On The Couch with Dr Joy Townsend from Learning Consent

[00:00:00] Jennifer Farinella: Hello and welcome to an episode of On The Couch, where we collaborate with experts, practitioners, authors, advocates, and influencers to explore current social themes, sex positive topics, and share stories and insights that matter. This podcast was recorded on Aboriginal country. We Acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the lands that were never ceded on which we live, work and record upon.

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While listening, we encourage you to practice good self care. Check the show notes for content details and references.

Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, enjoy this episode of On The Couch.

[00:00:45] Naomi Viret: I would like to welcome our guest On The Couch with us today, Dr. Joy Townsend. Joy is a consultant, writer, and educator, and the founder of Learning Consent, a sexual consent training platform, which has been developed to enable young people of all genders and sexualities to get better with sexual consent and discussing it. So welcome, Joy. Welcome to On The Couch with Caddyshack.

[00:01:10] Dr Joy Townsend: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

[00:01:13] Naomi Viret: Yay, we're excited to have you. So if you'd like to begin by letting us know a little bit about who you are, what is it that gets you out of bed in the morning and what is it that brings you today?

[00:01:26] Dr Joy Townsend: Sure. So the short and literal answer to what gets me out of bed in the morning is my children.

Literally, I have a two year old, an eight year old and a 12 year old. So it's often my two year old calling out from his cot saying, mummy, I'm awake. That is the reason why I get out of bed in the morning. If it's not him, it's usually my partner saying, come on, get up, Joy, get up.

So yeah, I'm a, a mother and a partner and we live on beautiful Yuin country of the Murramarang people. And yeah, I just feel so privileged to live where we do, it's saltwater country and the ocean is a huge part of why I get up in the morning as well. There's barely a day that goes by that I'm not in the ocean.

It's very healing and sustaining for me. As well as the ocean, it's food, coffee, friendship, and this work. I'm incredibly passionate about the work that I do. It's very close to my heart and it's a privilege. I totally get that it's a privilege to do work that is close to your heart and to get paid to do that work.

So yeah, that's some of the things that, that get me up in the morning.

[00:02:41] Naomi Viret: Love it. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. And for anyone that would like to know a little bit more about Joy and delve deeper into her work, Joy has lots of blogs and you definitely get a sense of who Joy is from reading those blogs. And we're so thankful for the work that you're doing in this space, Joy.

So we know from your PhD work that was titled, 'Her Sexual Self, A Narrative Investigation Of Young Women's Sexual Subjectivities.'

And I can just imagine what some of those interview participants brought to that research. And I'm just wondering as part of that, did you go into that research with consent at the forefront of your mind or was consent a topic that was raised by the participants and therefore it, kind of, has then shaped the work in the consent space, realizing how big an impact it was having on these young people's lives and what that really meant for them

[00:03:33] Dr Joy Townsend: Yeah, great question.

So um, no, I absolutely did not go into that research for my PhD with consent in mind. In fact, I started that PhD in 2013. I don't even know if the word consent would have been in my vocabulary back then, to be honest. Certainly not in the way it is now in our culture and society. Um, that's really exploded in the last few years.

And I actually went into that research project going, I really don't want to spend four years writing a PhD about sexual violence, I just very strongly felt that that wouldn't be sustainable for me. But hey, you write about women's sexuality, you're going to have to. If you're honest and you're talking to young women about their lived experience, what I found is that it's inevitable. It's going to come up sadly.

But I came to that PhD, I did an honors project, I was not academic at all as a kid. Um, and I went back to uni because I was bored at home. I had a little girl really young, as in, I was really young when I had my first child. I was bored at home looking after her, um, she was six months old and I was like, you know what, I'm going back to uni.

So I enrolled at Wollongong University in psychology first, cause they didn't offer social work. The closest thing that they did offer to social work, cause I wasn't into psychology, so then I was like, what else can I do, and they said, try sociology.

Absolutely loved it. I experienced my studies in sociology almost like as an enlightenment. Um, and so then I got the marks at the end of that undergrad to do an Honours project, and for that, I interviewed a handful of heterosexual young women asking them about pornography, mainstream pornography, and how their male partners use of mainstream pornography impacts on their relationship. Fascinating set of interviews, and loved doing that research project.

What came off the back of that research project was like, oh my gosh, women, there are some, of the women I spoke to had a really obvious sense of self when it came to their sexuality. And, you know, we talk about having a physical self and emotional self, a spiritual self. We also have a sexual self. So, I ended up being offered a scholarship to do the PhD.

