“where is your line?”: how we’re opening up consent

I’ve been working this summer not only documenting online advocacy campaigns, but launching one with filmmaker Nancy Schwartzman: where is your line? Using Nancy’s personal documentary film THE LINE as its center, we’re going to be throwing the questions raised by her story back to our audiences: how do we express consent for what we want?

Nancy and I started talking in April, when I had about two weeks to decide if I was going to leave San Francisco. This project made that choice a little easier, and gave me some faith that I might find good work in this middle space between art, activism, and technology. There was also something totally seductive about a project where our audience was so specific, and so already immersed in the internet.

Last week, we got to bring the film and the campaign together into the world for the first time, at a screening at American University. One of our interns, Carmen Rios, is an American student (and blogger, and unshutupable activist), and hosted us and gave us all the inside info that yes, talking about whether or not to friend your hookup on Facebook is an issue for real, but also, so real that to talk about “hanging out on Facebook” like it’s all that different from “hanging out” period is getting to be a less meaningful distinction. I was equally immersed this summer, in our little office on Broadway right near the crazy bull statue, listening in on and trying to design our campaign around the many smart observations from Carmen and Melanie Wallner (our NYU-based intern) on what’s going on with sex and communication and pleasure in college.

Backstory: I was a community educator in a program at my college women’s center, doing workshops on rape, dating violence, sexual harassment, and porn, trying to infuse a sex-positive perspective to a body of work and activism that didn’t have a lot of room in the prescribed curriculum for discussions of healthy expressions of sexuality. I remember being told that by offering a bowl of condoms and lube in our open community gathering room, we’d risk triggering survivors of sexual violence. Forget the fact that I am a survivor and I’m the one making the request. I got so many messages from the other educators and the staff at the center that my experience was too hard to consider. I wasn’t the right kind of survivor: I still had and enjoyed having sex.

Nancy and I hoped that we could create an online space where people would feel comfortable exploring how we talk about consent, and then share that conversation in places where they are already hanging out online. Using Facebook alone to talk about sex is problematic: does everyone want to share everything they say on a drunken hookup amidst all the other info on their Wall? This isn’t to say people need anonymity or privacy to talk about sex honestly; we need contextual space, where we have control over what stories we share are connected with what other pieces of our identity.

All of this so neatly connected with conversations I’ve been having with Sarah Dopp for the last year, and so she was the first person I thought of to bring in to help me translate this to a real website. Sarah’s Genderfork project just masterfully deals with all these issues of identity, consent, authenticity, and storytelling. She also put me up on her couch when I was in San Francisco, and that’s where we worked until late in the night on one marathon day.

The entire campaign website is drawn from the design of our stickers — inspired by the Saudi campaign, We the Women, that raises dialogue about laws that prohibit women from driving by using anonymous stickers posted and photographed in public space, and then shared on Flickr and Facebook to inspire dialogue. Over loads of emails and two (hilarious) Skype chats, our designer in Paris, Thomas Cabus, brought the whole thing — all my messy drawings and twisty, windy explanations of what we wanted to do — together.

What’s next is more screenings, more stickers, more videos, more fun in Photobooth after screenings and sharing stories with the young women and men who want to hang out and tell us what they need, what’s not working, what’s getting missed in the media.

And I hope I get to do more things like this — just turning on the Xacti and relating the lay of the land at the college we’re about to visit, talking back to what I was taught in college to call the “rape culture” but in a voice that’s got a chance of getting through — because if we’re not spending time figuring out how to say yes to each other, we’re giving in.