Our lives have gone increasingly digital, with activities such as scheduling, socializing, communicating with business partners and entertaining ourselves done mostly on high-tech devices. The next thing to go digital? The ability to provide consent during sexual encounters.
Forget good old-fashioned romance and seduction. A new app now allows users to make sure they are not raping anybody by having them go through a series of questions that gauge their interest and intoxication level. Dubbed Good2Go, the app is meant to "improve communications" and ultimately reduce sexual assaults and "regretted activities" particularly in college campuses, where students become more aware of the issue of sexual assault.
The app works like this. A user, which we will assume for now is a male, installs the app on his iPhone or Android phone and creates a Good2Go account with his name and phone number. When he meets someone he wants to have sex with, whether it's for a one-night stand or a long-standing relationship, he opens up the app and asks the potential partner if she's Good2Go. Let's assume that the potential partner is a female.
She has three choices initially: "No, Thanks," "Yes, but... we need to talk" and "I'm Good2Go" If she chooses the first option, a reminder pops up telling the user that "Remember! No means No! Only Yes means Yes, BUT can be changed to NO at anytime!" If she goes for the second option, the app pauses to allow the pair to discuss their boundaries (or the lack of), after which, the app goes back to square one to ask if the partners are Good2Go.
Finally, the third option continues to another set of options that require the potential partner to gauge her intoxication level, which ranges from "Sober," "Mildly Intoxicated," "Intoxicated but Good2Go" and "Pretty Wasted." For the first three options, partners have to verify themselves by entering a six-digit code sent by the app to their own phones. If the last option is chosen, the app recognizes that the potential partner is too drunk to provide consent.
Good2Go gets an A+ for the effort, but critics do not see this as an effective way to reduce sexual assault. Aside from the fact that it's a total mood killer, even though the app's website says this is not true by comparing Good2Go with putting on a condom as "it may stop the action for a second, but everyone understands it is in the interest of safety," using apps or texting does not capture things such as eye contact, body language and other important social cues that facilitate communication on sensitive topics such as sexual consent.
Moreover, Good2Go does not specify what the partners are Good2Go for, whether it is vaginal intercourse, anal sex, oral sex or any other sexual activity that the partners are planning on. In one of the most prominent sexual assault cases on a college campus, Emma Sulkowicz, the fine arts student who carries her dorm room mattress around everywhere she goes until her alleged rapist is expelled, says she initially consented to sexual activity but later said no when the male student choked her, slapped her and forced to have anal sex.
As if things couldn't get any more disquieting, Good2Go maintains a log of users' sexual activities. Although Good2Go maker Lee Ann Allman says "[We] would need to be presented with an official, legal request via law enforcement or a specific university before we would disclose these records," it's a potentially troubling fact given the Snowden revelations about the government's various ways to tap into technology companies for private user information.
