The Gisele Pellicot case, where villagers assaulted an older woman claiming her husband's permission, shows why consent must mean explicit yes. Without clear permission, the answer is no. Schools need to teach children what consent actually is before pornography and rape fantasies teach them something else.
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I want to talk about the Gisele Pellicot case. I know that lots of people have spoken about it and been completely horrified about what happened to this older woman, this grandmother, this woman who is, you know, almost a decade older than me, who was raped over many, many, many years by the people living in her village who seemingly thought because her husband said it was okay that it was fine for them to have sex with this woman who was drugged asleep and completely unaware of what was happening. I mean, there's a lot that I can say about that, but the bottom line is that really what it's about is consent and what consent actually means in practice. Consent in practice means that when somebody says no, it means no. It means if somebody hasn't given you explicit permission for you to have sex with them, then you can assume that that is also a no. It also means that if somebody else tells you that it's okay for you to have sex with this person who also hasn't given their consent, that is also a no. The problem in society is that, of course, we don't teach people about consent. We kind of just think it's implicit. And pornography showing pseudo rapes and the fact that we know that so many women do have rape fantasies might suggest that sometimes no means yes, or sometimes when women say, "Oh no, I don't really want it," that that also means yes. But unless you hear yes, then assume no. I think that's really the bottom line with this. And for me, it's all about teaching people around consent because we don't teach it in school to men or women. Sometimes women struggle to assert themselves and to say, "Actually, I'm not feeling it. I don't want it," or just simply, "No." They feel like maybe they're gonna hurt somebody's feelings, or they just don't have the confidence and the courage to be able to say no. And unless we teach young men and women from quite an early age, because we know that children now as young as 8 are getting access to pornography, which will show them pseudo-rape, so that might lead them to think that that's something that's acceptable to women. Unless we teach them about consent, how are people expected to know about it? And that's really, for me, what this is all about is start early when you're teaching young people about sex. Start when, you know, 8, 10 years old. Start teaching them what consent looks like and what a healthy sexual relation ship looks like. Otherwise, how are they expected to know?
