TW: This interview features the discussion of sexual assault.
Chanel Contos at her book launch this August
CHANEL Contos is no stranger to uncomfortable conversations. Actually, she would love to know what kind of porn you watch. Do you pay for it? How old were you when you started? And how do you think it’s shaped your desires on a conscious and subconscious level since then? For Chanel, that’s just dinner table chat. Pass the salt.
The feminist writer and activist, named one of the BBC’s 100 influential and inspiring women of 2022, is obsessed with interrogating the patriarchal systems that shape – and harm – our world.
While completing her master’s at University College London, Chanel posted on Instagram asking young people to share their stories of sexual assault. The responses poured in. Fast. She couldn’t keep up. Chanel texted a group chat of close friends in the middle of the night asking for help, a little frenzied, pretty fried, and definitely freaking out. I know this because I received that text.
Chanel and I went to school together. Since then, she’s collected 7,000 testimonies of sexual assault and created a petition demanding consent education in Australia with 50,000 signatories. These initiatives were part of an incredibly successful grassroots campaign to mandate age-appropriate consent education in all schools across the country.
Now Chanel’s non-profit, Teach Us Consent, creates slick resources that arm people with the information they need to go into relationships, confidently and kindly. The tone is less lecturing school teacher on a tirade, more empathetic friend with a cup of tea, much like its founder.
You can catch their posters at festivals, “is somebody gonna match my freak? (practice ongoing and enthusiastic consent, respect your boundaries and always use protection) or listen to podcasts that traverse from topics like “how gender expectations can cause harm” to “how porn algorithms influence us.”
Beyond sparking global conversations about healthy relationships, Chanel completed two master’s degrees. And wrote a book. Just one? Chanel, come on. Consent Laid Bare has a clear goal: to gift its reader the tools to understand, name and defy the patriarchal culture we live in. It’s a treatise on coupling intimacy with empathy; a guide for a generation drawing the line at outdated standards and reimagining a future founded on respect.
For the well-versed feminist, concepts in Consent Laid Bare will be familiar. Chanel tackles topics like pretty privilege, the taboo around female sexuality, the centreing of male pleasure, toxic beauty culture and the ethics – or lack thereof – in the porn industry. But she adds a level of nuance and academic rigor that had me scribbling in the margins. Her end notes are no joke. The book is the gift I wish I had when I was 13 and the one I’ll make sure my sons and daughters get. These are words I hope everyone has the privilege to encounter as they navigate life, connecting with others and treading gently as they go.
Chanel Contos at her book launch this August
Tell me a little bit about yourself and what led you to write this book? Try not to laugh.
Oh hi, my name’s Chanel [both laugh]. I think that a book is such an important medium for these topics, because they can be hectic and hard and confronting. A book means that you can kind of process, read and reflect in your own time. I realised how powerful language can be in reinstating autonomy to help us navigate the world differently. I think this book gives a lot of language to feelings that are widely felt.
You’re about to complete your Master of Public Policy at Oxford where you also rewrote and edited the book. No biggie. How did your time at an elite institution in the UK shape reflections on your writing?
I think it solidified a lot of what I’d already thought. My previous research was on entitlement and how it leads to assault in various contexts. At Oxford, I spoke to lots of people and asked for their reflections. The way I think about it is that the culture at places like Oxford matters because the people who come out of those institutions go on to run our countries. The political and human rights agenda is set based on their levels of empathy or apathy towards various groups, women being a key one.
On the topic of empathy, that’s a word that comes up again and again throughout the book and it goes to the Michael Brooks quote you begin with: “Be ruthless with systems, be kind with people.” Can you explain this guiding philosophy?
I didn’t realise it while writing, but what came out so strongly on reflection was the tension between entitlement and empathy. Sexual assault occurs when entitlement to another’s body outweighs the empathy that you feel towards that person, and the socialisation of apathy towards women is such a key factor in this world’s wide-scale issue of rape culture under the patriarchy.
I think the solution is to increase that empathy, very particularly the way that young boys and men feel empathy. But also, we need to be empathetic towards them too. It’s so important to be radical and critical of the big systems around us… to acknowledge them and name them and to understand how you fit into them and keep them running. But it’s also important to meet the people who are right in front of us with kindness.
In Consent Laid Bare, you go on to make the point that these systems aren’t just exploitative towards women, the structures that we need to be ruthless with also harm men. What are some ways the patriarchy operates on guys?
Strict gendered norms create narrow views of masculinity. It’s quite interesting because my research from UCL was about hegemonic masculinity, basically like the OG term for toxic masculinity. There has been a building body of literature for decades, and it pinpoints three key things that men gain social currency from when toxic masculinity is dominant: physical intimidation, wealth accumulation, and conquest over women’s bodies.
It’s so funny that you can read academic articles, and they’re all in fancy terms and long words, blah, blah. And then you can go on TikTok and see a global trend saying, “If he ain’t six feet tall, if he doesn’t have six inches, and he doesn’t earn six figures, then he ain’t shit.” We’ve just, like, summarised this whole body of literature in a little TikTok trend. It’s so in our face. Patriarchy creates crazy expectations that harm and restrict men, and it also represses men’s emotions and intimacy.