And I was like, I want to research that whole thing called our sexual self and how is it specifically that women come to form a sexual self. And so that's how I came into researching in this space.

Actually, I have here, I might just read a page from the actual introduction to my PhD. It says: that porn project left me with questions about the process of young women managing their sexual selves. Questions like, if porn isn't your only sexual learning resource, what else is helping you work out your sexual self? What does that process look like? How invested are you in the process? Or is it more something that happens to you? How did you learn what is pleasurable? How did you learn to say no or to even know what you want for your sexual self?

These were all questions I was asking myself. I'd been having sex since I was 17. Some of it was really good. Some of it was really bad. I could not really articulate what was particularly pleasurable for me and what was not. I'd never had an orgasm, but I wasn't particularly bothered by this because a) I enjoyed sex a lot of the time and b) I had no idea what I was missing out on. I'd never watched porn. My parents were religious and I was brought up in that world with all its gender norms and very conservative mores about sexuality.

I had my own strong opinions about mainstream porn. I dabbled in other erotic bits and pieces, some literature. My friends and I had talked about buying vibrators, but had not yet ventured into a sex shop. I was familiar with the rules. The rules, the contradictory expectations society placed on me to be both a good feminine woman and to also be sexy and up for it, in touch with and in control of my sexuality.

And it was a fine line to walk but I was feeling pretty confident in my efforts thus far. But I wanted to learn more. How do I learn how to have an orgasm? What is right and what is wrong when it comes to consent? If I don't want to have sex, and I tell my partner that, but they persist despite my little resistances, and we end up having sex, is that non consensual sex?

And what if it is non consensual sex, but I ended up enjoying it? What do you call that? Does my vagina work properly? Who can I go to to ask if my vagina is working properly? What porn is good porn? I've had sexual experiences that were physically pleasurable, but left me feeling kind of dirty and disrespected.

Why? What about objectification? I'm a feminist, but I enjoy being objectified sometimes. Is that wrong? Am I a victim of some of the dominant heteronormative discourses? What if I own the objectification? As in, what about when I'm in control of it, and objectify myself? Then is that okay? How do I grow and change sexually?

Well, I still have all these questions in 10 years, and how do I teach my daughter to be a sexual young person? Is there even such a thing as a healthy sexual self?'

So that gives you some framing for that project. I sat down and did two life history interviews with a whole bunch of young women between the ages of 18 and 35. Um, and then I rewrote their stories in my thesis and I structured that work around the four most commonly emerging themes. And one of those themes was just how common those young women's experiences of unwanted sex were. So in comes the consent piece. Yeah. So that's how I came to this.

[00:09:28] Naomi Viret: And you reading that has kind of given me goosebumps and I'm just sitting here sort of nodding my head going, yeah, like what great questions. So I think it's already pretty obvious that today's On The Couch chat is going to go well beyond consent 101. Whilst we have Joy On The Couch, I just want to go deeper into this conversation and we're really honored to be able to have you to do this with. So, are you able to offer us your working definition of consent just to set the scene before we start to get really deep into this conversation, if that's okay?

How is it you're defining consent within the work that you're doing and what frameworks or models are you going off?

[00:10:03] Dr Joy Townsend: Yep, easy. So we use a definition by an Australian psychotherapist called Marie-Pierre Cleret and the definition is this. 'Consent means the choice to say yes to something. A meaningful yes requires the capacity to choose to say no, and to have that no heard and respected at any point in time.'

So we use that definition in our programs with young people from the age of kindergarten right through to university students. We use it in relation to sexual consent, but also in relation to consent as it relates to so many different areas of our everyday lives. Yeah, and, you know, I, did, as you probably expect for that chapter on consent in my PhD, looked at a whole lot of definitions.

Um, and this is the one that I landed on. And yeah, when we use it in our work, I find that it resonates with young people. It's simple enough, but it also acknowledges that it's not always an equal playing field for people saying yes or saying no. And so it opens up a really important conversation about what makes consent complicated.

[00:11:20] Naomi Viret: And I think we're always having those discussions in that space around consent, that it should be really black and white. It should be yes or no, but it's far more than that. And it's quite often very nuanced and it can feel really grey and really confusing, particularly for young people. We're not here to discuss the intricacies of the law and consent because we could be on here for hours having those conversations, but we know that particularly when it comes from an education model and indeed we're even guilty of it ourselves within health, when we're educating around consent, is starting to come from that law focus of consent and what consent is or isn't.

Are you able just to shed some light in terms of what can happen when the education comes from that law focus, as opposed to that sociological focus that you take on?

