At the University of New South Wales’ Roundhouse, there’s a hunger in the air that is palpable. Best friends, in matching leather jackets, clutch copies of the same book to their chest. A few young women have brought male dates. Someone in the drinks queue, ordering an espresso martini, is talking about their breakup in hushed tones. Every seat in the venue is taken.
When Chanel Contos arrives on stage in a cropped brocade jacket, she receives roaring applause. The audience collectively holds their breath, as if they are about to be let in on a secret.
Contos talks about the difference between female empowerment and female liberation. Hook-up culture, she says, repels respect. She has never sat through a full season of Sex and the City, she confesses to a round of laughs, but has no desire to have sex like a man.
When we speak before the Roundhouse event, about her new book – Consent Laid Bare: Sex entitlement and the distortion of desire – I tell her that the idea that, for myself and my peers, the belief that you could have sex like a man was a sign of independence. She nods. “For us, too,” she says.
“Maybe this is controversial to say, but most women I know don’t want to have sex like men. We have had exponential growth in the sex positivity movement, but gender equality has not caught up. That gap between gender equality and sex positivity is where we have sexual assault, regretful sexual experiences.”
Back in February 2021, Contos, 25, famously posted an Instagram story asking followers if they, or someone they were close to, had been sexually assaulted during their school years. A day later, she had 200 confirmations. She would create Teach Us Consent, a movement and platform on which over 6,600 people would share their testimonies. She would build on decades-long histories of advocacy to champion holistic consent education in Australia.
A year later, education ministers mandated changes to the national curriculum. It’s a shift she couldn’t imagine.
At the publisher’s offices, Contos is fighting London-to-Sydney jet lag. Despite her tiredness she is erudite and self-possessed. Twin C’s glint at her earlobes. In April, she was chosen by the former prime minister Julia Gillard to lead the youth committee for the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. In May, Teach Us Consent was awarded $3.5m by the Albanese government for projects engaging young people on consent issues.
Contos, in the country’s imagination, is linked inextricably with the debate on consent and sexual education. But Consent Laid Bare isn’t entirely the treatise on the importance of consent I was expecting. It spans everything from taboos around female sexuality and the rise of image-based abuse to survival responses.
She begins by invoking consent’s roots in the Latin con and sentio, closer to the notion of “feeling together”.
“We need to find a way to operate in society using concepts of consent that aren’t just legal, so it is more human-centric,” she says. “It also encapsulates that consent can be withdrawn and consent is dynamic.”
Contos doesn’t believe that consent can be separated from rape culture. This second-wave idea, which gained traction in the 1960s and 70s, argues that we live in a world in which women are socialised to please men who are, in turn, raised to feel entitled to their bodies. Women are conditioned to fear sexual violence from strangers, rapists who are “angry” or “sadistic”, as Contos writes in her first chapter.
But Contos is focused, she says, on what she describes as the “entitled opportunist rapist”, the type of boy she grew up with; the type otherwise likely to be described as a “good guy”, even as he is actively rewarded by society for seeking his own gratification.
“We need to ‘other’ rapists, because it is too confronting to accept that our society doesn’t just allow them to exist but to thrive,” she says. “The traits that the entitled opportunist harbours are the very neoliberal traits that are celebrated in men and lead them into positions of success.” She pauses. “There are no consequences.”
These dynamics, she says, were magnified in the milieu of elite Sydney private schools in which she grew up, a world of parties and luxury holidays and rugby games at the intersection of wealth and whiteness and class. This world shapes the country’s corridors of power – from the law and politics to the media.
The entitled opportunist, Contos writes, is “unlikely to reoffend if they are held accountable for their actions or taught explicitly what consent is”.
Contos wrote her dissertation on the colonial aspects of Sydney’s private boys schools, which were imported from England, and the ways in which we talk about how in Australia rape culture is shaped by the settler-colonial state.
