Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Virtual Events
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    An AI-Driven Work Force
    University Transformation
Sign In
The Conversation-Logo 240

The Conversation

Opinion and ideas.

‘Yes Means Yes’ Is a Bad Coupling of Feminism and the State

By Laurie Essig September 29, 2014

California’s enacting on Sunday of the “yes means yes” law is a victory for some campus feminist activists but an ill-conceived detour for feminism.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

California’s enacting on Sunday of the “yes means yes” law is a victory for some campus feminist activists but an ill-conceived detour for feminism.

The new law guiding how colleges must handle accusations of sexual assault will require “an affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.” In other words, if a person is not actively agreeing to a sexual exchange and doing so throughout the exchange, it is not consensual. More important, the onus is no longer on the victim of sexual assault since she or he no longer has to have said “no.”

According to many young activists, that switch is a huge symbolic victory because it moves the law from victim blaming and gives more power to colleges and universities to pursue disciplinary processes. It also sets a clear standard for what constitutes sexual assault.

ADVERTISEMENT

In an op-ed in The New York Times, the feminist sociologist Michael Kimmel and the feminist icon Gloria Steinem suggest that the new law might even make sex better because “‘yes’ is perhaps the most erotic word in the English language.”

So why is the law, the rhetoric, such a turnoff for me?

It’s not that I don’t support the activists’ efforts against sexual assault on campuses, including at the college where I teach. That work is truly changing the campus climate. And consent is absolutely a good and necessary thing. But “yes” has some decidedly unsexy cultural and legal complications because ostensible consent is not the only thing we must consider when trying to untangle the hairball of misogyny, gender inequality, alcohol, race, and class that make up the rape culture on campuses.

The obsession with consent has, in fact, seduced feminism into getting into bed with the state. And the thought that cops and disciplinary panels will make the world of intimate relations more just is an outlandish sexual fantasy.

This is not the first time some feminist activists have decided to cozy up to a decidedly unfeminist state to protect them from sexual abuse. The feminist legal scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon pointed out the limits of the legal system in her canonical Toward a Feminist Theory of the State but then worked with Ronald Reagan’s conservative attorney general Edwin Meese III to try to criminalize pornography.

ADVERTISEMENT

Like the antiporn laws, “yes means yes” is a bad romance between feminism and the state for two reasons: pleasure and danger. The statute equates good sex with a legalistic definition of consent rather than with the pleasures had by the parties involved. It also expands notions of criminality at a time when the criminal-justice system is regularly committing horrific acts of race- and class-biased violence.

“Yes means yes” is a great notion with which to start a sex-ed class. Asking your partner if she or he want this or that, harder or softer, slower or faster is a fine way of producing more pleasure for all parties involved. But that doesn’t make the concept good law.

That’s because the legal standards we have inherited is based on liberal philosophical notions of “consent.” The consenter—usually imagined as a rugged individual, a propertied white male—agrees to enter into a contract with the state, an employer, or a lover. But feminism has long pointed to the fact that our lives and our desires are produced in conditions of extreme inequality—economic, sexual, racial, and educational. That inequality gets written into our relationships, including our sexual ones, too often as violence, but perhaps just as often as pleasure. Then, pleasure is a concept too often ignored in the legalistic framing of sexual exchange.

In other words, what happens when people get pleasure from not saying yes? Can they consent to nonconsent? A person who wishes to be ravished by her or his lover without any affirmative consent falls into the irrationality that often is sexual desire, an irrationality that has less to do with contract law and more to do with how power can be eroticized. Historically when people have engaged in sexual acts outside the paradigm of contractual relations, we have, as a society, marked them as irrational and incapable of consent.

As Gayle S. Rubin pointed out in her canonical 1984 essay “Thinking Sex,” we “should judge sexual acts by the way partners treat one another, the level of mutual consideration, the presence or absence of coercion, and the quantity and quality of the pleasures they provide. Whether sex acts are gay or straight, coupled or in groups, naked or in underwear, commercial or free, with or without video, should not be ethical concerns.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Perhaps even more dangerous is expanding the definition of sexual culpability. The “yes means yes” campaign seems shockingly naïve about how law is actually enacted. Increasing the number of sexual acts that are forbidden might seem like a good idea if laws were universally imposed, but they are not. Certain populations will be marked as guilty, and that has everything to do with race and class and little to do with justice.

The law may target the incredibly entitled young men who are most likely to commit sexual assaults on campuses. Or it might target the men who seem as if they must be guilty, the ones who wear hoodies or whose parents cannot offer huge donations to their colleges. The law might target only those who have committed sexual assault, but after Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and the Central Park Five, etc., it is difficult to imagine this happy ending.

As Michelle Alexander points out in The New Jim Crow, “the nature of the criminal-justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.”

“Yes means yes” expands the concept of criminality in a country where race and class hierarchies are kept in place through the carceral state. It is not like the Equal Rights Amendment or equal-pay laws or other feminist legislation. Those do not increase the state’s power to mark certain bodies as criminal. They just demand equal rights.

“Yes means yes” is another case of politics making strange bedfellows. Feminists work hard to show that the state is both racist and sexist, and yet some feminists imagine that very same state making the world a safer place for them. That’s like dating the wrong partner and wistfully hoping, against all evidence, that he or she will change.

ADVERTISEMENT

Laurie Essig is an associate professor of sociology and gender studies at Middlebury College. She is the author of American Plastic: Boob Jobs, Credit Cards, and Our Quest for Perfection (Beacon Press, 2010).

Update on 9/30/14: This post was changed to clarify that the law will affect on-campus disciplinary actions.



A student had a blue ribbon painted on her face to raise awareness of sexual assault.

Patrick Fallon, Bloomberg via Getty Images

Defining Sexual Consent

  • California Shifts to ‘Yes Means Yes’ Standard for College Sex
  • How ‘Yes Means Yes’ Already Works on One Campus
  • What California’s New Sexual-Consent Law Means for Its Colleges
  • In Context: A Reader’s Guide to Campus Sexual Assault

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

Mangan-Censorship-0610.jpg
Academic Freedom
‘A Banner Year for Censorship’: More States Are Restricting Classroom Discussions on Race and Gender
On the day of his retirement party, Bob Morse poses for a portrait in the Washington, D.C., offices of U.S. News and World Report in June 2025. Morse led the magazine's influential and controversial college rankings efforts since its inception in 1988. Michael Theis, The Chronicle.
List Legacy
‘U.S. News’ Rankings Guru, Soon to Retire, Reflects on the Role He’s Played in Higher Ed
Black and white photo of the Morrill Hall building on the University of Minnesota campus with red covering one side.
Finance & operations
U. of Minnesota Tries to Soften the Blow of Tuition Hikes, Budget Cuts With Faculty Benefits
Photo illustration showing a figurine of a football player with a large price tag on it.
Athletics
Loans, Fees, and TV Money: Where Colleges Are Finding the Funds to Pay Athletes

From The Review

A stack of coins falling over. Motion blur. Falling economy concept. Isolated on white.
The Review | Opinion
Will We Get a More Moderate Endowment Tax?
By Phillip Levine
Photo illustration of a classical column built of paper, with colored wires overtaking it like vines of ivy
The Review | Essay
The Latest Awful EdTech Buzzword: “Learnings”
By Kit Nicholls
William F. Buckley, Jr.
The Review | Interview
William F. Buckley Jr. and the Origins of the Battle Against ‘Woke’
By Evan Goldstein

Upcoming Events

Plain_Acuity_DurableSkills_VF.png
Why Employers Value ‘Durable’ Skills
Warwick_Leadership_Javi.png
University Transformation: A Global Leadership Perspective
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin