On Tuesday, April 28, 2026, the European Parliament called on the European Union to adopt a consent-based definition of rape. “No means no” needs to be replaced with “yes means yes”.
This conceptual shift is grounded in trauma-informed studies that have conclusively evinced the “freeze response”: people are incapacitated in situations they perceive as threatening. They are unable or too terrorized to asserts their rights and boundaries.
The transition to “yes means yes” is a welcome development. But courts all over the West have been taking it in an unwelcome and shocking direction: even affirmative and enthusiastic consent at the heat of the moment can be retroactively invalidated on multiple grounds, thus denying the consenting party all agency and criminalizing the ensuing proceedings.
A “yes” granted by a sober, enthusiastic partner has been construed by prosecution services and courts across the West as an attempt to please. Or a lack of awareness of the full details of the act. Or a response to imminent trauma or to the resulting bonding (“Stockholm Syndrome”). Or implicit coercion. Or a reflection of a power differential (“imbalance”). Or the psychological “annihilation” and captivity of the “victim” or “survivor” (the French dubious psycho-legal construct of “emprise”). Or being start-struck. Or any of a number of other qualifiers.
If consent is an ever-shifting construct, reversed in hindsight, no consent is possible. People are not mind-readers. Such legal convolutions vitiate any consent granted and criminalize flirting, courting, foreplay, and the sex act itself. All future actions of the “victim” or “survivor”, however exculpatory, are interpreted as a “fawn response” (in itself a controversial idea among scholars).
Of course, such a malleable approach to consent unequivocally granted, opens the door to bad actors who renege on consent proffered or use sex to entrap: liars, blackmailers, political or business adversaries, takedown smear campaigners, or partners who merely regret their decisions post-facto, sometimes years or decades after the event and with zero corroborating evidence.
The legal scene now resembles witch trials and relies on “spectral evidence” and the judgment of judges or, in some countries, juries as to the credibility of conflicting testimonies in “he said, she said” showdowns. These often devolve into morality plays with all centuries-old evidentiary-procedural rules intended to safeguard the rights of the accused summarily discarded.
The presumption of innocence, sequestration of witnesses, contamination of evidence and witness testimonies, the right to confront one’s accuser and cross- examine them (or even know who they are) are all dead letter in cases involving alleged sex offenses. Trials by public opinion and social media have now become the norm. Both judges and juries are not immune to overwhelming peer and social pressures and expectations.
Trauma theory is in its infancy. It is hotly debated. It is infested with charlatans and faddish constructs. Psychology is prone to outlandish crazes as it is: “refrigerator mothers” caused autism in the 1950s, homosexuality was a mental illness in the 1960s, false memories of childhood sexual abuse were “recovered” in the 1990s. Many an innocent suffered as a result of these unfounded speculations.
In the desperate quest to scientify the discipline, scholars in the field have pathologized and helped criminalize numerous human behaviors only to reverse course a few years or decades later. Experimental Psychology is in the throes of an unprecedented replication crisis. Psychology is by all measures a pseudo-science, a self-glorifying branch of literature.
Yet, courts and nation-states have incorporated these trendy and fleeting ideas into international treaties (such as the Istanbul Convention) thus deeply undermining their own judiciaries.
These unsavory developments threaten to undermine the very rule of law and its underpinnings of fairness and due process.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) of the United Kingdom (UK) has recently criminalized “lovebombing”: overzealous flirting in the first phase of a relationship. It is now cast as interlude to coercive control, a felony. No rigorous study has ever demonstrated this ineluctable behavioral sequence.
There is no debate that rape and other forms of sexual assault should be penalized with the utmost severity.
But we are criminalizing and stigmatizing sex itself as well as most forms of flirting and courting.
Large swathes of romance and inter-dyadic dynamics are now promulgated as delinquent as is the majority of inter-gender interactions.
We have sterilized lovemaking and rendered it transactional with the novel requirement for “enthusiastic consent”. One has to lawyer up in order to have legally safe sex and even then, the consent can be ruled away by some activist judge or other.
The law in many countries is heavily biased in favor of women: shockingly, rape used to be defined in the UK and Switzerland, for example, as the misuse of a penis only! Studies show that men are sexually assaulted at rates similar to women. They are just even more ashamed to report it than women are.
The justice system and “rape shield laws” have all but eradicated due process and the ability to defend oneself – if one is a man that is.
Nine out of ten conceivable and indispensable defense strategies are inadmissible and impermissible in cases involving intimate relationships. This is unprecedented and has no equivalent in any other type of criminal offense.
The laudable idea is to accord women some protection from public shaming and retraumatization. But victims of all crimes feel humiliated and are traumatized.
There is no reason whatsoever to single out rape, let alone sexual assault.
Literally every sex act is now construed as sexual assault. More than half of all men (and women) report being wary of each other in the workplace (Pew Center).
Memory is highly unreliable: it degrades and is reframed with time (cf. studies by E. Loftus). Therefore, sexual offenses should be time debarred (there should be a statute of limitations) akin to other forms of bodily harm and assault.
