Creating Cultures of Consent by Laura McGuire

Author:Laura McGuire
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781475850970
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Chapter 4

Decolonizing the Way We Talk about Consent

Cultural Humility and Sexual Scripting

We see the world, not as it is, but as we are—or as we are conditioned to see it.

—Stephen Covey

Many people see these challenging experiences as educators and either give up or become jaded. They blame the students, parents, and the world at large for the ignorance they so easily write off. But what if this isn’t exactly ignorance? What if it is something larger? Something we can grow from and with our students on.

Our students are not blank slates, they are not empty vessels, and they do not need us to deposit information into them. We must strive to engage them by promoting questioning and individual reasoning in education.

As Paolo Frier said, “Banking education treats students as objects of assistance; problem posing education makes them critical thinkers.” In order to see this fully realized we have to do the work of unlearning everything that had been modeled for us in education. We have to see our students first, understand their truths, earn their trust slowly, and then share how we have used the information we are sharing in our own life and to what benefit. This includes leaving space for disagreement and truths that remained mutually valid even when conflicting.

If we are to teach consent, at any age and in any context, we must be willing to explore the cultural, social, and psychological complexities therein. We must not fill our students with compliance objectives but instead mutually learn and grow in what consent should truly look and feel like.

“We see the world not as it is but as we are.” When we see the world as we are we create mythos around “universal experience.” We tell ourselves that all of humanity experiences the world as we do. When we travel or interact with communities different than our own we see glimmers of truth in the fallacies of these beliefs. Not everyone eats what we do, thinks as we do, believes what we do, and so on. For some this realization humbles what they previously had upheld as “normal.” They will reflect mindfully on the assumptions they have made about universality and realize that while there are common experiences to the human condition, the lens through which we each filter those experiences is as numerous and vast as the stars.

For others, such as our colonializing European ancestors, this will go in the opposite direction. Differences are thus seen as deviations from a “human-neutral” standard. Human neutral meaning white, cisgender, heterosexual, Christian, able-bodied, middle to upper class. Anything different than this is a lesser version of a “normal person” or neutral human.

When speaking across the country about understanding privilege and oppression we have participants do exercises to examine their privileged and marginalized identities. For some, especially young crowds who have heard of these topics before, the exercise is engaging and thought-provoking. But for some, especially older adults with less exposure, the exercise leaves them feeling confused. Their response to even

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