“We can’t exclude the disproportionate amount of sexual violence that women of colour experience, that Indigenous women experience,” she says. In her book, she references Prof Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex, which argues that anxieties around false accusations reflect fears about the possibility that the law will treat wealthy white men the way it regularly treats brown and black men – “how [fears of] false allegations are a racial issue, more than a gendered issue”.
Over the last year, Contos has been involved in a campaign against stealthing, the practice of non-consensually removing a condom during sex, since criminalised in the ACT, New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria. “The first man connected to stealthing is being charged for it is a [man of colour],” she says. “That doesn’t mean the case shouldn’t be taken seriously – but why aren’t we taking seriously the countless white men in Canberra who have done this over the last few years?”
Of course, the corollary to this is that in Australia, the activists who are afforded visibility are like Contos: white, middle-class and educated. At the start of our conversation, she acknowledges how privileged she is to write this book, to have a platform.
Contos is fluent in the language of power, her own as well as that of others. And she is not afraid to challenge what was sold to her generation as truisms. She believes that the idea that sex is an expression of love can lead to coercion. She believes that there is no ethical way to consume porn. “Pornography is everywhere but I think we need to have conversations about pornography and the industry,” she says. “I think we need to speak about problematic themes such as violence against women, choking, slapping.”
She repeats this sentiment on stage and refers to the work of Andrea Dworkin, the radical feminist, whom she cites in Consent Laid Bare. “I think it’s a shame that Dworkin fell out of fashion,” she tells me.
Dworkin, herself a survivor of rape, grew up in a working-class Jewish family in New Jersey. When she was alive, she was attacked for her belief, as the writer Olivia Laing puts it in her book Everybody, “that there is no purely imaginary sphere” and that there is a direct relationship between the violent scenarios that play out in pornography and the way women’s bodies are treated in the real world. In Consent Laid Bare, Contos, who isn’t against the visual representation of sex, writes that “porn is shaping the brains and tastes of generations who were born into a world where it is easily accessible”.
Dworkin also believed, controversially, that a woman under patriarchy couldn’t consent meaningfully to sex. On stage, when the interviewer Hannah Ferguson brings this up, towards the end of the night, a hush falls across the room. It’s not that Contos agrees literally with this view. But in Dworkin’s ideas, it is clear she’s found a way to articulate why young women of her generation – who were taught they were empowered, who were told they had endless choice – find themselves in the same situations, asking the same questions as generations that came before.
In Consent Laid Bare, she references Dworkin’s seminal 1971 work Intercourse and asks: “Are teens (and women for that matter) ever truly equipped with the full capabilities to consent when the structural conditions of our society place the satisfaction of men as paramount?”
When Contos speaks about these social forces, gives them a name, there’s a sense of a weight lifting. If we live in a moment in which social media erases our collective memory, that reduces feminism to a headline or a T-shirt or a catchphrase, it strikes me that there’s something revelatory about a return to more radical ideas.
Near the end of the event, women line up at the mics. A young woman in a denim jacket wants to know if Contos finds choice feminism problematic and, in response, Contos reiterates the limits of prioritising the individual over the collective. Another speaker asks Contos: “Has it been worth it?” Contos confesses to pessimism but recalls an anecdote from her book, in which three generations of women, who saw her on TV, shared their experience of sexual assault with each other for the first time.
“What gives you hope?” someone else asks. Contos takes a moment to reply, choosing her words carefully. She responds: “I feel hope when I hear small stories of change.” As the evening draws to a close, anticipation turns to elation. People chatter excitedly, turning over talking points. Women head to the bar for another wine and the friends clutching books make a beeline for the signing queue.
Contos tells me that the change she wants to see can be as simple as a woman who reads her book and thinks about where the true source of their consent lies. “Is it for their partner, is it for their own pleasure? It is about building the best capabilities we can to consent to sex in the world we live in.”
Consent Laid Bare by Chanel Contos is out now through Pan Macmillan
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. If you or someone you know is impacted by sexual assault, family or domestic violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit www.1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000. International helplines can be found via www.befrienders.org
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