Back in February 2021, Contos, 25, famously posted an Instagram story asking followers if they, or someone they were close to, had been sexually assaulted during their school years. A day later, she had 200 confirmations. She would create Teach Us Consent, a movement and platform on which over 6,600 people would share their testimonies. She would build on decades-long histories of advocacy to champion holistic consent education in Australia.
In May, Teach Us Consent was awarded $3.5m by the Albanese government for projects engaging young people on consent issues.
Contos, in the country’s imagination, is linked inextricably with the debate on consent and sexual education. But Consent Laid Bare isn’t entirely the treatise on the importance of consent I was expecting. It spans everything from taboos around female sexuality and the rise of image-based abuse to survival responses.
Contos doesn’t believe that consent can be separated from rape culture. This second-wave idea, which gained traction in the 1960s and 70s, argues that we live in a world in which women are socialised to please men who are, in turn, raised to feel entitled to their bodies. Women are conditioned to fear sexual violence from strangers, rapists who are “angry” or “sadistic”, as Contos writes in her first chapter.
But Contos is focused, she says, on what she describes as the “entitled opportunist rapist”, the type of boy she grew up with; the type otherwise likely to be described as a “good guy”, even as he is actively rewarded by society for seeking his own gratification.
The entitled opportunist, Contos writes, is “unlikely to reoffend if they are held accountable for their actions or taught explicitly what consent is”.
In Consent Laid Bare, Contos, who isn’t against the visual representation of sex, writes that “porn is shaping the brains and tastes of generations who were born into a world where it is easily accessible”.
In Consent Laid Bare, she references Dworkin’s seminal 1971 work Intercourse and asks: “Are teens (and women for that matter) ever truly equipped with the full capabilities to consent when the structural conditions of our society place the satisfaction of men as paramount?”