UC Riverside

Research on how individuals conceptualize, communicate, and interpret sexual consent is relatively scarce. Much sexual consent research is quantitative, employs hypothetical scenarios, and/or does not examine individuals’ actual behaviors in their real-life sexual experiences. Because much sexual consent research is devoid of context, it is not well understood how interpersonal, situational, and broad social contexts shape individuals’ conceptualization, communication, and interpretation of sexual consent. Additionally, most sexual consent research focuses on women or on gender differences between men and women. Virtually no studies provide in-depth analyses of heterosexual men’s conceptualization, communication, and interpretation of sexual consent. Using multiple qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews, sexual activity daily diaries, and diary debriefing interviews, this study offers a critical expansion of the extant literature by examining how forty heterosexual college men conceptualize, communicate, and interpret sexual consent. Results showed various, nuanced ways in which participants conceptualized, communicated, and interpreted sexual consent, which reflected the

interpersonal, situational, and cultural contexts of participants’ sexual experiences, such as the nature of the relationship between sexual partners, the university context, in which sex often occurs under the influence of alcohol, the overarching cultural milieu (e.g., the #MeToo Movement), and larger social forces, such as social relations of domination and ideologies that reinforce those relations (e.g., hegemonic masculinity and gendered sexual scripts). Thus, this study showed that considering the influence of social context, broadly considered, is critical for developing a complete and nuanced understanding of individuals’ conceptualization, communication, and interpretation of sexual consent. The findings have important implications for the design of more effective sexual health and sexual assault prevention education and policy initiatives.