Yet, in some countries in the West, rape is almost equated with murder: a complaint can be filed – and often is – decades after the alleged events have taken place. Witnesses have died or moved away, evidence has all but evaporated.
Defense is thus rendered utterly impossible.
The cyclical argument is: only fewer than 10% of sex crimes allegations are false, akin to the rates in other felonies. The proof? The conviction rate in such cases is high. But the conviction rate is high because of the maxim that women who come forward should be automatically and unreservedly trusted to be telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. “Believe all women” and due process and any evidence to the contrary be damned.
Why this unprecedented assumption? Because sex crimes are under-reported (which they, indeed, are): women are unlikely to lie, knowing what is in store for them during the grueling and often humiliating investigation and judicial process ahead.
Yet, the true number of false allegations is probably several multiples of 10%, according to many studies, including surveys involving police officers of both genders.
Women lie about sexual encounters for many reasons. False sexual assault allegations – sometimes in the form of a collusion and coaching involving several accusers – have been levied and weaponized for political purposes (Assange), to take prominent men down (Franken), and as a form of extreme defamation (Trump, Michael Jackson, Fairfax).
Moreover: lying is much more common among certain psychopathological profiles. Women with psychotic disorders and personality disorders (especially bBrderline, Narcissistic, Antisocial, Paranoid, and Histrionic) are much more prone to mendacity, prevarication, confabulation, Machiavellianism, venegefulness, and outright lying.
Liars should be punished as harshly as the penalties are for the offenses that they allege. Yet, very few of them are even prosecuted for fear of exerting a chilling effect on real victims. When a woman is found to have lied and ruined a man’s life in the process, she stands a mere 0.5% chance of facing charges.
Women are weaponizing these newfound indiscriminate yet discriminatory juridical powers and are often colluding in groups to ruin men’s lives. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, celebrities have become the preferred targets – and lucrative settlements are all the rage among their victims, real and alleged.
As it is, enthusiastic consent is an impractical, stultifying constraint: no two individuals maintain the same level of passion for any specific sex act. Good sex involves compromise and the wish to please one another – not selfish gratification.
We are reducing sex to mutual masturbation. But when even enthusiastic consent is no safeguard against malicious prosecution, this has a chilling effect on sex itself.
In the case of heterosexual sex, the entire debate feeds off toxic versions of both feminism and masculinity. Misandrist sentiments equate the unraveling of the patriarchy with retribution for millennia of female subjugation. The woke, politically correct ideal is to eliminate gender altogether (unigender and the stalled revolution, cf. Lisa Wade work).
The pendulum has swung precariously too far against men: young men are terrified to approach young women; every signaling behavior, however innocuous, amounts to sexual harassment, according to a UN document; flirting and courting in the real world (IRL) are widely considered creepy and are even criminalized.
Women are dissonant. They are caught between the still dominant sexual double standard (hypervigilant virtue) and invulnerability signaling: “I am the helpless victim, but I am also empowered, agentic, unaffected, and untouchable.”
Throughout post-modern societies, entitled grandiose victimhood has replaced dignity and reputational social control.
Current laws and their interpretation by the courts incentivize hyperbole or counterfactual reframing in a spiral of ever more fantastic accusations and allegations. Victimhood rules and pays. Virtue signaling translates into social capital and future immunity (an insurance policy).
The rise of diagnosed pathological narcissism and primary psychopathy among women leads to extreme fantasies, emotion dysregulation, acting out, psychotic microepisodes, dissociation, infantilism, and alloplastic defenses (blaming others for the predictable consequences and outcomes of your own regretted choices and decisions, never taking responsibility, never apologizing, never feeling guilty or blameworthy).
We must transition from the nebulous construct of enthusiastic consent towards behavioral or transactional consent (affirmative “yes means yes”). Behaviors before and after the fact provide an indispensable and often indisputable context. Post-facto remorse should not transform the acts performed into unwitting crimes.
We should definitely do not apply norms and laws anachronistically and retroactively.
Transactional sex should never be criminalized, regardless of the identities of the willing participants: power asymmetries are inherent in every give and take, sexual or not. Moreover: women have always been the sexual gatekeepers and have been trading sex for favors since the dawn of Mankind.
Additionally, we should define far more narrowly and rigorously criminal offenses such as coercive control.
Finally: the playing field should be levelled. Many women are primary breadwinners, more educated than men, and have been known to be abusive, too – yet there are almost no persecutions of women for such offenses despite these clear power asymmetries.
For example:
Marital rape is criminalized as it should be. But the withholding of sex, affection, and intimacy should also be criminalized: it amounts to mental cruelty and is a manipulative control technique (a form of Machiavellianism).
Women should be prosecuted for harassment (including of the sexual sort), stalking, defamation, coercion, rape, and a host of other offenses currently enforced exclusively against men.
Equal power confers equal responsibility and equal liabilities. Women are having it both ways nowadays. It is time to end this malpractice.
The alternative is a reactionary male backlash against the hard-earned rights of women. We are witnessing the harbingers of this disturbing trend all over the globe, from rescinded abortion rights and trad wives in the USA to Russia and Afghanistan where domestic violence has been decriminalized and access to the public sphere is being denied, respectively.
