Young Men Support Consent Norms but Navigate Real Encounters Through Intuition, Not Scripts

Ask a young man whether sex requires consent, and the answer is almost certainly yes. Ask him how consent actually worked in a recent sexual encounter - in the moment, as the situation developed - and the account becomes more complicated. That gap between stated principle and enacted practice is the subject of a qualitative study published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy, led by researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and the University of Melbourne.

Through in-depth interviews with 35 men aged 18 to 32, the study documents how young heterosexual men actually navigate consent during sex, finding that their real-world process diverges significantly from the affirmative consent frameworks they were taught.

Who Was in the Study

Participants were recruited through advertisements at the University of Melbourne. All 35 had prior sexual experience; 31 identified as heterosexual. Each completed an in-depth interview, and 10 also completed a survey. Interviews were conducted by a female researcher, which the authors acknowledge may have shaped what men chose to report. The sample is small and not representative - all were university students at a single Australian institution, and their reported experiences skewed toward encounters within ongoing relationships rather than first-time or casual ones.

These limitations mean the patterns that emerged reflect a particular slice of young male experience. But those patterns were remarkably consistent across participants.

Multi-Factor Authentication

The researchers coined a term for the consent process the men described: multi-factor authentication. Rather than relying on a single explicit verbal request, the men reported piecing together an accumulation of cues - physical signals, trust built over time, setting, timing, and other contextual factors - to infer whether consent was present.

Verbal check-ins happened, but mostly when other signals were ambiguous. Many participants described formal verbal consent as procedurally disconnected from the actual experience - a box-ticking exercise that felt mismatched with the flow of genuine mutual desire.

"The young men appear to turn to a decision-making system that is less rigid and intellectual and more embodied and intuitive," said first author Jossy Forrest of the University of Melbourne.

This finding creates a genuine tension with how affirmative consent is typically taught. Consent education tends to emphasize clear, explicit verbal communication as the standard. The men in this study were not dismissing that standard - most expressed genuine commitment to getting consent right. But in the actual flow of a sexual encounter, they operated through a different process.

What Men Were Not Using as Signals

Two commonly assumed consent proxies - intoxication and clothing choices - were examined directly, and the findings cut against stereotype. Participants did not interpret alcohol use as a signal of consent. Intoxication complicated matters and made men less rather than more willing to proceed.

Clothing choices were similarly not read as consent indicators. What participants found more meaningful was the process of undressing itself during a mutually escalating encounter - an active choice being made in real time - rather than what someone arrived wearing. This distinction between static appearance and dynamic behavior was consistent across accounts.

Wanting More Than Just Consent

Perhaps the most notable finding involves what participants said they were actually seeking. Almost all reported wanting reassurance after encounters that the experience had been genuinely mutual - not merely technically consensual, but wanted by both parties.

"Young men seem to know that sex has to be consensual," said Jessie Ford, assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia and senior author of the study. "However, they seem to want to have sex that is more than just consensual - sex that is enjoyable, mutually desired, non-judgmental, and that connects them with their partner."

This suggests the aspiration embedded in many consent frameworks - enthusiastic, mutual agreement - is not alien to young men. What may be missing are better practical tools for achieving it, rather than revised statements of principle.

What This Does and Does Not Show

The researchers are careful about interpretation. The study documents a descriptive gap between taught frameworks and enacted practice. It cannot determine how often the multi-factor authentication process fails or what happens when signals are misread. It does not provide data on harm or on outcomes across different consent processes.

What it does provide is a detailed account of how one population of young men actually think about and navigate consent - information that is relevant for designing more effective consent education. If instruction focuses on verbal scripts that participants experience as disconnected from actual encounters, its practical impact will be limited regardless of whether the principles it teaches are correct.

Ford's research examines gender, sexuality, and both harm and pleasure in sexual health contexts. Future work, she said, should capture multiple perspectives - not just men's accounts - and follow people over time across diverse encounter types to build a fuller picture of how consent operates in practice.

The research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program scholarship.