So, what is consent?

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Women’s Month gives us an opportunity to consider how we wish to be treated by society. No matter our sexual orientation or gender identity, women deserve respect.

And attaining this respect, as well as affording others this respect, begins with consent.

Dr. Rica Cruz, a sex and relationships therapist, psychologist, and the founder of sexual wellness platform Unprude, has a simple analogy for consent. If you want to drink somebody else’s water, you have to ask for their permission before doing so. You cannot just take what is not yours. 

Bawal Ang Bastos

In sexual contexts, which is where consent is often discussed, she explains that consent is “an explicit agreement to engage in any kind of sexual behavior that includes touching, kissing, with another person or with a group of people. The keyword there is explicit.”

And consent is important because: “Ayaw mong maging bastos,” Cruz says. 

(“You do not want to be rude.”)

“You have to learn how to respect that each person, each individual occupies space. And it’s not just literal space, right? There’s emotional, mental, spiritual space that you need to acknowledge. And no other person can get into that space without this person’s consent," Cruz says.

Definitions are easy, but for a society that shies away from such topics, execution can be tricky. 

“Asking for that yes doesn’t have to be as awkward as, ‘Oh, can I kiss you now?’" Cruz began.

She says it can take the form of a long conversation. “So when we say long, ongoing conversation, it doesn’t have to be [when] you are ready to engage in anything. It can just be talking about values, talking about desires, talking about how you feel about these things, so you would have an understanding of where the person is [at].”

Consent, she adds, is “only valid in the here and now.”

This means it can be “withdrawn any time,” and the people involved can “pause” their activity and “establish clarity” with each other before they continue, or even decide to stop. 

But while consent is only valid in the actual here and now, conversations about it can and should start at a young age.

Cruz explains children as young as four years old can be taught consent in that it spans bodily autonomy. It means their bodies are theirs and they can refuse certain touches; it includes which touches are safe and unsafe; and it covers basic body parts, among other topics.

Cruz notes it is around this age that children get molested, hence the importance of talking with their children about sexuality, consent, sex, and the like.

Sex education is more than teaching the learner about the act. In this context, says Cruz, it’s about the relationship the parent builds with their child, and how that relationship teaches them to respect themselves, respect others, and share that respect with the world. 

'No means no'

Interestingly, laws that are related to acts that violate one’s consent do not actually define what consent is.

What they do is articulate the State’s values. For example, the Safe Spaces Act says that it is the State’s policy to “value the dignity of every human person,” and that it recognizes that “both men and women must have equality, security, and safety not only in private, but also on the streets, public spaces, online, workplaces, and educational and training institutions.” 

The Anti-Sexual Harassment Act of 1995 echoes this, saying the State “shall value the dignity of every individual, ...guarantee full respect for human rights, and uphold the dignity of workers.”

These laws also tell us when consent does not occur. For example, the Anti-Rape Law of 1997 says that rape is committed during the following circumstances: “through force, threat, or intimidation; when the offended party is deprived of reason or otherwise unconscious; by means of fraudulent machination or grave abuse of authority; and when the offended party is under twelve years of age or is demented.” (Note that former President Rodrigo Duterte enacted a law raising the age of sexual consent from 12 to 16 years old in 2022.) 

But in a now-viral exchange with Senator Robin Padilla last year, family lawyer and women’s rights advocate Lorna Kapunan put it simply during a Senate committee hearing on sexual harassment in the media industry.

A resource person at that time, Kapunan famously said “‘Yung ‘no means no’ applies to both genders. So kapag sinabi ng husband na ‘no,’ hindi siya pwedeng i-force ng asawa.”

Her statement was in response to Padilla, who said some women only say “no” because they want to be wooed, and to his question as to whether men have the right to say “no” as well. 

(“‘No means no’ applies to both genders. So if the husband says ‘no’, he cannot be forced by the wife.”)

To his statement that men had certain urges that needed to be satisfied, and that wives are there to serve their husbands, Kapunan advised counseling.

She added, “That’s why it’s important, ‘yung issue ng mutual respect. If your spouse refuses, whether valid o hindi, respetuhin natin ‘yung decision ng wife or ‘yung husband in that case…. Hindi po obligasyon ng isang wife, sabi niyo po, is to serve the husband.”

(“That’s why the issue of mutual respect is important. If your spouse refuses, whether valid or not, we have to respect the decision of the wife, or the husband in that case…. It is not the obligation of a wife, as you said, to serve the husband.”)

She also pointed out that the Family Code had been amended to remove the “obligation of obedience.” No longer did it state that the wife shall obey the husband; now it states that “the husband and wife are obliged to mutually respect each other.”

