Proceedings of the Global Conference on Gender Studies
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Talking About Consent. A Study About French Heterosexual Couples
Marion Elie
ABSTRACT:
Back in the 1980s, Paola Tabet introduced the concept of economic-sexual exchange as a continuum stretching from prostitution to marriage. While transactions seem obvious in the context of prostitution, within a couple they are less obvious. Through qualitative interviews with French couples between 2018 and 2021, we studied how the various sexual scripts are gendered within the heterosexual conjugal relationship and how these evolve and influence consent and sexuality over the course of the relationship. This work focused primarily on the women’s point of view, although the men’s testimonies are of particular importance. The sample included respondents from a wide range of social backgrounds. In a couple, the study of sexual scripts, in particular interpersonal and intrapsychic scripts, is very interesting because they are diverse and specific to each member of the couple and evolve as a function of their mutual knowledge and complicity. This presentation will show that, according to our interviews, the more women emphasise the fact that they have complicity with their partner (that they don’t need to express their desires or wishes verbally), the more they talk about having sexual practices they don’t enjoy and have sex without wanting to. This work also exposed how sex can become a tool for negotiation or gift-giving, creating power games between connivance and emotions (care, duty, fear, guilt and complicity). At the heart of these power games, we find love as an excuse. For women, depriving their spouse of certain benefits would send them back to a form of selfishness, perceived as incompatible with unconditional love.
keywords: conjugality; emotions; scripts; sexuality; sociology