The Real Reason Men Ignore Consent

It doesn’t have much to do with knowledge or lack thereof.

The issue is men wanting to hop the fence, not that they don’t know where the it is. Photo by Marivi Pazos on Unsplash

As discussed by the New York Times recently, the problem of consent is not due to men not knowing what it is. To say that educating men about the details of consent will stop rape is like saying training in marksmanship will stop gunmen from going on killing sprees; we know the real problem isn’t a matter of making mistakes, but of intentionally doing harm. No amount of education can correct that. The problem is one of morality, not knowledge.

However, the segment of Americans advocating for consent — liberals, generally speaking, bend over backwards to avoid any talk of morality. We try to frame everything in amoral terms, as if by avoiding any discussion of morality we could avoid the problem altogether. However, when it comes to consent no amount of information can touch what is fundamentally an issue of bad intentions.

We can’t avoid it any longer. We’ve got to look at the moral foundations of rape culture.

The problem is that men don’t care about women. This is a subset of a much larger problem of masculinity — that set of attitudes and performances presented as not only good and right, but as essential for men. According to scholar of feminism (and former member of US Army Special Forces) Stan Goff, masculinity is a kind of script which men…