Ask

I checked Ask: Building Consent Culture with the hope that I may gain insight in how to talk and teach consent with my family. What I got was a grab-bag of essays of varying quality that may or may not directly discuss consent.

The six essays I thought most useful or thought provoking are:

"Sex and Love When You Hate Yourself and Don't Have Your Shit Together" by Joellen Notte, for tackling mental illness, love, and consent. That also ties in well with Sez Thomasin's essay "Sex Is a Life Skill: Sex Ed for the Neuroatypical," which discusses the fact that kids placed in special ed classrooms may also benefit from sex ed and consent, and why.

"Rehearsing Consent Culture: Revolutionary Playtime" by Richard M. Wright offers, for my needs, possibly the best way to approach teaching consent to children and teens in the book.

Navarre Overton's "The Kids Aren't All Right: Consent and Our Miranda Rights" discussed consent outside of a sexual context, and in a light I hadn't considered important. While Navarre discusses how kids that are read their Miranda rights may not actually understand what they're consenting to, I wondered how often this plays out for people who don't speak English in the United States. It is troubling to consider just how disadvantaged someone who doesn't speak English is when the law knocks on their door...

"Giving Birth When Black" by Takeallah Rivera made me mad. It's a good essay, but damn, the issues around consent in the hospital and around birth are frustrating.

Kate Fractal's "Games, Role-Playing, and Consent" is great for ideas on how to consider consent in games (and, incidentally, ideas for role playing that I think will be great for my family).

Finally, I appreciated Carol Queen's Afterword. I felt that it spoke honestly to the realities of how consent can be murky and awkward. That it isn't an easy problem to solve, and how many of us don't have the patience for any solution other than an immediate solution.

For me, those essays made this book worthwhile.

The other essays? Some were riddled with logical loopholes such that I felt that I was contorting myself in an effort to make sense of their conclusion. Many missed opportunities to provide citations, instead relying on the familiar weasel words "studies show". Which studies

Finally, the worst of the lot were essays that were self-aggrandizing, conflated bullying with assault (having been at the receiving end of both, I cannot agree that bullying and assault are equivalent), or discussed topics so far afield that consent was but a tangent to their topic.

I'm still looking for a solid book on consent, and how to teach consent. This offers glimmers of hope that something is out there. In the mean time, I at least have a few gems that I can start with today.