“Yes Means Yes” and the Sound of Silence

Comment published on New York Times online blog, in response to Samantha Stark, “‘I kept thinking of Antioch’: Long before ‘#MeToo’, aTimes Video Journalist Remembers a Form She Signed in 2004,” April 8, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/08/insider/antioch-sexual-consent-form-metoo-video.html?comments

The real question raised by Affirmative Consent or "Yes Means Yes" policies and laws that makes them different from "No Means No" is the meaning of silence, and the treatment of non-verbal interaction as a quasi-linguistic code devoid of its real ambiguity. Indeed, the latter possibility undoes the whole endeavor because it implies that Yes can mean No (maybe the woman "realizes" this afterwards) since a verbal affirmation could be contradicted by some, perhaps even, following the logic of interested interpretation in our liberal managerial culture, latent or micro-statement. In that case, the man is considered a rapist if he failed to read the woman's mind.

The tacit presupposition is a neoliberal culture with a right to not be affected or bothered. Something like "body language" is then elevated to a code of signals (which it is not, as nonverbal expression is essentially ambiguous) that those receiving the message must obey. Your speech or gesture is "violent" if I don't like it. 

Is silence dissent or consent? Thomas More raised this question as his trial, claiming that silence means yes. In fact, the absence of either a clear yes or no means that the situation is ambiguous. The only way for anyone to clearly know that a person has been violated by an action or interaction in which she or he was involved, absent a clear indication by the transgressing party, is an unambiguous "No." You cannot ask permission to seduce, for seduction is that asking.