[00:12:05] Dr Joy Townsend: Yeah, sure. Yeah, look, I think consent laws set a really low bar for how we learn about consent. I don't think they're intended to be the starting point for our consent education.

And even for our definition of consent, I think consent laws serve a purpose. And that is to prosecute those who have perpetrated sexual assault. Um, but they're just not a great starting point for how we learn to do consent well in our everyday life. So in our lessons and workshops with young people, we don't spend much time at all on the laws of consent and we very much do teach consent as a practice and we come at it from that social emotional lens.

 I mean, the laws are often a sticking point for a lot of young people, particularly in our workshops with boys schools, single sex high schools. It tends to be a place where a lot of their questions will get stuck on what's the law and what does that mean if I do X, Y, and Z? Because that's our comfortable space, right?

We want a black and white answer to things. Um, and the law is meant to offer a black and white definition of consent to serve the purposes that it's intended for, uh, but we very much take the position that, you know, consent is a practice. It's not always black and white. Sometimes it's incredibly grey as with so many things in that, um, social and emotional aspect experience of our lives.

 I think as well, that teachers will start with that legal definition of consent because it is a black and white and can feel like a safe point to start from. Um, and so I don't hold that against them, but I do really think that we need to be extending the conversation beyond that, and that means taking a risk sometimes and engaging in things where there isn't always a right or a wrong answer and having those conversations and engaging in the messy parts of our lived experience.

And so that's where I really want to see that, that the education shift kind of away from the law and much more towards, well, let's have the conversation about the situations in which it can be not straightforward.

[00:14:16] Naomi Viret: And that sometimes that is going to get dirty, but it, it is entrenched in that honesty and that trust that a lot of students often build with the teachers because they are with them for so much of their life. So that leads really nicely into the fact that I think when we talk about consent, a lot of us just have this assumption that consent is a sex related thing, but actually it's far broader than just related to sex.

There's instances where we're practicing consent in our day to day lives, but because it's so familiar with us, it almost becomes this unconscious or subconscious act that we do. And I know that you're a really big believer in trying to be more aware of everyday consent so that we can be practicing these conversations.

Can you talk to that a little bit more for us, please?

[00:15:01] Dr Joy Townsend: Yeah, sure. So I think teaching consent from as young as kids are able to, to speak and play with each other and with others is best practice. That's really important. And, you know, the, UNESCO technical guidance for how to teach sexuality education, that's international best practice and what we align our programs to actually has specific learning objectives about consent for five, five to eight year olds, that stage one of learning.

So I think that's a big part of how we, we practice consent mindfully and we normalize conversations about consent in everyday life is that we start teaching it. Um, and what are we teaching to those young people? Well, we're teaching the core skills of consent, which is self awareness, bodily awareness, communication, and decision making.

I heard one of my favorite consent educators, her name is Sarah Casper. She's over in New York. She runs an organization called Comprehensive Consent for anyone that wants to check it out. But she said this 'telling people to ask for consent doesn't teach people to practice consent.' And I think that teaching those consent skills and giving kids the opportunity to practice those in a low stakes environment, whether that's at school or at home or on the football field, whatever it might be is critical.

That way, we're giving them opportunities to reliably and confidently tune into their own body's cues, communicate their desires and interests, and set and maintain boundaries. Um whereas often consent is covered in a school curriculum, it's taught as a list of rules to abide by or a law to not break. 'Do this, don't do that.' But actually, if we were to shift that and start teaching the skills so that young people get more and more confident at practicing consent when the stakes are low, so that when the stakes are much higher and they're in a sexual situation with someone, perhaps they don't know it all, they're well versed in those core skills and able to apply them.

[00:17:10] Naomi Viret: And I really like how you reflect on that bodily autonomy and really being able to get young people to be listening into their body cues and what it is that they're feeling. And I think it's one of those things that's kind of come to the forefront in the last few years, especially as we've gone more into consent and trying to educate from a younger age, is what happens if I don't want to hug and kiss grandma, hello or goodbye.

And you've got your parents going, you will kiss grandma because otherwise I feel a little embarrassed that you haven't. And so I guess it all starts there, and we need to give that ownership and bodily autonomy back to the young people in our lives or who we're working with. And so they feel comfortable in having those conversations. They know what it feels like to receive a no or to give a yes and what it is that they're actually consenting to.

So it kind of leads me into thinking about role modeling of consent, because particularly when it comes to sexual consent, it's not something that's really well role modeled to us within society. It's not something that we're seeing in TV shows and movies, etc. So, with the work that you've done and are doing with young people, what are they using as their point of reference around consent and is role modeling a big gap per se?

