Let’s face it: the new ‘consent condom’ won’t prevent rape – but it will protect men from rape allegations

This isn’t a product which celebrates or enables consent so much as it is a tool to protect men from all those nefarious, lying women waiting to say they were raped by them

I’ve come across a lot of ridiculous products in my time, especially when at the helm of the feminist satire blog The Vagenda. Vaginal steamers; Goop-endorsed intimate eggs promising a “spiritual detox”; a veritable smorgasbord of perfumes and “deodorants” which are often more likely to give you gynaecological nightmares than leave you smelling of roses; a severed head which simulates fellatio; that inflatable chair with a dildo attached which made the rounds (and a couple of appearances on Eurotrash) in the Nineties. If necessity is the mother of invention, sex is the feckless father; some of the worst instances of innovation have happened in the industry which caters to physical intimacy. I still can’t get a straight answer about who thought glass vibrators were a good idea.

Consent culture – or, as most women like to call it, “the concept that men might no longer be able to get away with rape” – has given rise to an even stranger set of products and experiences. First came the much-maligned consent class, which became popular at university freshers’ weeks for a while last year. The aim of a consent class is, of course, noble: to introduce all students to the novel idea that their peers are also human beings and they might not like to be touched without permission or raped on a night out. The idea is that young men in particular might not know about all the nuances of consent, or might not realise you can be a rapist without looking like a hardened criminal.

A Warwick University student called George Lawlor made waves three years ago when he wrote, for The Tab, that he refused to attend consent classes because he knew he wasn’t a rapist (the article was accompanied by a picture of George holding up a sign which said “THIS IS NOT WHAT A RAPIST LOOKS LIKE” while standing in what looks like a university lecture hall, something I’m sure his fellow students didn’t find unnerving at all.) The classes are “full of people pointing out the obvious, thinking they’ve saved the world”, he wrote. While he didn’t exactly paint a sympathetic figure – especially after following up a year later with an article which claimed consent classes are “still a waste of time” and he’s “still not a rapist” – there are some parts of Lawlor’s argument I agree with.

Most people understand consent intuitively. As gay artist Michael James Schneider has pointed out (with the help of pink balloons), straight men understand consent just fine when they go to a gay bar. They also understand it just fine when you frame it in terms of ordering a cup of tea. In fact, anyone with a shred of empathy knows what consent means and shouldn’t have to be sat down and talked through it like a toddler being told not to hit other children at preschool. The idea that men are lumbering oafs who “just can’t control themselves” – around alcohol, around leggings, around short-sleeved shirts, around women – is insulting to both the sexes and has been used historically to prevent women from being able to hold rapists to account.

The post-MeToo world goes wrong when it embraces silly products supposedly made to harness consent culture; which go even further than the compulsory classes. The apps where people have to both check in and say they definitely, absolutely do want to have sex right now, for instance; the consent condom, which made the rounds today and specifically requires four hands to open it.

The first and most obvious criticism of a condom, which aims to prevent rape by making a box impossible to open without the inclusion of a willing partner, is that a rapist is unlikely to stop and put on a condom at all, and even less likely to go out and buy a box of condoms which advertise themselves as only being accessible when someone gives consent. In fact, the only use this box of condoms could realistically have is to protect a man from a rape accusation. This isn’t a product which celebrates or enables consent so much as it is a tool to protect men from all those nefarious, lying women waiting to say they were raped by them.

Like the consent apps which had a Silicon Valley moment last year and ended up taking the form of legalistic documents, the “problem” this product aims to solve is not rape; it is a rape allegation. Neither a consent condom nor a consent app do anything at all to protect somebody from being sexually assaulted or to help them if they have been. These are male-centric goods whose target demographic is supposedly women but whose beneficiaries are the future Brett Kavanaughs of this world – people who plan for powerful careers and want to avoid being accused of sexual misconduct in the future.

After I tweeted (much more succinct) words to this effect earlier today, I was hit with a deluge of men asking me why I would be “against protecting men from rape allegations”. The criticism is neither here nor there; nobody wants anyone to be accused of any crime they haven’t committed. But false rape allegations, like false murder allegations or false allegations of grievous bodily harm, are vanishingly rare. There’s a reason why we don’t have products to protect ourselves from false allegations of murder: there’s very little statistical point. Rape and sexual assault, however, are much more common than any of us would like to accept. And that is the problem these products purport to help solve.

Simply put: when almost all of the products responding to MeToo, however well-meaning, are catering to the needs of men who fear women might say they’ve assaulted them, we’ve gone very wrong. The developers may well not realise that’s the trap they’ve fallen into. But that’s why it’s crucial to continue the consent conversation, rather than to derail it into male territory.