Consent and alibis

A hard no, and enthusiastic yes - trying to set standards for consent is just providing men with alibis - yes, harder to meet, but still alibis. Because sometimes even a "yes" can mean "no". Does that not make the encounter non-consensual? As far as I can see from these comments, we'd still blame the woman, because she didn't signpost the access to her body correctly. What needs to be done is to stop focusing on how women can gatekeep more effectively, and start focusing on why men are allowed to get away with absurd excuses about not being able to read minds. We should expect men to read cues actually. Everyone with even a little sexual experience can tell if the other person is into it. Why are we pretending it's so hard to know? Men use this to get away with pushing, coercing and even violating women. Whether it's "her dress was slutty" or "she didn't give a hard no", it's still an alibi for them - they mean they should be off the hook because they had reasonable grounds to assume consent and ignore any clues to the contrary. And no matter how precisely we define consent, and how high we bring the bar to getting it, there will always be violations, and more importantly, with that system, they will be ruled permissible. So men need to be held accountable for actually caring whether the other person wants it and is enjoying it - not just for meeting the latest basic requirement. Men should be expected to care whether their partner is into it, whether she's having a good time, whether she's getting something out of it. And we're not talking about that, ever, like it's unreasonable to expect that of men, or impossible. I think that's just playing within the field of rape culture and only when we start holding men to that standard - treating sex as a two-way thing you do together, and not as an achievement or a goal or something they have to get from women - will rape culture's roots be addressed, and not just the symptoms.