[00:18:18] Dr Joy Townsend: Yeah, so I think role modeling is really powerful and modeling is possibly one of the most effective ways to teach consent. One of the things we often hear young people say both in research and in our own work at Learning Consent is with regards to any sex education, whether it's consent or sexuality education in school is: “Yeah, but what does it actually look like?”

How does it actually work? Which is totally a fair question. And so what we do when we run workshops with senior high school students and university students is we actually show them a sex scene, a consensual sex scene that replicates and models the communicative approach to consent that we teach and young people love it. We preface it by saying, this is going to be awkward. Like we're all going to sit in the middle of the day, your teacher's in the room, you know, Johnny's next to you and Sarah's on the other side. And sometimes we do this with 450 kids in the room and we watch a sex scene. The one we're using at the moment is the second episode of a UK series called Normal People. I don't know if you've seen that, but it was celebrated by young people right around the world for its depiction of consensual sex. Um, and so that's the one we use it's yeah, just in the first 10 minutes of the second episode. And the feedback we get from young people was that, that watching that scene was the most valuable part of the workshop for them.

[00:19:50] Naomi Viret: Because it's practical, right?

[00:19:52] Dr Joy Townsend: It's practical. Exactly! And it's so much safer to watch someone else do it in a space that's being held for them to be safe than to be learning on the job themselves. And the other thing that I think is it's, it's filling a gap. A lot of young people, when they say, what does it actually look like the first place they go to when they're not learning what it actually looks like in formal sex education or at home is pornography.

And consent is largely absent from pornography in almost all the time, from mainstream porn, it is absent. And so, yeah, it's about filling that gap, modeling a positive example of consent. Yeah, and another thing that we do actually, as well as showing sex scenes, we just run a whole bunch of workshops for O Week this year for university students.

And we actually did a whole lot of interviews with these first year students who live on campus, and we said: “Tell us your stories.” What's complicated about consent? For you here, living on campus and university context, and we took all those stories and we developed them as three screenplays. So just miniature vignettes, we employed professional actors to perform those screenplays in our O Week workshops for young people.

And so they weren't actually modeling consensual sex scenes, but those actors were modeling conversations about consent. Conversations about where it got complicated in a relationship or on a big night out, and how to follow up where consent perhaps has been, um, it could, could have been done better or a conversation that demonstrates how that's awkward, but very much shows, yeah, how to, how to talk about consent with their peers. And I felt like that work in those, that series of workshops around this year was extremely effective. Young people were just so hungry for positive examples of both consensual sex, but also how to talk about this stuff.

Absolutely. And I love the fact that you refer to it as those awkward conversations because they are awkward conversations to have.

I often reflect on that in the sessions that we do with young people going, yes, it might feel like an awkward conversation, but the more that you practice it, the more it becomes like a script and it just naturally becomes a part of the act.

I think we're sort of delving into having a look at a bit of this messaging and language and discourse that's around consent.

I've recently heard you discuss this approach, when it comes to the team at Learning Consent and you've touched on the term the Communicative Approach to consent. Are you able to unpack that a little bit more for us and kind of shine a light on what that actually means?

Yeah, for sure. So again, I didn't come up with this Communicative Approach to consent. It's something I came across in my research. It's by a French feminist philosopher from the eighties, actually. So the Communicative Approach to consent it's predicated on the assumption that the aim of consensual sex is mutual pleasure. Now that in itself is revolutionary because most consent education centres on the management or the avoidance of risk and danger.

Whereas with this approach, consent is just as much about the pursuit of mutual pleasure as it is about the avoidance of harm and danger. And we actually know from research with young people that the number one thing they want to learn about, is how to make sex pleasurable for a partner. That's been established for decades now that when, when you ask young people in Western countries to rate what they want to learn about when it comes to sex and relationships, sexual pleasure rates, number one, and it is so hard to find any formal sex education that covers off on sexual pleasure, let alone if it's centered on it.

And so the Communicative Approach to consent is based on three key principles. Pleasure being number one. So the pursuit and negotiation of mutual pleasure. Responsibility being number two. So that's the responsibility to keep yourself and the personal people you're having sex with safe and communication is the third principle, the obligation of each party involved to be actively communicating. Those three concepts, pleasure, responsibility, and communication are ones that we are familiar with and use in unison from a really young age, whether that be in play, in sport, cooking a meal for a friend who might have some serious allergies. I'm sure if we kind of dug deeper, we could all think of examples in our life quite recently, where we've had to apply pleasure, responsibility, and communication together to achieve an outcome.

