How to Do Consent (without Sounding Like a Robot)

Essential, up-to-date guidance on consent and sex for anyone who’s having it—and everyone who wants to do it better. Empowered practices, embodied skills, and frame-changing advice for navigating consent, pursuing pleasure, and building connection in the real world. Part practical guide, part cultural critique, this book offers braver, more creative, and more empowered visions of what sex can (and should) be. Essential reading for anyone having sex in the 21st century, How to Do Consent moves the conversation past stale and rigid assumptions toward one rooted in connection, fulfillment, and self-discovery. Timely, provocative, real-world, and affirming, Schachter’s work dispels misconceptions like: “Consent can be done perfectly”: When in practice, it’s relative, subjective, fluid, and interpersonal—there’s no one right way to do it. “If you can’t talk about sex, you shouldn’t be having it”: Abstinence lite is unrealistic; talking about sex requires experience, trial, and error. “Consent will save us”: Consent is a harm-reduction strategy, not a panacea. “Enthusiasm is a requirement for consensual sex”: Utterly unenthusiastic but totally consensual sex happens all the time. It’s fine! “Consent is something that men do for women”: It’s a shared, communal responsibility—and anyone of any gender can violate another’s’ boundaries. “Sexuality is always innate and unchangeable”: While honoring the reality that many are “born this way,” Schachter shares how their own desires and sexuality have been both fluid and actively sculpted. Grounded in Schachter’s work as an intimacy coordinator and consent educator—and informed by insights from sex workers, therapists, kink practitioners, and community leaders—How to Do Consent (Without Sounding Like a Robot) offers a provocative and bitingly funny alternative to the myths and practices that keep us silent, confused, anxious, and disconnected—and that hold us back from asking for (and discovering) what we really want.