Have a Merry, Consensual Christmas
Personal Perspective: How to navigate the holidays, and the grey area of sexual consent.
Posted December 3, 2025 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch
The holiday season has begun. This is the time of year when people mix and mingle, share a cup of good cheer, and let off steam in social gatherings. Christmas songs and movies stir the embers of holiday romance. Firelight is flickering. Lights are twinkling. Mistletoe is hung. Glasses are clinking. How can you resist snuggling together like two birds of a feather? Intimacy is calling your name.
Unfortunately, even within this most idealized romantic setting, communication about intimacy can be mistaken. Misreading cues—both verbal and nonverbal—can lead to a grey area of ambiguous consent, which fuels and even normalizes sexual assault .
In a new book by Kristen Myers and Patricia Wallace, Exploiting, Enduring and Resisting Ambiguous Sexual Consent in the Grey Area: Taking It , the consequences of nonconsensual sex is front and center. While their empirical data are based on college students, the importance of the message knows no age or life stage. And it is particularly relevant as we go into this season of blurred boundaries .
One of the unintended consequences of sexual liberation is the freedom for heterosexual women to be casually exploited by men who deny doing anything wrong. In traditional patriarchal societies, when women are raped, it is by force and because the men who are supposed to be protecting them cannot do so. Rape has always been a weapon of war, a tool of misogyny, and a terror for women. But in traditional societies, sexual assault is black-and-white. Men raped women with violence and sometimes impunity, and everyone—the men and women involved—knew it was sexual assault: immoral, unethical, and illegal.
What Myers and Wallace show is that rape, or sexual activity without consent, is no longer black-and-white; there is now a very dangerous grey area. Despite concerted affirmative consent campaigns, coercive sexual intimacy and sexual assault persist, with some students (mostly men) still forcing sex on their partners: “taking it” from them. Facing ubiquitous sexual pressure, young people often relent to unwanted sex and “just take it.” Outsiders then pass judgment on victim/survivors, demanding, “It's just sex! Shut up and take it!”
Some men still just “take it” as part of their aggressive attitude toward sexual relationships. The women find themselves in ambiguous private settings and decide that resisting it is too difficult, and so they just “take it.” In the new book, we learn about the growing grey area in which consent is not given but assumed, and where women do not define their experience as rape but as unwanted sex. The ambiguity of sexual relations has led to the freedom to be exploited, to be treated as a commodity for the taking. These nonconsensual encounters are often fueled by alcohol and occur after partying.
Nowadays, after a flirty party, hookups happen. The rules of sex have changed. Let me give you an example: In a recently released family holiday romcom, Champagne Problems , the protagonist doesn’t just kiss the stranger she meets one night in a foreign city—yes, the one who will end up her opponent in a business deal the next day—she hooks up with him, spending the night in his apartment. It wasn’t so long ago that a heroine in a holiday romantic comedy would have kissed her stranger goodnight and gone back to her own hotel, starry-eyed and dreaming about her connection. Not in 2025. Even small-town America takes for granted that sexual attraction to hook up happens within a few hours. It's sexual liberation at its best, unless the woman in question decides she’s not ready, even after a few drinks, once at the stranger’s apartment. Because then he may aggressively insist until she is resigned, and he “takes it"—unwanted sex, but not rape. The grey area.
For a real-life example, think back just a few years to the accusation that comedian Aziz Ansari had sexually assaulted a date. She went to his home and they were flirtatious. She claims she decided against having sexual intercourse, and he claims that because she did not resist, he presumed she consented. The grey area.
Few would deny that this grey area exists and is a problem today. But why, and what to do about it, is less clear. Many would argue that we must simply better educate both women and men about “affirmative consent.” But Myers and Wallace convincingly argue that colleges have attempted this, and even good programs do not reduce the rate of assaults on campus. Even the program that one of the authors directed couldn’t make a dent. Why not? Because the sexual revolution may have been successful, but the gender revolution was not. We can teach young people about “affirmative consent” and even about avoiding the grey area, but we cannot change individual behavior until we change how we raise our children, the cultural gender norms and expectations we hold for each other, and the misogyny still embedded in our social institutions, our workplaces, and our families.
In their important new book, Myers and Wallace aim to spur changes in our culture because the grey area of consent can only exist in a world where men still have more power, prestige, and believability than women. The solution is not just to raise more feminist boys and girls, although that is important. The solution is not just to educate teenagers about “affirmative consent” and the grey area, although that too will help. The solution must include all of this, but go further, to eradicate gender inequality. We must address gender inequality in all its manifestations to stop anyone from being able to “take it” because they can or anyone else from “taking it” just to save face or go along to get along in their social milieu. Gender still matters, even if we would like to pretend otherwise.
So, when you go to your holiday party where the love light gleams, soak up the beauty and joy of the season, but don’t lose your sexual agency by becoming bewitched by the holiday magic. Avoid the grey area. Be clear in your cues and communication. Be vigilant in how you read others’ communication. By practicing affirmative consent practices, gratifying, empowering sexual intimacy can be the best gift you get this year.
Myers, Kristen and Wallace, Patricia, 2025, Exploiting, Enduring and Resisting Ambiguous Sexual Consent in the Grey Area: Taking It. Bloomsbury Press
Share this post Facebook Bluesky Linkedin Email
There was a problem adding your email address. Please try again.
By submitting your information you agree to the Psychology Today Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy
Barbara J. Risman, Ph.D., is a sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure.
Get the help you need from a therapist near you–a FREE service from Psychology Today.
This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.