So, yeah, that's the approach we teach and we teach that outside of sexual consent, as well as in relation to, to sexual consent. I just love the approach because it feels really intuitive for people it's very social, but yeah, my favorite thing about it is that two fold thing that it manages to avoid harm and danger, but also promote really positive, pleasurable sexual encounters. And that consent is a really core part of a pleasurable sexual encounter.

[00:25:16] Naomi Viret: It's almost, it's that it's taking a sex positive approach to consent as opposed to the opposite of that and you've kind of led into this a little bit as well, but you have a blog that's titled 'Bad Sex Versus Sexual Violence', and you quote some work from Laurie Penny on their book.

And it's this notion that we need a new language around consent, like yes or no is kind of no longer cutting it in this space. Do you have any thoughts on that statement and what that change in language might actually look like?

[00:25:48] Dr Joy Townsend: Yeah, I think it is a lot of what we've spoken about. I think it's teaching consent as a practice and teaching those core skills from a really young age and normalizing that practicing consent is practicing these core skills, the body awareness stuff, the communication, the decision making body boundaries.

I think also teaching that Communicative Approach, particularly to sexual consent so that mutual pleasure is at the, the centre of what people are trying to achieve when they're having a sexual encounter. And then I think it's also being mindful about the complexities of consent. So, you know, if we're going to talk about a new language of consent, how can we be mindful about the fact that it's not always for a whole lot of us, it's not very easy to just say no. Um, and what can we do in our lives to change the way we ask questions, to change the way we seek consent from the people around us so that we're being mindful of that and making it easier for them to give or not give their consent.

[00:26:54] Naomi Viret: So I guess moving on to some of the themes that have come out of your research and getting to the real nuances of consent. There, these terms that are coming up now around sexual compliance, and you touched on it earlier about what if I actually didn't want to have sex, but then I did, and it was really good.

Like, what does that actually mean? And so having consensual unwanted sex. And it's that fine line of, did I actually want that to happen? Or was I potentially sexually assaulted? So again, I guess it's showing another grey and complex area.

Do you have any tips on how we can help to navigate these conversations with people who were working with, like how do we start these conversations with the sexual compliance and the consensual unwanted sex being taken into account?

[00:27:38] Dr Joy Townsend: Yeah, I think this unwanted sex conversation is probably the one that we most need to be having with our young people. And the reason why I think that is because of the research that demonstrates, you know for a long time now, that survey, the Secondary School Survey that's been around since 1992. We collect data from high school students here in Australia in Years 10, 11 and 12. And one of the questions we've always asked them is, have you ever had an experience of sex that you didn't want to have and this latest round of data collection that happened in 2021, 40%, of sexually active high school students said, yes, I have had an experience of sex I didn't want to have.

[00:28:20] Naomi Viret: And that was increased from 30% in 2018. So it even goes to show that in the three year period, the instances that are happening and either people are feeling more comfortable to disclose that that has happened to them or the actual rates are increasing, which is also really concerning.

[00:28:35] Dr Joy Townsend: Yeah, it is concerning. I can give a little bit more of a breakdown of that stat. So trans and non binary young people, 55% of them reported having had an experience of unwanted sex in the previous 12 months. It was 45% of female identifying young people and 21% of male identifying young people.

So that's one in five young men in Years, 10, 11, and 12 have an experience of sex that they didn't want to have. And I think it's not talked about because there's a huge amount of stigma for young people attached and, and all of us attached to experiences of unwanted sex. It's also not talked about, because we don't have the language, you know. I've been in interviews with young people where they say, well, it wasn't rape, but it just wasn't what I thought it should be, there was something about it that was really uncomfortable.

And when I give young people that language around unwanted sex, often that just frees them up to have so much more of an in depth conversation about formative experiences, because they're actually able to name, 'Oh yeah, that was an experience of unwanted sex'. Very few will call an experience of unwanted sex, non consensual sex.

Young people aren't going to use that terminology to describe it. And I mean, the jury's out on this, but I think, you know, consensual unwanted sex is a thing. In fact, it's a very normal thing, particularly if you're a heterosexual woman in a long term marriage or long term relationship. And I think given that these experiences are so common for young people, I think when we're talking about unwanted sex in an education setting, we need to be engaging with their lived experience.

So using case studies of unwanted sex is really important and a really effective way to open up the conversation. One of the case studies we use when we're talking about unwanted sex, and a content warning, this is a young person, an actor sharing an experience that was shared with me in an interview setting of a young woman's experience of unwanted sex.

