Chaucer and the Fantasy of Retroactive Consent

In the short comic "Trigger Warning: Breakfast," the artist describes cooking for a man who has assaulted her the evening before.¹ "The morning after I was raped, I made my rapist breakfast," she explains. Eggs, medium well; toast; and bacon. Still, "there is another story that I like better" than the one with this ending, she notes. In this preferred version, she does not make her rapist breakfast, or prepare him eggs the way she herself likes them cooked. Instead, "I fight. I spit at him. I struggle." Attempting to change the devastating significance of the previous night by way of her own response to it—that is, by making him breakfast in the morning—the artist seeks a kind of revisionist agency: "I thought I could have another story. We go out. He says I'm beautiful. The next morning, I make him breakfast. If I didn't say no, it's just a romance." In reality, she suggests, "I am a bad victim. I am a bad story."²

"Trigger Warning" illustrates what I will refer to here as a fantasy of retroactive consent, in which an assault is rescripted by its author, perpetrator, or victim as a consensual act. I have chosen the term "retroactive consent" because it evokes Laura Kipnis's anxiety over women retroactively withdrawing consent in order to brand their lovers as rapists. "Sexual consent can now be retroactively withdrawn (with official sanction) years later," Kipnis laments, "based on changing feelings or residual ambivalence, or new circumstances. … This makes anyone who's ever had sex a potential rapist."³ As Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa observes, the danger in Kipnis's remarks lies in the relation between time and causality. "Kipnis's language suggests a kind of 'backwards causation'—one can reach back into history and create rapes that weren't there by removing the consent." This "absurd metaphysics" reinforces one of the pillars of rape culture, as Ichikawa further points out: "the fallacy that if one has consented to anything" (and, we might add, at any point), "then one has consented to everything."⁴

Kipnis's remarks are premised on the dangerous assumption that a notable number of individuals are more likely to fabricate assaults than to accept unsatisfying sexual unions. This essay will consider a problem of "backwards causation" contrary to that which Kipnis imagines, and one that I suspect is far more common, in which a victim warps a sequence of events to reshape their assault as consensual. We see this scenario in "Trigger Warning": the artist describes her attempt to recast the previous night as a romance by making her rapist breakfast. She imagines herself as a character in a different story, and she records her desire to inhabit this alternative reality for the reader.

But this fantasy (and it is indeed a fantasy) of retroactive consent can also be imposed on a victim externally. In De civitate Dei, for example, Augustine considers Lucretia's rape at the hands of the king's son, Tarquin, as Livy describes it in Ab urbe condita. Insisting on her innocence, and further demanding that no woman use her tragic plight to justify their own adultery, Lucretia dies by suicide, using her body as a warrant: "corpus est tantum violatum, animus insons; mors testis erit" ("my body only has been violated; my heart is guiltless, as death shall be my witness").⁵ Despite the extreme measures the Roman matron takes to corroborate her unwillingness, Augustine questions the legitimacy of her denial, and, relatedly, her motivation for killing herself. Perhaps she was not guiltless after all, he speculates, but rather consented in her mind to the assault:

An forte ideo ibi non est quia non insontem, sed male sibi consciam, se peremit? Quid si enim (quod ipsa tantummodo nosse poterat) quamvis iuveni violenter inruenti etiam sua libidine inlecta consentit idque in se puniens ita doluit ut morte putaret expiandum?

[Perhaps, however, she is not there because she slew herself, not innocently, but conscious of her guilt? What if—but she herself alone could know—she was seduced by her own...