My man Ben and I have known each other since he came to Sidwell in 3rd grade, and years later, we’re still cool. So cool, in fact, that he hollered at me to join him in a conversation about consent.
Yeah, you heard me. CONSENT. He’s started an AWESOME organization called The Consensual Project that teams up with schools and universities to talk to the young folks about consent in hookups, relationships, and I guess anywhere its present in their daily lives. It’s a pretty interesting concept, and once he told me about it, I was excited for him. Now, when he asked me to get on camera and talk about consent in hookup culture, I was a little reluctant. I didn’t wanna put myself out there like that, because…well, if you know about the infamous Roster post…no, but really, I just wasn’t really 100% ready to talk about it. After some persuading, we ended up talking on camera for about 45 minutes. Ben whittled all of that down to this five minute clip you’re about to see. Check it out, and then scroll down to see what I have to say about things you didn’t catch due to editing.
Okay, so that was me being pretty damn honest about hookups and such. Now, a few things you didn’t see that I spoke about.
One of the big things we talked about was how black culture and white culture differ. For instance, partying and communication between the two, generally speaking, is lightyears apart in terms of similarity. I frequent all sorts of parties, but let’s talk about the black ones real quick. Since I’m from DC, I know how the party culture/climate is. When you hit a party around these parts, girls get grabbed up and that’s just kinda how it goes, they know what it is. It’s not a real grab, it’s that light grab. You know, the joint that’s like our mating call. The girls know what’s up, the guys know what’s up. It’s not aggressive, it’s just what we do. Our culture kinda embraced that and that’s just how it’s done these days. Can we change it? Probably. But I proposed to Ben in our convo that maybe a combination of body language and consent is how change can be achieved.
I also quickly touched on how sometimes, the element of surprise is cooler than consent. Let’s just be real for a second: you don’t wanna know it all. Asking to kiss somebody is cool, but that rush of getting kissed or kissing somebody is almost unmatched! Ben and I have differing views here, but I think that in the end, like I said before, body language and consent combined can communicate pretty much everything that needs to be communicated in these scenarios.
I had a great time working with Ben, and I’m excited to see what The Consensual Project has up its sleeves in the near future. Schools, BOOK THE MAN! He’s literally getting gigs all over the country, and I’m proud of his progress. Check the site out here, it’s probably one of the smoothest, most easily navigable sites online. Whoever designed that should win some kind of award.