[00:30:36] Actor: A friend of mine used to get at me and go, can't you just leave? You know, you, you can say no halfway through if you want to, you know? And I was like, no, that's it. Like, like you're there. That's what's going to happen. And I hated that feeling, but I still went through with it.

There were a couple of times, um, just an awful, awful time at Falls Festival actually the summer after I'd broken up with my first boyfriend. I'd met a guy at Falls and I got along really, really well with him and we'd spent all day together and everything and that night, and then we went back to this guy's.

Back to his tent and the whole way there, I was just like saying to myself, I don't want to do this. I don't, I don't, I don't want to do this, but we spent all day together and it's kind of like he'd earned it. That was, it was just a horrible, horrible experience. And like pitch dark tent, you know. In the middle of the bush, so you couldn't see anything.

Thank God, because I was crying. And I said to him, why don't you, why don't, why don't I turn around, kind of thing so that he couldn't see my face. And then when it was over, I, I just left.

[00:32:13] Dr Joy Townsend: So we use that case study in our senior high school workshops and our university ones, and particularly for male identifying young people in the room, when they hear that it's often the first time they've heard that experience told from that perspective, which I think is extremely powerful.

And what a great way to, to start a conversation and say, and we follow it up with some statistics. We say, look, this is Jane's experience is actually a very common experience. amongst Australian sexually active high school students. So let's talk about it. You know, was that a non, a non consensual experience of sex?

Let's have that conversation.

[00:32:55] Naomi Viret: Yeah. Cause there's not these obvious cues of struggle and a lot of young people, when we're having these discussions kind of go, well was I sexually assaulted? I'm not sure, because like when I've seen that in the movies, it's with a stranger down a dark alley and there's a real struggle and lots of screaming and shouting, but actually this was with somebody who I knew or this was with somebody who I trusted or somebody who I was even in a relationship with. And very similar to Jane's story, and it's like, but was I like, yeah it's a tricky one.

[00:33:23] Dr Joy Townsend: Yeah. And the other thing with Jane's story is that, you know, she, for that, that thing, that moment where she says it was sort of like he'd earned it. Mm.

I owe you and it's one of those unwritten rules. There are so many of these unwritten rules that accompany people's experiences of sex and the scripts that accompany, whether it's heterosexual sex or non heterosexual sex.

It's like, these are the things that play into why we find it difficult to say no, why we don't feel as able to say no. And so I also think it's important to, to, to draw from those lived experience case studies, because they give us an opportunity to explore that whole aspect of consent.

Naomi Viret: And it kind of puts a name and a face to somebody's story, even though Jane is an actor, it is somebody's actual experience. And I think it's a really nice time for us to talk about the Continuum of Sexual Violence. So would you like to take a minute to explain that one to us, please?

Dr Joy Townsend: Yeah, so this is something we use as well in our programs with young people, and it's to give them a little bit more language to break down experiences of sex that they wouldn't refer to as being freely chosen. And so, traditionally it's that whole no means no. If it's not yes, then it's no. And we have this kind of real binary black and white understanding of a sexual experiences falls into one of two categories, either it's rape or it's consensual. And so what I love about this Continuum of Sexual Violence, which again, I didn't come up with this. This is an amazing Australian academic called Liz Kelly in the eighties, came up with the Continuum of Sexual Violence.

What I love about it is it's just giving a little bit more language and acknowledging a little bit more nuance around our sexual experiences. And so we have at one end choice, freely chosen sex, pressured sex, coerced sex, and then rape or forced sex at the other end of the continuum. And this in itself is a massive enabler for young people to have more language, to then be able to have conversations and name sexual experiences.

It also helps to break down some of the stigma that comes with experiences of unwanted sex, because if we've got more language with which we can talk about those experiences, then we're slowly going to chip away at that stigma and normalize those conversations.

[00:35:50] Naomi Viret: Love it. And you know, what's really hitting me is when you say what year these tools were like developed in. I've heard you refer to the 1980’s so much today, and often I think we're seeing sexual consent is something that's just become really buzzed in the last couple of years, but what your research and these tools are showing, is this is something that's been around forever.

This has been an issue forever. It's just now that we feel as society, we have more voice and choice around this. And it's something that we can actually speak a bit more freely of and we're just putting our line in the sand and saying, no longer are we going to accept and tolerate this, like things need to change.

So it moves us nicely into talking about porn and you touched on it a little bit earlier, and I'd like to just flesh it out a little bit in terms of, we know that the viewing of pornographic material is happening. As you said, outside of those formal education settings, it's the number one educational tool that is being used especially for young people.

