Consent is important to understand for males. Teaching boys and reteaching men that this needs to be the first step in any dating narrative will help shift the culture. Teaching them and opening up conversations regarding feelings after any sort of rejection needs to be common place. Its dating, its bound to happen at some point.
Meet The Conversation Head On
Meet the conversation head on before it happens and prepare them to be able to talk about it, to process it without violence. Help them understand they need to create a space that allows for any potential date to decline, to say not now, not never. Allow for the space for them to accept rejection as part of the human experience. No matter how painful it appears to be, it cannot be met with the destruction that current musicality promotes.
Viewing anything as taboo creates an environment surrounding it that fosters stagnation.
Consent Needs to be the New Conversation
We spend a decent amount of time in the country on sexual education. Not half as much as some countries, still leaving labeling us as a progressive society that continues to look at sex the way our grandparents did, still viewing sex as taboo. Viewing anything as taboo creates an environment surrounding it that fosters stagnation. Consent needs to be the new conversation in sexual education.
Consent Opens Up A Conversation
Teaching kids about reproductive organs and the process of reproduction as well as basic sexual health is important. And on that same level, basic principles of consent and what that means for everyone involved is just as important in breaking the cycle of male entitlement to sex.
Consent, at its core, opens up a conversation where people can have the conversations leading to a healthy experience. The push to teach consent is in no means a push to tell kids they should be having sex no more than sexual education is telling them they should be. Its setting up a system of checks and balances for when they do. It is creating an expectation to when they are of age and do understand what a healthy relationship is, the conversation is expected, its commonplace. It replaces the expectation of Destructive Masculinity.
