He asked me what I thought about the allegations of sexual misconduct by Neil Gaiman.

I had read the New York magazine account of them, but my friend hadn’t. He was resistant to reading the article, instead taking it as a prompt for a treatise on the misfirings of me too discourse—his phrase—how he believed it didn’t align with the ‘truth’ of heterosexual relations. Lest it seem as if this were a tidy conversation, let me clarify that it wasn’t.

At some point, we got around to the topic of consent, wherein he sent this message: 

the whole consent discourse… [is] inimical to desire.

Perhaps it’s unnecessary to also clarify that he’s heterosexual, because this is something a woman is unlikely to think, let alone state aloud. We women tend to rely on consent as a form of protection, and as a way to signal desire clearly in the moment; no always means no. The legal system has entrenched this concept in its prosecutions of sexual trespass. His statement edges dangerously close to describing the power imbalance underpinning rape; I don’t know if he meant it to sound provocative. It definitely sounded to me like he was speaking of a man’s desire, not a woman’s.

But what about my desire? What if my lack of consent utterly annihilates any desire I might feel, whether or not I ever felt any? What if the assumptions about my desire being equal—on a level field to begin with—are wrong?

•

I sincerely hadn’t expected this response; our conversations had given me a sense of an unconventional, intelligent mind. Perhaps a part of me assumed—or hoped—that his ideas indicated a generational shift. Our families come from the same part of the world—the Arab part—and he seemed attuned to the status of women in society. I remember the familiar sensation of being sideswiped by ideas I consider retrograde, from men who aren’t clearly misogynists by any measure. I’ve gotten this from allegedly progressive white men, too.

How I would characterize him is as a person who craves freedom, and is grappling with life in a markedly conformist, deeply patriarchal, and surveilled society. Someone who may not always be cognizant of the ways in which that condition has affected his thinking, despite his best efforts. If it sounds like I’m being generous with him, it’s in the interests of nuance. I’m not interested in flattening him into caricature; he is as complex as he is common. Human, you might say.

Had he used a word like complicates, he might have persuaded me to agree with him. But inimical—‘being adverse often by reason of hostility or malevolence’—is a strong and precise word. It’s tantamount to stating that consent destroys desire on purpose, because it is inherently hateful. That is an unmistakable position, not something that is easy to misinterpret, and his English is impeccable, so that wasn’t it either.

He wanted to talk about it, he was upset in a way I’d never seen another man be by this subject. Over the course of a few conversations over text and telephone—interspersed with other subjects—I listened.

He was extraordinarily bothered by the idea that a man accused of sexual misconduct could have his whole livelihood taken away from him (1), a result that he considered disproportionate to the misconduct (2). Perhaps his concern is legitimate. Men from communities of colour tend to face greater repercussions when they are accused of sexual wrongdoing—unless they happen to be wealthy, connected, or influential (3). Though I suggested his concern came from fear, he demurred, stating only that perhaps even he could be so accused. With a mild sneer implying that such an accusation would have no legitimacy.

I have to bracket for a moment that—underneath the defensive bluster—I had the sense that he himself didn’t feel especially powerful, so coercion wasn’t something he’d ever considered himself capable of. It felt as if he was expressing a palpable vulnerability to being wrongfully accused for something he took as innocuous. Disempowerment can feel absolute even if that’s a distortion; it can be very difficult to recognize those situations where you do hold power. A person who feels disempowered in society may yet wield damaging coercive power within their own home, for example. 

Manipulation doesn’t always come from obvious places, or in overt ways.

•

In my mid-20s, I apprenticed in the stone division of a sculpture institute. The foreman—a skinny, socially-awkward granite carver who shared an appreciation for Tolstoy, and with whom I was friendly—was around 50. He declared a crush on me, which I gracefully declined, content as I was to remain friendly. But this was not enough. I endured constant verbal and psychological harassment—mostly without witnesses—for months, until he started doing these things in front of other people (4). The last time, he stormed out of the facility in the middle of the afternoon when he saw me joking around with another male friend, and made an angry and jealous comment about it. Over 25 years later, I can no longer recall the actual words, but the intent was to shame me. In that moment, I knew that he had crossed a line: I was not his property. When I relayed what my harasser had said to me, my other friend (also an employee) chastised him for his response: “she’s been nothing but friendly with you, what are you doing?”

Until that point, no one saw his behaviour as harassment. He made going to work intolerable; I thought I could placate him with friendliness, but I felt uncomfortable anytime he was around. It seemed impossible to imagine that this person would be capable of exerting any kind of coercive or abusive power over anyone. Until that point, no one had intervened.

He didn’t appear to be the sort of male who would do that.