Is it indeed a good knowledge gap filler and a safe space to learn? Would you like to discuss that a little further?

[00:36:54] Dr Joy Townsend: Yeah, sure. So another Australian expert in this space is professor Michael Flood. So he was my supervisor when I did that first research project on porn. And I think he's at Queensland university now, but he actually refers to porn as the default sex educator for young people.

And I totally agree with him. The median age of first thing pornography for Australian young people is 13 for young men and 16 for young women. And on average, uh, boys are viewing porn for the first time, three years before their first sexual relationship. And for the young women that this research was conducted with, it's two years before their first sexual relationship.

So this suggests that there's ample opportunity for these young people to be influenced by pornography and the scripts that it represents when it comes to how to have sex. And especially when it's right at that really formative time in a young person's thinking where they're developing their attitudes about this stuff, which will then go on to inform their behaviors.

 At Learning Consent, we take an absolutely no judgment stance on pornography because the reason why young people access it is, because it's filling a gap, is because formal education is failing them. We do not provide Comprehensive Sex Education in this country and so young people will go elsewhere.

I use the analogy of flat pack furniture. You know, if I buy something from Ikea and I want to know how to put it together. I'll absolutely jump on YouTube and watch someone else do it to learn how to do it. And I think that's the way that young people are interacting with pornography initially as well.

And like I said, the, that number one thing they want to learn about is how to make sex pleasurable for a partner, which is a beautiful motivation. But where do they go to, to find that information? Where's the most readily available source for that? It's pornography. And it is a problematic source of education.

So part of Comprehensive Sex Education and Consent Education is to teach young people about porn, not to go: “Don't watch it, but to go, hey, a lot of you are watching porn. Let's talk about what's problematic about it as a representation of sex and relationships.” And it's actually being formalized in some countries as what's called a Porn Literacy Curriculum, which is about holding formal space for young people to think critically about pornography and about what's missing from its representation of sex and relationships. So I think that in a nutshell, that's kind of how we think about pornography and a part of any consent education. If it's going to be comprehensive, it's because consent is an education, is about learning stuff. It's also about unlearning stuff. And if we're in a room with a bunch of 16, 17 year old kids, and they've been watching porn for three or four years at this stage, then we need to be engaging with what they've been learning from pornography and pointing out that consent's been absent in that representation of sex, as well as a whole bunch of other things.

So, you know, having that conversation I think is really important.

[00:40:04] Naomi Viret: Absolutely and what really struck me was some of those stats that you just revealed around that they're watching porn so many years before the initiation of those relationships or sexual relationships. And that, you know, only brings to mind for me that aspect of pleasure as well. And the fact that pleasure ties back into that Communicative Consent approach.

And we're often thinking about other people's pleasure, but would you like to touch on self pleasure? Because that feels like it's such an important part of that Communicative Consent model. And perhaps young people are watching porn for self pleasure, because that's not something that society talks about a lot or sees as the norm.

[00:40:41] Dr Joy Townsend: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love this question. I think, you know, self pleasure or masturbation, whatever we want to call it, is the most effective way for us to learn about sexual pleasure. And it's the safest way as well, because it's just us and our own bodies.

So if we can be teaching young people about masturbation, normalizing it, promoting it as being the safest, most effective way to learn about sexual pleasure, that will be awesome.

I found an amazing American sex educator online called Betty Dodson. Have you ever heard of her? I bet there's some people listening that have heard of her. So she's passed away now, but she was like, when I found her, she was in her seventies or eighties. And she'd do this, these wonderful YouTube videos with her close friend who was in her late twenties at the time.

So it was kind of like a niece and an aunt. It had the vibe of a niece talking to an auntie about sex so there was nothing dirty or gross about it. It felt really safe. And Betty Dodson's whole thing is female self pleasure. She teaches workshops on it and she'd written a guidebook to female masturbation and how to reach orgasm.

And there was parts in there that was specifically about, you know, if you have an aversion to touching yourself for whatever it might be in your personal past, as you talked about child sexual abuse being one of those things. There was this really safe, small steps to slowly get familiar and get more comfortable with that practice.

[00:42:13] Naomi Viret: I guess it's one of those questions that as educators, we kind of get faced with all the time when it comes to consent. So what if somebody is under the influence of drugs and alcohol and what plays out there when it comes to consent and people being under the influence.

[00:42:29] Dr Joy Townsend: Yeah. Yeah. Look, I mean, the standard teaching for many years has been that you can't have consensual sex under the influence of alcohol, which I think is just bullshit.