Finding the right words

But how do you find words to talk about consent? Romance author and publisher Mina V. Esguerra is in the business of precisely that. 

“We used to joke about how awkward it was to mention the condom,” recalls Esguerra, who founded Romance Class, a writing community for Filipino authors of romance.

“What euphemisms do you use? When do they buy it? [What I tell] new authors is, yes, if this is not part of your regular conversation, then it will feel unnatural and that's okay."

It's fine to cringe, she says, because "eventually, as you start getting comfortable, as I started getting comfortable writing it, it became easier."

Having been writing and publishing romances for more than 15 years now, Esguerra can attest to the “cringe” having lessened over time. She has now found new ways to write scenes where consent is sought and given.

“I just wrote a scene where the female main character says on the first date, ‘Hey, if I like you, I might ask you to have sex with me. Because sometimes I do that on the first date’.... Usually [my practice is, I write] characters who know each other already, and then they get to the part where they decide to be intimate, and then they talk. But this one, they were practically strangers. So this was new and it was fun,” Esguerra says. (She is committed to releasing the book this scene will be in this year.)

For her, writing these scenes is ultimately about providing authors and readers the words to use in real life. 

“It feels awkward to write, ‘I want this’ or ‘I want you to do this’ but I think as authors, as readers, we will get comfortable with enough reading and with enough writing [and] actually seeing the words and hearing the words. And eventually [we will be] comfortable saying the words ourselves,” she says. 

Esguerra also hopes that we also become comfortable with asking for something, then getting rejected.

“That's probably why there’s a lot of non-asking because we actually don’t want to hear the rejection. We also are not equipped to reject, to say no with nuance. And that’s also something we’re learning to write. And hopefully in the writing it and getting better at writing it, we provide conversation models,” Esguerra says.

“I don't think we write about the saying ‘no’ very well yet. So it's always, the no comes with hurt or rejection or feelings of being abandoned. And I think maybe that’s an area we can practice on. If we’re to normalize the asking, we should also provide a way for people to answer. Either way that makes everybody feel okay,” she adds.

Pandora’s Box

Writing scenes where consent is made explicit was not always a part of the Romance Class curriculum. When they had the first class in 2013, 16 people out of the 100 participants completed a manuscript, and twelve of them self-published their books afterwards. All of these books had no sex scenes. 

Because they did not want this lack of sex to define the romance genre for Filipino authors, in the next class run, Esguerra made it mandatory for the authors to write a sex scene. She too had never written a sex scene before. 

The requirement revealed something troubling: Some of the authors could only write a sex scene where the main character, usually female, had been intoxicated or compromised in some way beforehand. 

“And I saw the difficulty of the author in trying to fix it. There suddenly was no scene. The entire scene was contingent on her main characters being drunk and finding themselves having sex,” Esguerra recounts.

“So that stayed with me. Not just that we had identified it and had a discussion about it, but I talked to an actual adult woman who could not think of another scenario to replace it with if for some reason they could not be drunk.”

This was not the last time a Romance Class author would encounter the same problem. 

“So I was like, ‘Okay, let’s unpack this’,” Esguerra says. “And I realized that it was kind of [like] opening a box and some terrible stuff came out."

As an editor, she tries to give feedback in a way that makes it clear that it is a note on the story, and not her making a judgement of the author. 

“But I do see where there’s overlap because a lot of the writers who write romance are probably drawing from personal experience,” Esguerra says. “But again, when we discuss things, I want to be able to talk about the character. And then if the author starts thinking about people they know or their own lives based on some very deliberate editorial guidelines, which is that consent must be part of the entire scene, then that’s interesting and maybe it’s useful in many ways, not just in writing romance.” 

Learning as you go

She herself has released new editions of her old books after learning about things like asserting oneself, setting boundaries, and navigating consent. 

While she used to think that a single romance novel shouldn’t have the burden of teaching a young reader everything about love, relationships, and sex, she has tweaked her stance since. 

“Author Jennifer Hallock (of the Sugar Sun series) calls it ‘the aggregate’. Our contribution as authors is maybe one book, two books. And that might be a drop, but in the aggregate when now it’s accumulated in a giant pool that we’re all swimming in, then the fact that you didn’t speak up about this particular topic in your book adds to the general sentiment that this is normal.... And I only really thought of it when I accepted that, okay, maybe I have to bear some responsibility in saying something about this, even if no one else notices,” Esguerra says. 

“Because someone actually will.” — LA, GMA Integrated News