Feminism and law

The hidden faces of women’s sexual consent

Abstract

It is the first time that a substantive debate about women’s sexual consent has taken place in the Spanish state. The context has been that of criminal legality and its preferred protagonists: jurists and feminist academia, with their powerful disparate voices. The controversies within it reveal two very different faces: that of a sexual consent built around the capacity for self-determination of all women without intolerable interference in their privacy and without alerts or fears of the danger of expressing their free will; and that of a fragmented and hierarchical consent that divides women between privileged classes with the option to decide about their sexuality and subaltern classes that, thanks to an interested victimist perspective, see the value of their consent denied, making it invalid and irrelevant in the name of gender equality. This is the critical analysis that is developed throughout this article.