•

The lynchpin in this conversation was my friend’s argument that if you express desire, and you experience unease during a sexual act, your consent was not violated, and you simply had to take the hit of regretting having done a thing (5). That there is no means by which someone might in the moment revoke their consent—say if they suddenly change their mind about having sex. That true agency means desire exists on its own, and consent has nothing to do with it. To consider any other possibility is to fall into a pattern where women are encouraged to enact what he called “this horrible victimhood model”.

He implied that #metoo was largely about women recanting prior consent by calling it rape. That it was turning the men into the actual victims.

•

In my late 30s, I worked in advertising. I remember standing outside a local taco stand on a sunny spring day, waiting for my lunch order to return to work.

Out of nowhere, a slight young man who reeked like a distillery appeared within a foot of my face proclaiming “you have an interesting look,” in an attempt at conversation. I had been looking at my phone the second before, so the invitation felt like a tractor beam I was suddenly forced to extricate myself from.

Such uninvited attention triggers an armouring and a dissociation from the actual self; the real me is not your target, she is hidden. You will never see her.

I avoided eye contact. Then evaded discourse with short, terse answers that revealed nothing personal, being a shade between friendly and neutral without giving any ground. The slight advantage was that I didn’t care who he was; if he had been my boss or a colleague, the calculation would change. But if I angered him inadvertently, he could take that out on me without warning; the attention, like the response, always unpredictable. 

Eventually, I escaped before I could be followed back to my workplace, something I worried about at the time. I wonder if men ever fear being stalked for turning a woman down.

•

This friend from the Arab world is steeped in the sexual and relational norms that emerge from a fundamentally patriarchal culture dictated by one’s family and by religious affiliation. He believes that these norms are superior to the West’s, despite their limitations. I’m skeptical of this; there is no place in the world that isn’t poisoned by the same reactionary, hierarchical patriarchal ideas. Limiting beliefs regarding a woman’s rights and her sexual agency are extant everywhere (6), as is backlash to #metoo. 

My own family’s history complicates a belief that any culture holds superiority over another in this realm. Both my maternal aunts’ first marriages were arranged—neither lasted, one was abusive. My mother, choosing an Arab of the wrong religion—a Palestinian-Christian refugee—was forced to leave her homeland for safety’s sake. Her family was not considered strict Muslim, not that it mattered. My mother’s family was objectively wealthy, so neither of the arranged unions were about economic survival. Marrying off your daughters is about guarding the family’s honour, which often resides between the legs of the family’s women, never its men. Desire was a ghost, and consent to these arrangements was given without fulsome awareness (7). But is that truly consent?

•

I was raised in the West, taught that it was my responsibility to handle a man’s desire, as if sex was the only thing men wanted from me. I was not raised to think that I had any real agency over my own sexuality: I was repeatedly told that I was to wait until marriage to have sex. The only respectable way to be a woman: chaste and relinquishing her desire to her husband. 

The mix of these contradictory ideas meant that I spent my 20s not knowing what I was supposed to do: the husband never showed up. Neither did a viable, trustworthy partner to explore with. I didn’t lose my virginity until I was 30, by which time it was about eliminating the stain of having waited so long in a part of the world that didn’t understand that, because I wasn’t religious. Neither pleasure nor love were in it.

I consented to it, but it wasn’t the experience I desired. 

•

Of course, my friend is correct about sexuality and human relations not being so tidy or easily contained. To that point, the recent film Babygirl comes to mind; in it, an older female CEO enters into a submissive sexual relationship with an employee who is her subordinate, subverting all the stereotypes about power vis à vis desire.

But this conversation also reminded me that manliness is a confusing problem for men around the world, one sign among many that this hasn’t really changed. The totality of the power they hold from birth, the privilege of it, doesn’t register. It doesn’t matter what your politics are when it comes to this topic, or where you’re from. The more I consider it, the sadder I feel. I want men to feel empowered—as much as I want women to—but removing consent from the province of desire doesn’t feel like the way to get to that place. It also means women are no closer to achieving true, honest parity in sexual relations when to the men it’s zero sum, and not something that requires conversation or understanding along the path.

It feels like we keep walking in a circle in place, going nowhere.

•

Put simply, consent is another word for yes (8). It’s more than just yes, but at its heart, it’s yes, repeated over and over again, with enthusiasm. It is an expression of trust (9). Which leads me to another thought: that the one thing consistently missing from interpersonal relations (10) in the 21st century is clear and understandable communication, from both men and women. And at the heart of a lot of this trouble are not the men who don’t care, but the greater numbers who don’t in fact listen. They neglect to ask questions when they don’t understand, and they don’t bother to be explicit and clear with the other person. They make assumptions, and jump to conclusions based on their own unconscious linguistic hair triggers, operating from a place of fear. By sacrificing clarity of understanding, they give up their own agency. To paraphrase James Hillman, they use euphemism to cover their anxiety; anxiety about what they want, or how they’re expected to behave. Or they think it’s sexier not to say anything: to leave things open to interpretation, neither a yes nor a no. 

