Chanel Contos is an award-winning activist who founded Teach for Consent, a campaign that mandated consent education in Australia and criminalized stealthing in multiple states. In 2022, the BBC named her as one of 100 Inspiring and Influential women worldwide. Her work has been covered by the BBC, New York Times, France24, and many other outlets.
What’s the big idea?
Modern cultural trends enable sexual abuse. Through education about the ecosystems that set the stage for rape and understanding how victims survive and process a perpetration, we can start to change societal conditions in a way that prevents and protects against these violations. To begin, it is critical that men and women learn about consent, across all contexts.
Below, Chanel shares five key insights from her new book, Consent Laid Bare: Sex, Entitlement, and the Distortion of Desire. Listen to the audio version—read by Chanel herself—below, or in the Next Big Idea App.
1. The foundations of prevention.
Forensic psychiatry distinguishes between types of rapists. These are known in the literature as sadistic rapists, compensatory rapists, angry rapists, and opportunistic rapists. Instead of opportunistic, I use the term entitled opportunist, because I believe that acknowledging entitlement is paramount to understanding the motivation of this rapist.
Entitled opportunist rapists have high social competence, and their offences are predatory acts that are unplanned and show poor impulse control. Little anger is exhibited and minimal violence, which means their method of rape is usually sexual coercion (which is tricking, pressuring, or forcing someone in a non-physical way to perform a sexual act), or using drugs or alcohol to make it so the victim is “easier”; that is, they cannot consent or they are not able to withdraw consent.
Their motivating factor does not come from a place of malice or sadism, but the prioritization of their own immediate sexual gratification. This type of rapist is often confident, powerful, and opportunistic in other parts of their life—all socially admired values in men. They may very well be perceived as a “nice” person, and they are often not aware that they have sexually assaulted someone until they learn about consent (if they ever do). From most of the testimonies I have read and people I have spoken to, it seems to be overwhelmingly common that an entitled opportunist will walk away from an assault not understanding the weight of their actions. Most of the book is about this type of rapist, as they make up the majority of perpetrations, and are also the easiest to prevent.
2. Fawning as a last resort to achieve safety.
Fight, flight, or freeze are natural stress responses to scary situations that most people are familiar with. Less understood is a fourth reaction: the concept of fawning.
Until 1995, research on stress responses was primarily conducted on males, with females comprising only 17 percent of participants. At the turn of the millennium, researchers started suggesting that this male-based research may have resulted in a unique female stress response being overlooked. Fawning is a strategy that we unconsciously learn for getting ourselves out of trouble or a dangerous situation. It is when a person acts overly nice to survive an ordeal. Fawning has received increasing attention from psychologists and psychiatrists as people try to make sense of incidents of sexual assault and behaviors in the aftermath. In the cases against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, photos of his accusers “smiling” and “flirting” or working with him after the alleged assaults were used to position them as willing partners.
“Fawning is a strategy that we unconsciously learn for getting ourselves out of trouble or a dangerous situation.”
Forensic psychiatrist Carole Lieberman defines fawning as “a response where the victim tries to get out of danger by taking on a persona that tries to please the perpetrator.” In the context of entitled opportunists, this could look like fake laughing, fake smiling, letting your rapist drop you home, pretending to lie there asleep next to them, or getting breakfast with them the morning after an assault—before returning to safety. In the testimonies I received, the theme of fawning was often described (without the actual word being used), accompanied by comments about confusion, self-blame, and regret for their own actions.
This trauma response is triggered when fight or flight are not options to achieve safety. It is common in women facing heterosexual situations of assault because, speaking in general terms, a man will likely be stronger and faster, so trying to physically fight or outrun him is not an option.
3. Pornography shapes society.
Pornography is the leading form of sex education globally, and I really don’t like that. I think it’s indoctrinating a generation in a way we can’t fully comprehend yet. It is difficult to truly understand the societal effects of pornography because researchers and scientists have failed to find a control group of men who have never watched it. One way that we can begin to comprehend it, however, is by reflecting on the trend of “choking” or strangulation during sex.
Studies in the U.S. have found that engaging in choking during sex is much more common in younger adults than older adults. Something that used to exist on the fringe of BDSM culture has made its way into the mainstream through violent pornography. Now, 58 percent of women college students have been choked during sex. Studies show that the more pornography someone watches, the less likely they are to think that consent is required to strangle someone during sex.
I wrote Consent Laid Bare to increase people’s capabilities to consent. This includes trying to deduce where the source of desire comes from. How much has pornography impacted sexual behavior? How much has the validation that comes from satisfying a man shaped how women act? How much do societal expectations of being a man shape how men act and what they value?
4. Online interactions require consent, too.
Disturbingly, 14 percent of children aged 9 through 12 and 19 percent of children aged 13 through 17 have shared their own self-generated child sexual abuse material (SG-CSAM). A 2022 study found that 86 percent of students aged 14 through 18 had received sexual messages or images, and 71 percent had sent them.
“Consent and sex in the online world must be added to the education we give our young people to keep them safe.”
Of further concern, researchers at University College London found that three-quarters of girls aged 12 through 18 who participated in focus groups said they had received images of male genitals unprompted, noting that close to half of the harassment had come from what appeared to be adult men.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but for the sake of brevity, I will highlight that consent and sex in the online world must be added to the education we give our young people to keep them safe.
5. Culture change can reduce sexual violence.
Sexual violence is preventable. Sexual assault occurs when entitlement outweighs empathy. The entitlement to another’s body only needs to outweigh someone’s empathy toward that person by a little bit. Entitled opportunists are able to feel empathy; they are just generally socialized to have little of it for women. This means that cultural change can prevent the vast majority of sexual violence.
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