This article seeks to contribute to efforts to find a meaningful approach to sexual consent education with young people in the UK. It highlights current debates around how to design sexual consent policy and pedagogy in educational institutions and shows how some approaches might insufficiently account for how unconscious psychological and external social forces coalesce to frame young people’s decisions, obscuring the reasons why they are pursuing sexual intimacy. Deploying some empirical data from small-scale qualitative research and Lacanian theory, it suggests that attempts to codify consent through laws and policies such as affirmative consent, and some associated educational practices, can misfire because they expect too much ‘knowingness’ precisely when unknowingness is inseparable from sexuality, especially for young people embarking on sex for the first time. It proposes that pedagogic attempts to minimise the risk of trauma and harm arising from non-consensual sex need therefore to engage in dialogue with young people that is both psychoanalytically and socially literate, be bold, introduced early, and fully account for the limits of language. The article concludes with some implications of the proposed pedagogy for professionals working in relationship and sex education with young people.
This article examines how the threat of being called out – funao – shapes the sexual subjectivities and flirting practices of heterosexual teenage men in Chile. Focusing on the rise of feminist funas (online public denunciations of sexual or gender-based violence), it explores how fear of exposure functions as a paranoid fantasy that reconfigures men’s conduct even when they cannot articulate why certain behaviours are unacceptable. Drawing on psychosocial theories of fantasy, affect and masculinity, the article argues that funas act as affective pedagogies, disciplining young men’s behaviours and contributing ambivalently to the prevention of gender-based violence – not through explicit political conviction but through anticipation and shame. The analysis is based on online interviews with high-school students conducted during Chile’s 2019–2021 social uprising. Findings show how young men portray the funao as a passive victim, mobilise myths of miscommunication, and express both fear and confusion in response to feminist scrutiny. These accounts demonstrate how fantasy helps us grasp not only what participants say but also how they feel their way through a shifting sexual culture, where violence is imagined as a possibility that resides ‘between men’. The article contributes by demonstrating the value of fantasy as an analytic for studying sexual cultures, capturing the affective and anticipatory dimensions of change beyond cognitive or structural accounts. Situated in the Chilean context, the case also contributes to global discussions on digital feminist practices and men’s transformations, illustrating how feminist politics can simultaneously unsettle normative masculinity and generate ambivalent, uneven routes to change.
