Saying No to "Yes Means Yes": Limitations of Affirmative Consent for Mitigating Unwanted Behavior Online According to Women and LGBTQIA+ Stakeholders

Affirmative consent-or "yes means yes"-was initially devised to mitigate sexual violence stemming from misunderstandings of consent. More recently, HCI research has considered adapting affirmative consent to mitigate nonconsensual acts online. Given that affirmative consent has historically been under-adopted and critiqued as unrealistic in its original context of in-person sexual activity, it is imperative that users be involved in producing guidance for affirmative consent practice in computer-mediated contexts. We report a focus group study about affirmative consent in VR dating with 16 stakeholders identifying as women and/or LGBTQIA+ (demographics at elevated risk of nonconsensual acts). Findings suggest that affirmative consent may be obsolete: participants elucidated several reasons why affirmative consent is impractical, if not impossible, to practice in virtual environments. Participants offered provocations to guide creation of new, inherently computermediated consent models for mitigating unwanted acts, posing significant opportunity for HCI to have public health impact.

• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.