Suppose a person is not into uttering "enthusiastic consent" for sex. Is that okay?
If you answered no, it is not okay, then you are attempting to impose your cultural values, perhaps "sex positivity", on someone else.
If you answered yes, it is okay (partaking in the philosophy of enthusiastic consent is a personal preference), then on whom do you blame rape when a misunderstanding occurs regarding consent? Isn't preventing such misunderstanding one of the main points of "enthusiastic consent"? If the other person asks for consent, but only receives "lukewarm" consent, how is that person to know whether the first person is saying "no" in the framework of enthusiastic consent, or saying "yes" in a framework not requiring enthusiastic consent? This stance tends to place more blame on the victim than the "no" stance.
Thus, this simple question is a Catch-22: a paradox. The challenge is to understand what is going on causing the paradox.
Digressing, two reasons a person might not be into enthusiastic consent: They have been so powerfully conditioned that sex is an awkward topic of conversation that they find it extremely uncomfortable to utter enthusiastic consent. Or, they consider sex as an activity to be done "instinctively", not wanting to think about it, but just to go with the flow and hope for the best, with consent an unnatural idea in the context of sex.
The solution to the paradox lies in the larger issues around sex. Sex is deeply intertwined with personal and social values of self-worth, and of social constructs of power. Consent matters specifically because of these issues. If it weren't for the consequences, both personal and social, consent wouldn't matter.
In focusing on the topic of consent, we are blinding ourselves about these larger, more important, issues.
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