Sex on the very small screen: Data culture and sexual consent

This chapter takes as its starting point the important relationship between data cultures and sexual culture as well as the material link between cultures of data and the real, embodied ways that people have sex. It brings key understandings of data culture to bear on the issue of sexual consent apps. Beginning in 2014 with Good2Go (Sandton Technologies 2014), consent apps have proliferated across Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, North America and the UK. Yes-Means-Yes (David B Simon 2015), uConsent (Gunner Technology 2018) and iConsent (eDynamix Global Limited 2023) are just a few of those available on Google Play and the App Store. Their objective, as the app The Consent (The Consent LLC 2023) puts it, is to ‘creat[e] customised consent agreements for romantic encounters in two minutes or less to help reduce sexual violence and false accusations!’. Sexual violence predominantly against women is endemic worldwide: a quarter of women in the UK have been raped or sexually assaulted as adults (Rape Crisis 2023). The figure is 22% in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2023). A woman is raped every ten minutes in Brazil (United Nations 2022). The crime of sexual violence is notoriously difficult to prosecute, with charges in the UK, for example, at under 2% (Rape Crisis 2023). Rape is, as Dame Vera Baird QC states, effectively decriminalised in the UK (Siddique 2020). Consent apps are presented as a solution to the purported problem that the intimate, often private nature of sexual violence renders it impossible to know whether a crime. This chapter asserts the relevance of data culture to contemporary understandings of sexual consent. It asks, in what ways are consent apps part of data culture and how does this data culture illuminate fundamental problems with how sexual consent is understood?