Blavatnik Book Talk: Consent Laid Bare

Why It Matters

Contos’s work links grassroots testimony and policy reform, showing that early consent education and legal changes can reduce sexual violence and shift institutional responses. Her campaign demonstrates a replicable pathway from social awareness to legislative impact on gendered harms.

Summary

Chanel Contos, author of Consent Laid Bare and founder of the Teach Us Consent campaign, outlines how pervasive ‘rape culture’ normalizes sexual violence through everyday behaviors and social expectations. Drawing on thousands of testimonies she collected and her own schooling experiences, Contos argues that lack of early, clear consent education enables sexual coercion and other abuses to flourish. Her activism helped mandate consent education in Australia and contributed to criminalizing stealthing in some states. The book maps this culture as a pyramid—from casual objectification at the base to rape at the apex—and traces how awareness turned into concrete policy change.

Original Description

Join Australian activist, and MPP alumna (2025), Chanel Contos in conversation with Philippa Webb, Professor of Public International Law, to discuss her new book Consent Laid Bare. In an era of growing equality on many fronts, Contos argues that when it comes to sex, we are all still working with an outdated social contract that privileges men's pleasure at the expense of humanity.

In Consent Laid Bare, Chanel challenges the rampant inequality that reinforces violent behavior and questions whether consent is possible in a world where female sexuality has been hijacked and suppressed by influences such as porn, patriarchy and male entitlement. It offers girls and women encouragement to see the forces that influence us all as they seek the source of their ‘desires’.

Chanel's message of fostering empathy is especially urgent in the face of rising rates of toxic messages about masculinity and manhood that are targeting our young men.

Blavatnik School of Government,

University of Oxford

http://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/