content note for sexual violence.
Before going on the date, before going to his place, before getting onto his bed, before making out, in all the spaces and gaps I told him, explicitly and clearly, “I don’t do penetrative sex”. He seemed understanding and respectful of my boundaries. Only to remove my pants and make his way down south. When I asked him what he was doing he said “Oh, I thought everything else was fine”. For hours, he begged, pleaded, and passive aggressively noted that things would be “nice” if I simply removed my clothes. He made puppy faces, spoke tenderly and acted caring. Despite the disgust on my face, my obvious discomfort, my big fat ‘NO’, I was pressured into undressing.
He asked for consent. I gave it. But did I, really?
When liberal/queer men rape, they do not always or only rely on force, undue influence or physical violence; their tools are subtle, ‘consent-coded’. Yet these tools still strip dignity and make sex transactional. Here we attempt to translate the language of manipulation and bargain in consent. These rape-tools, often invisible to the men that wield them, visit deep emotional violence, particularly on people navigating gender dysphoria. We write to visibilise this violence, and position these tools not as aberrations, but as enshrined in patriarchy.
Why focus on Liberal and Queer men?
Liberal men seem safe. They are, after all, not the usual gym-fintech bros. They read books, watch ‘important’ movies, speak of decolonisation and demilitarisation, come to pride parades, and sometimes, you meet an almost-queer liberal feminist with painted nails. One may ask why focus on liberal men. This performance of femininity and progressiveness cloaks patriarchal and homophobic behavior, disorienting their partners. And that is precisely what makes them so dangerous, potentially more so than the overtly problematic cis-hetero man: they use feminist and queer tools to manipulate and negotiate consent. Under their cloak of ‘political correctness’, they also benefit from patriarchal conceptions of consent.
Queer men may believe that they are not patriarchal, but they benefit from patriarchy, are enabled by it, and actively reproduce it. They are socially approved to evade accountability by simply being a man. They may be queer but that does not strip them of the privilege of being treated like a man – unconditional endorsement by society to simply be. There is no land and no person, untouched by patriarchy’s downpour. Patriarchy can not and must not be questioned by or with feminine aesthetics. Active unconditioning – outside, and inside the bedroom – is required.
Will vs. Consent
Transactionalism is often at the heart of the consent discourse. This draws a distinction between “will” and “consent”. Legally, ‘will’ is understood as a person’s mental faculty or desire to commit an act, while ‘consent’ is an affirmative agreement to act. In practice, this distinction is virtually non-existent. For example, a person’s initial ‘will’ to resist may be eclipsed by the fact that they eventually succumb and ‘consent,’ but this consent has been extracted from them. This emphasizes transactionalism and liberal men make ample attempts to bargain or manipulate consent.
Bargaining for consent may happen in the most coquettish and seemingly respectful manner, but is this real consent? We say no because such a consent originates with disrespect of a person’s initial ‘will’ to not to participate in an act. Sexual interactions are shaped by preferences, and those preferences vary endlessly. The baseline assumption should be simple: nothing happens without mutual consent. A patriarchal notion of consent operates in binary- ‘yes’ or ‘no’. In such a setup, it is entirely immaterial if the ‘yes’ initially was a ‘no’, as long as you are able to manipulate it into a ‘yes’. We problematise this set up against liberal/queer men, because even they operate on its devices.
Hegemony of Penetrative Sex
Men’s construction of sex, shaped by patriarchal notions of conquest, extraction and domination, pedestalises penetrative sex. This framework often makes us feel inferior, as though we are offering something less pleasurable to our partners. That humiliation is not ours: it is a fabrication of patriarchy. And the same patriarchal setups seep into queer relationships. Nothing is new, it is the same script with different characters.
Often, one partner may not want penetrative sex. Yet, in our experience, liberal and queer men respond to such boundaries by bargaining outside or inside the bedroom. The latter is far more harmful, because being in bed already places one in a vulnerable position. That vulnerability intensifies when expectations are imposed against one’s will. And paradoxically, vulnerability is a brute; it strongarms you into silence, incapacitates you from expressing your will plainly. One of us, when asked to perform oral sex as if it were expected, became anxious and flustered, eventually submitting despite not wanting to. A moment’s hesitation typically triggers coaxing. The violence here is silent. The act is ‘consent-coded’ but leaves one person feeling like they’ve been reduced to an object of pleasure. Milena Popova talks about how womxn’s refusals are often framed as “masculine” and punished for not aligning with feminine docility. Direct refusals may be ignored entirely, with men proceeding regardless. What good is consent if its devices do not operationalise?
The perils of this bargained consent are both emotional and physical. We have been in situations where our partners have asked us to have penetrative sex without a condom. In one instance, alcohol was suggested as a way to “loosen up” to have penetrative sex.
All of us (including men) are allowed to make requests of our partner, but when the response is hesitation or no, we have a positive obligation to discard that request, and not impose it on our partner. Yet, often men will use this opportunity to start making a case: “I’ll be gentle” or “It will not be painful.” These pleas and games are patently manipulative. And men may want to call it consensual when their partner submits to continuous badgering, but it is not. This is silent warfare. We are convinced that men understand non-verbal discomfort. A verbal “yes” becomes a means to an end (penetration). Ambiguity or the absence of a yes allows them to shift the work of negotiating consent onto the partner.