How surprising is it, really, that misunderstandings—catastrophes, even—inevitably arise?

•

This is where I’m compelled to mention BDSM (11), a form of sexual practice that has innovated in the areas of consent and emotional responsibility (12). The BDSM community relies on the many varieties of consent (13) to ensure not only the mutual pleasure but also the safety of all participants in situations that can be highly charged—the ability to withdraw consent at any time is paramount. BDSM is the most practical way to prove that consent is not only not inimical to desire, it can be a method for heightening desire, for the expression of desire in many forms, and for grounding desire in the body without removing a sense of abandon. Consent as a means of respecting the integrity of the person during and after the sexual act, and requiring participants to be explicit and clear in their communication.

As a culture, we never talked about aftercare until that term filtered down from BDSM into mainstream discourse. Heterosexual sex is rife with stories of men who fucked, got up, and left, the stereotype being of one whose interest in their partner evaporates—following a brief refractory period—shortly after they climax (14). 

By contrast, the concept of aftercare reflects a recognition of the deeply emotional nature of sexual intimacy, and of the transitional space negotiated between the sex act and daily life. Sex is more than bodies that climax. It’s energetic communion. It’s play, it’s vulnerability, it’s a deliberate letting go of self consciousness. Aftercare acknowledges that much can have transpired when someone is in the grips of deep pleasure. It is a process by which those realizations can be integrated: brought into the self, alchemized by the body, understood on all levels of awareness and sensory processing. It can be something as simple as being held, but the intention is for it to be responsive to a partner’s needs.

The comfort of some form of aftercare seems obvious when you have shared part of your rawest self with another. Nothing about this should ever be rushed. The disorientation that comes when this does happen is destabilizing, and it engenders a sense of physical intimacy as inherently unsafe emotionally. 

Male friends have said to me that they believe women treat sex as a token they exchange for love, but I would counter it’s that they tend to hold off sex until the men are able to access their own emotional vulnerability. Experience makes women aware that men tend to deep six their emotions while their other drives float on the surface. It’s rarely clear that the buoy of sexual desire expressed is in any way connected to an emotional anchor below, and most often it is not. The reasons for this are multi-factoral: generational, societal, as well as cultural. It is so easy for men to get away with lowered expectations for their behaviour. Men are socialized to deny their emotions as if sensitivity to an essential part of the self—referred to derogatorily as feminine—betrays weakness, rather than integrity.

•

The original reason #metoo hit a nerve was because men the world over had gotten away with abuse and harassment (15) for far too long without consequence, the lower expectation taken to its extreme. Women were fed up; the laissez passer that was the fee for access to public spaces, and spaces where men were otherwise allowed to dominate, had been that women would continue to let harassing behaviour pass, unpunished. Your desire superseding my consent, without exception. 

But what of my desire? The other conundrum is that women aren’t freely allowed their desire in the ways men are, so there is no equal footing to begin with. Too few young women are raised in an honest and open process of initiation into their sexuality that allows them full bodily autonomy: to name and own their desire, and to hold it without shame. Too frequently, their first experience of male desire is being coerced into sex, without regard for what they want. Later, they may hear that their desire is something “mysterious,” as if no one could ever know what a woman’s true desire is; she might not even know herself. Women are then told that they are responsible for their own desires, in each moment, regardless of the situation! It is incandescently enraging and also deeply absurd and tragic.

I mean. You could just ask her. You could even make it a sexy thing to ask.

•

BDSM comes to mind for another vivid reason: role play. Role play allows individuals to skirt and transgress typical sexual boundaries, including but not limited to fantasies of rape. Rape fantasies are not the same as being raped. The difference here is that the desire to experience, in a controlled context, a feeling of having one’s agency taken away (16)—a feeling of pleasure that itself comes from a sensation of violation, but is not actually violation—requires a much more sophisticated level of consent and self awareness.

The stakes are much higher with role play. The line between what is rape and what is simulated rape might seem fuzzy, but it is not because of the active presence of consent. Someone whose fantasy it is to experience rape—where their experience of being overpowered isn’t in conflict with their desire—does not wish to be raped. They consent to a facsimile of the experience (17), and the requirements of role play typically include safe words, i.e. the ability to revoke consent at any moment, and the obligation of the other person to respect that revocation the second it is requested (18).

Consent in this context affirms the inherently slippery nature of sex, its unpredictable intensity. That as much as you might know yourself, you might not be capable of knowing how you will feel or respond in any given situation, in that moment, and that your agency to change your mind is inviolate. Your emotional grounding is paramount; your consent is yours to give or remove freely in response to that ground shifting.

I have known what it feels like to be stripped of my own complex humanity, reduced to an object. My physical and emotional bodies cleaved apart, denied their rightful integration. My consent a means to an end, not a beginning.

•

There is another idea naturally interwoven with consent and desire, and that is the notion of pleasure: what defines it, what creates it.

At another point in our conversation, my friend stated that providing pleasure was integral to his own experience of desire. This is something I’ve also heard other men say, that they derive pleasure from the knowledge that they are providing it. There is a way in which this idea seems like a very generous view of sex, not at all the stereotype of the man who is focused on his own gratification. But it can also mean that if she doesn’t display pleasure or perform desire in a way that the man accepts as valid, then the woman hasn’t met an expectation: she has not gratified him. Her orgasm is a trophy he claims as evidence of his sexual prowess; her desire is secondary, not sovereign. She is still not enough as she is, she is still not encountered as the idiosyncratic sexual being she is, a human. And he likely hasn’t articulated his expectation; he may not admit to himself that he has such an expectation, or that it comes from influences he’s unwilling to admit to, if he is even aware of them (19).

We never managed to get beyond the temporary relief of a splenic vent in our conversation. My friend’s ideas about desire and consent appeared trapped in an amber matrix of fear, where nothing could get in, neither air nor light. It felt pointless to poke at it further; these ideas aren’t easy to reconcile in a single conversation, let alone a generation of them.

Inarguably, what destroys desire is anything that insists on its own pleasure to the detriment of the other person’s. Mutuality, reciprocity, understanding are things that create desire. Consent is not a cudgel, it is a reassurance that the other person’s agency—as well as their desire—is intact, in each moment. That their yes, each yes, is freely given, each yes being an arrow on the roadmap to their pleasure. And the path can be idiosyncratic, and surprising. It should have that freedom.

If the point is to find that path, and to create it anew each time, there is no other way to find it without the light that consent provides to illuminate it. 

•••

Endnotes:
(1) whole livelihood taken away from him : I believe men fear this consequence because it contradicts the position of dominance that they’ve been taught from birth to expect is their due.

(2) misconduct: There was an anecdote about a friend accused of drugging and raping several women, which he considered false accusations, while his friend was merely a philandering “asshole,” but not a rapist. Many men have difficulty imagining their friends capable of crossing a line, not merely being confused by a blurred one.

(3) influential: Michael Franti, Sean Combs, but conversely Emmett Till. 

(4) in front of other people: He showed up during one of my nighttime TA shifts at the facility, and proceeded to drunkenly berate me in front of my roommate’s boyfriend, who was shocked as he’d never witnessed this behaviour.

(5) regretting having done a thing: This was the gist of his reply to a series of questions about being coerced into a sexual situation. It strikes me as an internalization of the very sort of patriarchal ideas that women are subject to.

(6) extant everywhere: I encourage readers of this essay to read Mona Eltahawy’s excellent book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution, to better understand this context.

(7) fulsome awareness: I remember asking one of my aunts about her arranged marriage and she replied that she trusted her father to make a good choice for her. She was 17. 

(8) another word for yes: I feel compelled here to refer you to Katherine Angel’s incredible book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, for a far more nuanced and thorough discussion than this essay can hold.

(9) expression of trust: Also feel compelled to reference Laurie Penny’s wonderful essay The Horizon of Desire on Longreads.

(10) interpersonal relations: I mean cis hetero sexual relations here, to clarify, given the context of the original conversation.

(11) BDSM: bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.

(12) emotional responsibility: This is not a community I am a part of, but I have read about it, and admire its approach to consent and bodily autonomy.

(13) varieties of consent: I’m not going to go into “consensual non consent” in this piece, because it is particular to a specific form of sub-dom relationship that is not being taken into account here.

(14) shortly after they climax: If this were untrue, Liz Phair may never have written “Fuck and Run.”

(15) abuse and harassment: I am citing this excellent thesis by AUC masters student Yasmine Elleithy as she includes multiple sources for the stats on street harassment in Egypt, including a notable one from the UN in 2013 that mentions a reporting percent of 99.3% out of a sample of 2,332 respondents.

(16) one's agency taken away: Clearly talking about the situation of being the subject of a simulated rape; the other possible context is assuming the position of power after having experienced an actual violation in real life, which is a different dynamic entirely.

(17) facsimile of the experience: This is another discussion entirely on its own that I won’t go into here, because it requires more complexity than this essay can hold.

(18) it is requested: Again, I am avoiding the topic of consensual non-consent in this context because this will become unwieldy.

(19) if he is even aware of them: Porn, among other things, but mostly porn.

Image of Apollo and Daphne sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the Galleria Borghese, Rome. From italyperfect.com. Retrieved December 21, 2025.