Plenty of adults and young people are like drink alcohol and remain coherent enough to have consensual sex. And in our culture, particularly here in Australia, alcohol and sex come hand in hand a lot of the time, no matter what the age group is, but particularly for young people. But I think what we need to be informing young people about is that alcohol and drugs complicate sex.

And it complicates that Communicative Approach to Consent that we teach, because the research indicates that there's a direct relationship between excessive alcohol and drug consumption and the risk for committing sexual assault. So I think we start there when certainly in our programs, we start with that research.

We said, we admit, look, it's complicated. We're not going to tell you not to drink and have sex. Like we're all human here. We all know that that's what's happening and what will keep happening. But here's, here's how alcohol complicates it. And here's what the research has to say. So in the UK, the crime statistics there suggests that in 50% of rape cases, excessive alcohol consumption is involved.

[00:43:43] Naomi Viret: Wow.

[00:43:44] Dr Joy Townsend: Certainly comes up here in that National Student Safety Survey in Australia alcohol features a lot, in the stats around young people's experiences of sexual assault. There is not a one way to teach young people how to stay safe and have sex under the influence of alcohol. But what we teach is the Communicative Approach to Consent requires that all parties involved are sober enough to make an informed decision about whether they want to participate in sexual activity or not, and whether that participating in that activity will end up being mutually pleasurable taking into account how much alcohol or drugs might be in each other's systems. So yeah, that's our position on it at the moment, is inform them, let them know that there is a direct link between excessive alcohol consumption and sexual assault, and then give them the tools to make their own informed decision about how they can still safely have sex when they're under the influence of alcohol, or if they can.

[00:44:40] Naomi Viret: I think it's a great approach, is there particular tools or resources that you'd like to recommend or that you've come across in your research that's been really powerful and helpful or that indeed young people themselves have found a great teaching tools?

[00:44:51] Dr Joy Townsend: Just on that pornography point that we touched on, there's a great Australian resource called ‘It's Time We Talked’, and they offer a set of resources for young people and then a different set for educators and a different set for parents.

And their young people's one actually has interviews with Australian young people talking about how pornography has influenced their relationships. And also interviews with porn actors talking about what it's like to work in the industry. So that's a really good one that just popped into my mind.

But also I think if you're an educator in this space, I think you can't do this work and not be informed by that UNESCO Technical Guidance On Sexuality Education. It's it's best practice. It's freely available online, breaks it down into eight key concepts that need to be covered and consents in there as one of those, and the learning objectives for each age and stage. So that's another one I'd really recommend checking out. Um, and the latest results of that National Survey of Secondary Students and sexual health there is available now online and that's another one that's really worth being familiar with because it gives great insight into what's happening.

[00:45:58] Naomi Viret: Yeah. So I guess just in terms of the pleasure versus consent, like the aim of sex for a lot of people is that pleasure, but the opposite of that is fear.

And have we seen a fear based start around sex, particularly with the, you know, the possible wake up the morning after regret sex, or people being unsure, and I guess some of that law based learning that we've had. Have you had that experience in the research that you've done that sex is now something maybe seen as fearful as opposed to pleasurable?

[00:46:29] Dr Joy Townsend: Yeah, I think it depends who we're talking about. Like, I think for some audiences, sex has always been something that we've had a lot of fear around, particularly for women. Um, but now there is very much. So like you're saying, Naomi, a fear response around the consequences of having non consensual sex, which I think is good.

Like we want people to realize that to not take that issue lightly. But we need to shift that fear into action. I really believe that, the messaging around teaching young people that consent needs to be here is how to have the absolute best, most fun sex. You know, it needs to shift from don't have sex, like don't have non-consensual sex, because it's against the law to have consensual sex because it'll be awesome. Helping our young people in our education programs to catch a vision for just how great communicative and connected and pleasurable sex can be, is I think, a huge part of addressing that fear response.

[00:47:30] Jennifer Farinella: Thanks for listening to On The Couch. We create this podcast because we are allies in actively challenging discrimination, microaggressions, and exclusionary behaviors. We want to create spaces where people feel safe to share their thoughts, knowing they will be heard and respected. Such an environment fosters collaboration, innovation, and contributes to a more inclusive society.

Connect with us on Instagram and Facebook where you can share On The Couch with your colleagues, friends, and family. On The Couch is made by Jennifer Farinella, Naomi Viret, Maddy Stratten and Winnie Adamson.

Until next time, peace, love and protection.