by Este Dee (Melissa Maher)
read time: 3 min
(spoilers: its still shit)
Most of us have seen the infamous Tea video: the good old “unconscious people don’t want tea” (read: sex). If you haven’t seen said video, you’ve probably heard people groaning about it.
Metaphorical hands up: who feels comfortable expressing their sexual needs as a result from this video? Right… there’s maybe one of you sneaking your metaphorical hand up in the back. That’s ok! The tea video isn’t the root of all evil: it provides a decent framework to work off and is accessible to a wide age and intellect range. It’s a helpful tool within consent education.
It shouldn’t, however, make up the entirety of our consent education. Unfortunately, after a quick ask around, it seems that a Tea video screening and an obligatory “don’t rape” module is pretty much the standard practice in Australian schools and workplaces. Even the Australian Defence Force was relying on the Tea video for consent training up until a few years ago – and they’re known for their rape culture, so you’d think they’d try a little harder.
If we’re talking to an adult or late teen audience, we can’t rely on analogies to do the heavy lifting.
We need to be educated on the legal and societal repercussions and expectations for sex, and be able to talk confidently about sex without cringing. Once you get in the bedroom, trying to explain your sexual needs in the context of ‘tea’ isn’t going to cut it.
We know people are slipping through the gaps of consent education, because we know how many people are being assaulted. You might’ve heard the adage “not all men, but every woman” – responding to the #notallmen “movement” that occurred in the face of the #MeToo movement. The adage attempts to explain to the #notallmen advocators that all women having to take safety precautions against every man – just in case – is not calling all individual men “assaulters”. The fact that this must be explained – and that this hashtag rose as the response to #MeToo in the first place – is, in itself, pretty telling.
If even general talks of consent are taken as a personal attack, what will happen when we do need to have those personal talks with our sexual partners? Clearly, we’ve been conditioned to be not only afraid of communicating our sexual boundaries but also of being on the receiving end of those boundaries. We need to teach from a young age how to sit in the discomfort of being told “no”, and how to handle the guilt of doing something wrong.
A “don’t have sex with someone if they say no!” mantra is all well and good, but it leaves audiences in two categories. There’s the “I’d never do something like that, this doesn’t apply to me, therefore I do not need to be mindful of consent”; and the other, “I know this but I don’t care I will do it anyway” (who, realistically, we are not stopping with simple consent training). This binary teaching style creates black and white thinkers, who refuse to conflate themselves with the back-alley rapists in the media and therefore refuse to dissect their own relationships with sex and consent.
If you take anything away from this, please let it be this: you, even as a morally good and kind person, have the ability to overstep someone’s sexual, and non-sexual, boundaries.
It does not necessarily mean you are a back-alley rapist, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t do damage. There is no scale of trauma that spans from “unenthusiastic kiss” to “back-alley rape” – they’re both traumatising. If you’re going to have sex, you need to get comfortable talking about it, because you need to be asking your partner, and getting some form of enthusiastic “yes”, before every single thing you do.
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