The violence of these coquettish consent-coded tools is that they leave victims disoriented: bodily autonomy annihilated, but ‘consent’ technically given. Manipulation and violation of consent is cloaked so skillfully, that the victim is left in constant uncertainty. Consent is often thought of as a zero-sum game: either it is respected, or it is not, and one party always ‘loses’. But what about the soft-spoken, liberal man who knows the language of consent, and then weaponizes it? For long drawn hours, days and weeks we are left with thoughts of whom to blame for this assault , and wonder if it is even blame-worthy. How do we name the manipulation and bargaining that corrodes our agency? How do we process the confusion and self-doubt that follows? Especially when penetrative sex is so hegemonic that it infiltrates even queer intimacy? Victim-shaming becomes internalized. Self-blame festers.
Whenever a man is told “no”, his curiosity often shifts to the partner’s sexual history or past trauma. As though our consent or refusal is invalid on its own, and we must provide a justification. In these scenarios, consent has been wrangled and reduced to a box-ticking exercise. Violation of consent cannot be separated from gendered power relations that position men, even queer men, as having more knowledge and experience of penetrative sex which they can teach their partners. Partners, especially womxn, in this dynamic are positioned as passive recipients meant to be ‘convinced’, worn down or pressured into compliance. Having sex is easier than getting raped. For people with gender dysphoria or for asexual individuals, the imposition of patriarchal sexual roles compounds existing tensions with their bodies. This is exploitation cloaked as intimacy. Patriarchal-heterosexual roles and preferences are imposed on them, leaving them pressured to feel and perform beyond what their bodies and identities allow.
Rights vs Privilege
In legal discourse, scholars often debate whether a benefit is a right or a privilege. To a layperson, the two may sound synonymous, but there is a crucial distinction. A right carries a corresponding duty, whereas a privilege exempts a person from such duty or liability. In fact, Hohfeld defined privilege as the jural opposite of a duty. Through frameworks such as the right to privacy, bodily autonomy, partner choice, and reproductive and sexual healthcare, womxn are conditioned to see their sexual autonomy as a right. But in cis-men’s vocabulary, sex is treated as a privilege. They face few repercussions, if any, and move through the world seeking sex as if its consequences are someone else’s problem. Their erections are framed as the partner’s responsibility: something to be managed, soothed, or relieved. Cis-men refuse to treat their erections as their own problem. Instead, they cast themselves as slaves to biology and impose the burden onto their partners. This mindset sustains a colonising rape culture of biopolitics, where invading another’s body is acceptable so long as it is done on the invader’s terms. The bare minimum of consent may be observed, but the priority is always extracting a sexual act from the interaction.
While one of us was on a date, it was clearly stated they would not engage in sexual activity simply because they were going home with the date. The man dismissed this as playful shyness and blamed the author for “leaving him with a boner.” He insisted the author should “do something about it” before leaving. The author responded with anger and assertiveness, while the man remained soft-spoken, repeating : “You get angry so quickly. I feel threatened.”. When the author later described this as attempted rape, a friend dismissed the language as too harsh. The language of consent is so shallow that non-consensual acts are often rendered invisible. Deviations from consent are not recognised as violations in their own right; instead, the violence is minimised. The male view of sex erases lived realities and sexual desires of queer and trans womxn. The authors have repeatedly encountered queer men who insist on penetrative sex as the ultimate form of sexual engagement.
Translating Sex as Pleasure
If sex were truly an equal arrangement, would it allow us to write our own definitions? Does sex have space to allow us pleasure without pressure, shame, or a prerogative? Is it a privilege-based model or something more than that? A prerogative model leaves no space for the partner’s pleasure or autonomy, because privileges carry no corresponding duties.
We want to impress upon our reader to think on what pleasure does or should look like. Can sex ever be pleasure? Can it be timeouts in between makeouts? Can it be touch and tickles? Does sex always translate to penetration, in all and any forms of relationships? What if we seek pleasure and desire only through a thirsty naughty glance?
What if we stop giving disclaimers of our homosexuality? What if we stop demanding heterosexuality – more so in sex? Can sex be imagined without dehumanising the other and exhausting their autonomy? What does it mean then to translate sex into pleasure? How do we look at our partners’ bodies beyond being the objects to fulfil our sexual libidos?
Consent must be understood as a continuum. It is an ongoing conversation with sighs, moans, and laughter in between; it is not a punctuation mark that ends the moment someone is naked or finished in five seconds.
We need a radical redefinition of sex, and have it center the desires of trans, queer, and sapphic people. Too often, their desires are erased or subordinated to men’s. Our imagination of this shift dislocates men’s view of sex and bases itself on love, care, respect and not body as vessels of sex.
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Just as in that first encounter where our refusal was translated into something it was not, these patterns repeat in countless subtle ways. Naming them here is how we reclaim the clarity that patriarchy tries to deny us.
Let us be clear: we are not victims, and we are not powerless.
We are angry, and we embody resistance.
