Emotional Consent part 1

Most people have some basic understanding of how consent works. Someone asks a question, consent is given with a “YES”.  Voila, you have consent. But have you ever stopped to think about what are you really asking for when getting consent. Is it just asking to do something or is there more to it? 

Consent is not just a sex thing either, it applies to medical procedures, having photos taken and being part of studies. Consent is needed for all these things not just because of the physical ramifications but what the person feels about them. 

An example would be having a photograph taken and shared publically. Doing so has no direct physical effect. It doesn’t hurt, actually you can’t feel it at all, but emotionally it can have a profound impact from pride to shame, happiness to abject fear.  It depends on how the photo makes you look, what does it show, who can see it and how they might react to it. The entire weight of the consent for a photograph is on the emotional consent.

OMG, where did you get that photo of me!! All the embarrassment and shame.

What we often gloss over is the emotional consent component of things like medical procedures and sexual acts. When consent is given it is not necessarily about the physical act, but how we will feel before, during and after. 

A common example of this is a woman is in labour and her care provider asks if she can check her cervix. When the laboring woman consents it is because what she is hoping to feel is reassured that both her and her baby are well, things are progressing and both of them are safe. It is not about the physical aspect of it; she is not wanting someone to put their fingers in her vagina. How a care provider both gains consent and performs the task makes an enormous difference at that point.

It is not Consent if you are AFRAID to say no. It is coercion and the way this works is deeply based in the emotional aspect of consent. 

Going back to the example of a woman in labour, if a care providers says something along the lines of, “I have to do this vaginal exam because the cord could be coming down first and your baby will die if I don’t.”

Consent is imperative in many contexts.

At first glance this looks like getting a woman to agree in order to seek the feelings of reassurance and safety, but in actual fact it is trying to get her to so frightened in her state of non-consent that she will move out of it. Towards any other feeling. She is not seeking anything, just running from fear.  This can lead to feelings of shame, violation and trauma.

Another scenario might be where a woman says yes to a vaginal exam, but the care providers intention is not just to check the cervix but to try and stir things up a bit to speed the process along. Not only is the woman not consenting to the physical act of stretching and sweeping the cervix, the emotional consent for a feeling of safety is completely over-ridden by the care providers impatience or fears. When a care providers intention is not in line with what she has told a woman it can be felt in a very traumatic way. The woman is not consenting to being made to feel like she is an inconvenience, she is consenting to being reassured. This disparity can evoke some full on emotions and trauma. 

Emotional consent can be a hard concept to grasp, because we often don’t think about why we say yes to things. In my next blog I will explore this idea a bit more in the context of sexual consent.