When it comes to changing these systems, where do you see glimmers of progress?
Anecdotally, we get such great feedback from young people who get a chance to engage with consent education before it’s too late, through Teach Us Consent. So many DMs, and reflective conversations. Parents tell us it’s changed how they speak to their kids and how their kids behave… I mean, critics argue that consent education sexualizes kids and teaches them things that they shouldn’t even know at that age. But in reality, there’s been research out of the Netherlands and UK showing that adequate sex and consent education reduces rates of unwanted teen pregnancy, it reduces rates of STIs. It increases the average age that young people engage in sex, and it decreases the frequency at which young people have sex.
Chanel Contos at her book launch this August
So we can see how young people respond when given the right tools. I’m also interested in how we shift culture at large. Who do you think needs to be leading these conversations?
Everyone. We really need to listen to women, but at the same time, I don’t think we can rely on them to do the emotional labor that can often be really, really heavy. Something I realised as well, is that being able to engage in a conversation around this topic and maintaining a level of like, calmness and level headedness is such a privilege.
What we’re missing is men leading the conversation, because we’re not going to get anywhere if only half the population is talking about this. Everyone should be pioneering this. And this book is a toolkit for that. It gives people language. It gives people ideas. It gives people space to reflect and think about how these factors have affected them and people close to them.
For men who want to be part of that movement, where’s a good place to start?
The last chapter, “Dear Boys and Men,” is a little manifesto. It’s easier to hand that to someone than the whole book. It summarises the key themes most relevant to them.
Men, take note. Let’s talk about your writing process – what was that like?
Oh, my God, so chaotic. Sometimes, I would do nothing for weeks. Then something would click, or I would have a conversation and write thousands of words at once. I wrote a lot on planes. I travel a lot for work. I wrote this book while running a company and doing two master’s degrees, so planes were, like, my quiet time when no one could contact me.
Airplane mode, on. As a writer, where do you get inspiration?
I do love to read. Roo [my partner] laughs because I always bring a feminist book on holiday. He’s like, “Can you just chill the fuck out?” And then I’m like, fine. I’ll read a fiction book. And then I read a Margaret Atwood fiction book.
The patriarchy is never on holiday, so neither are you.
Yeah… I’m constantly stressed about the world. But I think much more than reading, conversation is where I gain inspiration. Talking with other women, talking with young people, talking with men. I love asking men how they think patriarchy has impacted them. And I love asking men about their porn consumption. As soon as I become vaguely acquainted with a man, I’m like, “So, what type of porn do you watch? Do you pay for it? How old were you when you started? How has it shaped you?”
Chanel Contos at her book launch this August
I mean, people’s private habits say a lot about broader culture. It’s just an average ice breaker from your favourite feminist author.
[Laughs]. Another huge influence was the 7,000 testimonies we collected for Teach Us Consent. I read all of them, which gave me a very nuanced look at how rape culture impacts like young people. Those became a roadmap for the book.
I remember the testimonies were coming in faster than we could read. So much of your work comes back to control over bodies and I always think about how beauty culture had such a strong grip on us as teenagers. What’s your take on it now?
Look, I love beauty, I love makeup, I love clothes. But the compulsory nature of them, especially for young women, is where the problem comes from. These are time-consuming, expensive, sometimes painful practices. The book isn’t anti-beauty but I’m just trying to ask people to think, what’s directing this desire? Femininity is expressed through additions or modifications to the body. We remove hair, make our eyelashes longer, and change parts of ourselves in ways that men don’t.
Meanwhile, what’s actually feminine is things like bleeding every month, childbirth and breastfeeding, but femininity has been hijacked into this perfect, picturesque objectification. I still love dressing up and wearing makeup. But it’s important to distinguish: do I do it for me, or because it makes life easier in a patriarchy when I meet these standards? It’s also fine if it’s the latter, which to be honest is where I think I fall.
Do you think we’ll ever move beyond beauty as a measure of worth?
There have been a lot of movements to expand the definition of beauty like body positivity movements. And obviously that’s great and good. But again, we’re still putting such a unique emphasis on beauty for women in a way that we don’t for men. It widens the sphere of what’s counted as beautiful, but still emphasises that beauty is an important thing for a woman to be. I don’t really have an answer to that but I want people to think, like, are we just creating more people to sell products to maintain this standard?
Writing about patriarchy is heavy. What gives you hope?
I feel really hopeful for the next generation of parents who are coming in. I think they have less shame talking about these topics and are more tech literate. The internet can be a really great thing, and the problem is that young people are targeted with harmful content. But if you intentionally seek out positive content, you know, if you go to the Teach Us Consent Instagram page, or if you Google questions and go to reputable websites with answers, you can be super empowered in a way that other generations haven’t been. You can take your autonomy into your own hands.
by Christiana Alexakis
Consent Laid Bare is available in stores now.