Sexual consent can be conceptualized as an internal willingness to engage in sexual behavior. To communicate this internal feeling, people use and interpret cues—both active and passive. We proposed and tested a model for the potential mechanisms underlying women’s sexual consent, which predicted associations between women’s internal feelings of consent and the consent cues communicated and interpreted in a given sexual encounter. Because research on sexual consent has consistently urged researchers to collect data from samples that are not primarily college-aged and White, we conducted a pilot systematic review of peer-reviewed sexual consent literature to confirm this need. We then used structural equation modeling to test our proposed model with data from a national sample diverse regarding age and race/ethnicity (n = 589). We found that women’s internal consent feelings are associated with their use of active consent cues—especially nonverbal cues. Because passive cues were unrelated to women’s internal consent, not resisting or not saying no should not be used to infer women’s consent.

Introduction

The peer-reviewed literature lacks consistency in defining sexual consent (Beres, 2007; Muehlenhard, Humphreys, Jozkowski, & Peterson, 2016). Informed by these conceptual and empirical reviews, a recently published study defined sexual consent as one’s voluntary, sober, and conscious willingness to engage in a particular sexual behavior with a particular person within a particular context (Willis & Jozkowski, 2019). This definition maintains that sexual consent is an internal experience—one that is distinct from sexual desire (Muehlenhard, 1995/ 1996; Peterson & Muehlenhard, 2007). To assess the variety of feelings associated with an internal conceptualization of sexual consent, one research team asked participants to write about the feelings that they associate with being willing to engage in sexual activity (Jozkowski, Sanders, Peterson, Dennis, & Reece, 2014). These researchers identified five sets of feelings related to internal consent: physical response, safety/comfort, arousal, agreement/want, and readiness. Whether somebody is willing to engage in a particular behavior with a particular person within a particular context depends on a multidimensional process of internal feelings. Because people are not intuitively privy to the feelings of others, sexual consent cannot only be conceptualized as an internal experience (Hickman & Muehlenhard, 1999; Muehlenhard, 1995/1996). Rather, sexual partners must communicate their consent (Beres, 2007, 2014; Muehlenhard et al., 2016). Active consent communication refers to anything people do that indicates their consent and is diverse in practice; it can be verbal or nonverbal and explicit or implicit. People tend to rely on nonverbal consent cues (Beres, Herold, & Maitland, 2004; Jozkowski, Sanders, et al., 2014; Muehlenhard et al., 2016).