SOON WE WILL SEE PEOPLE ARGUING THAT CONSENT AND RAPE ARE SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED: The Politics of Bad Sex: A new book argues that current standards of affirmative consent place too much emphasis on knowing what we want.

Some schools have trained students, as part of orientation, to seek and settle for nothing less than “enthusiastic” agreement to sex. Even under an affirmative-consent regime’s valorization of clarity, “yes” doesn’t always mean “yes.”

The jury is still out on whether our experiment with affirmative consent will reduce rape, prove useful for distinguishing sex from sexual assault, or lead to less experience of sexual violation. But what may well emerge is a recognition that the clearest practices of “yes” and “no” do little to untangle a deep difficulty that makes consent seem promising yet wide of the mark: the altogether human experience of not knowing in the first place what is wanted or unwanted, desired or undesired.

Affirmative consent — much more a requirement that it be “enthusiastic” — is a requirement crafted to serve the needs of university bureaucrats, not actual humans. Those 1990s rape counselors were right to laugh at it.