The “only yes means yes” law caused great controversy last term. The philosopher Clara Serra explains in The Meaning of Consent (Anagrama) that affirmative consent comes from the US and is based on the idea that women cannot say no because they live in a world in which they are always under duress. And she asks herself: “Why, when we are not free to say no, could we say yes from freedom?” Serra, who was a deputy for Podemos and Más Madrid in the Madrid Assembly, and is now a researcher at the University of Barcelona at the Adhuc center for theory, gender and sexuality, analyzes how both this American feminism of domination, which equates the power of men with violence, like the new sexual neoliberalism, for which the sexually empowered woman knows precisely what she is looking for, ignore the gray space that is sex, in which there is also room for a “maybe” and a "maybe" and where we don't always know what will happen. And she wonders why the “no means no,” which she defends, today seems like a motto to banish.
In the world everything is about sex except sex, which is about power?
They have quite a bit to do with it. Judith Butler says she doesn't believe power is eradicable from sexuality. And she says, I think very bravely, that power is an even erotic dimension of sex. The book partly wants to argue that we have to be able to separate sex from violence even if power is not completely eradicable from sexuality. Today there is a current that tends to unify them. If any inequality of power leads us to a situation of sexual violence, there are few limits to put on criminal law. What sexual relationship could we say is totally free of any type of inequality, of asymmetry?
It says that we are caught between two visions of consent, between Yankee feminism of domination and sexual neoliberalism. What does it mean?
There are two speeches that seem contradictory and in the end they are not so contradictory. Underlying current discourses of consent is a philosophy that indicates that saying no is practically impossible in a patriarchal world and therefore consent could be something to question, to contest. The paradox is that at the same time that this philosophy resonates in current discourses, there is a very exacerbated confidence in the possibility of contracting sex in a very transparent way, in the possibility of making our desires explicit, making them known, making agreements, which seems incompatible. It is as if the sexual contract were something unfeasible in a patriarchal world and on the other hand it was something very easy and at hand at any time. Consent is a very complex thing, but renouncing it, as domination feminism does, leads us to a very dangerous territory. If we say that women cannot consent, the next question is, who speaks for them? Probably the State, for example saying that the sex worker, even if she says yes, does not consent. That leads us to a denial of the majority of women's sexual age.
Talk about the Americanization of sex.
Yes, that has allowed us to incorporate these mottos, the motto of only yes is yes, which has existed for a long time in the Yankee sphere and has to do with a society that is not ours in sexual terms. I really like something that Rita Segato said: “Me too is good in the sense that it can be used for us in an emancipatory sense. But beware that it comes from an extremely puritanical North American society, more fearful of sex.
And how do they reach the Spanish left?
The US has great power to export speeches. And the case of the Manada and the reform of the law has been the conducive context for those ideas to take a seat here. The European Commission is trying to get many European countries to adopt this framework. France and Germany have said that they do not see it clearly.
Was the law a mistake?
I do not believe that it has posed a social danger of releasing rapists. And the law is important in aspects that are not criminal, it involves improvements in the support for women, the aid they can access, the listening to which they can access. What I am critical of is the criminal issue and the discourse that has accompanied the law. The philosophy that accompanies the law in its criminal aspect is poorly stated.
Is 'no' better than no?
Yes, although it does not mean that from this framework the laws cannot be very reformable and very improvable. 'No means no' is deeply feminist. In the world we will find many obstacles to saying no, but we must work to ensure that this is not possible. Another thing is that when faced with this difficulty we give up and assume that women will never be able to say no. For it to be possible, we must work against women's poverty, labor inequality, economic inequality... Empower them. And I don't know in what sense when saying no is impossible, saying yes means something. The condition of possibility of a true yes is that no is possible.
What role does desire play in the politics of consent?
Central. Can desire be illuminated from the law, be something to take into account in a court? What this guy really wanted was this, is he catchable? He would say no. We subjects are more opaque, more vulnerable, more interdependent, more intertwined with the other, with others, than the fictional autonomous subject that is sometimes talked about. Desire puts us before the enormous problem that sometimes we don't know what we want. And yet you have to buy a house, sign a mortgage, a marriage contract, vote. Then we realize that it was not what we wanted. We got married thinking it was for love and we realized ten years later at the psychoanalyst that I got married to please my father. And we can sometimes choose things without our desire being fully present there. It is a risk that must be assumed and in the sexual field it seems that we try to avoid it when in other aspects of life we assume that uncertainty. You don't go into the sexual arena knowing exactly what will happen to you. That's the whole point of it. Legally, the meaning of consent must be linked to the will. Then we can talk about in what sense, beyond the legal field, it seems ethical to me to also seek the desire of the other. But what seems very dangerous to me is that the law asked us to fuck for love. If you coherently go through the philosophical assumptions that give meaning to the motto of only yes it means yes, you end up in a place where desire is being pursued and where in the end I think you end up instituting what is desirable.
