chip cookies all
night, all day, you don't even need me for chocolate chip cookies. You can make 'em all
on your own, you get my drift? Do you get my drift cause I'm talking about masturbation.
Now for a little more clarification on what consent is, it is something that is active,
voluntary, wanted, honest, not just about what you want but also what you don't want.
What consent is not however is something that is coerced or convinced. The absence of 'no'
does not mean 'yes'. The only thing that means 'yes' is 'yes'. Legally speaking there are
three main areas where you cannot give consent. First of all, if you are severely intoxicated
by alcohol or drugs and this gets into a lot of gray areas that I'm not going to get into
but Laci Green has an awesome video about this called 'Sex + Alcohol' that I highly
recommend. The second area is if you are physically or mentally disabled. And finally this might
seem like an obvious one but you cannot consent if you say 'no'. That is regardless of any
kind of sexual activity that has happened with that partner in the past. You might have
sex with someone in the morning but that night if you say no, no means no. And men this conversation
is for you as well. A lot of times when we talk about consent it's in very gendered,
heteronormative terms. We think of consent as something that a guy should seek out from
a girl to ensure that he is not then later blamed for doing something like raping her.
But when it comes to sexual violence, guys, it can and it does happen to you as well.
According to Columbia University Health Center, 1 in 10 rape victims is male. 10 to 20 % of
all men will be sexually violated at some point so consent is not just something that
women need to learn about. And it shouldn't just be something for male-female couples,
no. Sexual violation happens in any kind of gender-sexual orientation slice and dice structure
that you would like to look at. If we want to lower the incidence rates of all these
kinds of violations happening, the surefire way to do it across all of these different
gender-sexual orientation structures is by talking about consent. We have got to start
the conversation because societally we are so uncomfortable acknowledging that people
and especially younger people want to have sex that we don't even know how to say no.
I didn't know about consent when I was younger and I wish that I had. The least fulfilling
sexual experiences that I have had were from my younger days when I was just going along
with things because I thought that's what I should do. I didn't know that I had a voice
and that I could say no and that was no reflection on me but simply what I did and didn't want
to do and that's perfectly and totally fine. It needs to be okay say yes, I consensually
want to have sex and I want to have a lot of sex and that's totally fine. Equally fine
for you to say you know what, no, I'm not okay having sex, I'm not okay doing this,
this, or this. Everybody's a little bit different and everyone has a different kind of relationship
with sex. Can you tell that I'm passionate about this? All it takes to have consensual
sex is to just say hey, you know what? I want this. What do you want? Okay. Let's go do
it. Consent again is not meant to take the fun out of sex but rather to liberate us in
order to have more fun and the next morning be happy about it. Feel fine about it. There
should not be that kind of guilt associated with sex the next day because we did something
just cause we didn't know how to say no. I want to know from you, do you talk about consent,
how do you bring it up? And any questions you might have let me know in the comments.
If you want to know more I also recommend you going to Rainn.org, that's Rainn with
two 'n's, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network and they have all sorts of information
on this. Remember people I've said it once and I'll say it again. Consent makes sex even
sexier. So let's do it. Let's talk about sex. It's about freaking time.