Boys learn not to worry about girls’ pleasure, and when girls and women have sexual encounters that don’t feel good — whether they’re just unsatisfying or actively abusive — they’re primed to accept that’s just how sex is.
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Jaclyn Friedman
Jaclyn Friedman is an American feminist writer and activist from Boston, Massachusetts, best known as the co-editor (with Jessica Valenti) of Yes Means Yes: Visions of Sexual Power and a World Without Rape, the writer of What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide To Sex and Safety, a campus speaker on issues of healthy sexuality and anti-rape activism, and the founder and executive director of Women, Action & The Media. 2Background Friedman graduated from Wesleyan University, and earned an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College in 2004. She lives in the Boston area. She is openly bisexual, and was sexually assaulted while she was an undergraduate in college. 2Women, action and the media Friedman is the founder and Executive Director of Women, Action and the Media (WAM!), a North American non-profit focusing on gender justice and media issues. WAM!’s accomplishments include the successful campaigns to pressure Facebook to enforce its terms of service against incitements to violence against women and to pressure Clear Channel to rescind its decision not to run advertisements for South Wind Women's Center, a women's health clinic in Wichita. WAM! also runs chapters in Boston, New York, Chicago, LA, DC, Ottawa and Vancouver. 2Other activism Friedman regularly speaks at college campuses on the subjects of sexuality, sexualization, rape culture, and creating a healthy sexual culture around enthusiastic consent. She also hosts a weekly podcast "Fucking While Feminist." In 2010 Friedman was selected as a delegate on the Nobel Women’s Initiative's peace delegation to Israel and Palestin
Studies show that most rapists are perfectly aware their victims aren’t into what’s happening. And social science has also clearly demonstrated that men (and women!) are perfectly capable of understanding social cues, even ones where someone is saying “no” without using that actual word.
Teaching affirmative consent does something profound: It shifts the acceptable moral standard for sex, making it much clearer to everyone when someone is violating that standard.
But the most damaging thing that happens when we leave pleasure out of sex ed is that we allow girls to go on thinking that sex is something that’s not really for or about them.
Consent education does something else transformative: It tells girls that sex is supposed to be for them.