Consent Impairment: Understanding Reduced Capacity for Sexual Agreement
Consent impairment is a reduction in a person’s ability to understand, evaluate, communicate, or voluntarily decide about a sexual or intimate activity.
Coercive Pressure: Sexual Manipulation, Threats, and Invalid Consent
Coercive pressure uses manipulation, threats, repeated demands, or unequal power to make someone agree when they do not freely want to.
Sexual Self-Efficacy: Confidence in Sexual Choices and Communication
Sexual self-efficacy is confidence in one’s ability to communicate sexual choices, set boundaries, protect health, seek care, and manage intimate situations.
Sexual Agency: Choice, Autonomy, Desire, and Sexual Self-Direction
Sexual agency is the ability to make, communicate, and act on personal choices about sexuality, pleasure, relationships, health, identity, and boundaries.
Boundary Testing: Recognizing Respectful and Manipulative Behavior
Boundary testing involves discovering how firm another person’s physical, emotional, sexual, digital, or professional limits are.
Boundary Setting: Defining and Communicating Personal Limits
Boundary setting is the process of identifying, communicating, and maintaining personal limits in relationships, intimacy, privacy, and everyday life.
Boundary Crossing: Meaning, Examples, and Personal Limits
Boundary crossing occurs when someone goes beyond another person’s physical, emotional, sexual, digital, or professional limits.
Subjective Arousal: Felt Sexual Excitement and Mental Response
Subjective arousal is a person’s conscious, self-reported experience of feeling sexually excited, stimulated, interested, or turned on.
Spontaneous Desire: Unprompted Sexual Interest and Motivation
Spontaneous desire is sexual interest that appears before deliberate stimulation or intimate activity begins, sometimes without an obvious trigger.
Responsive Desire: Sexual Interest That Develops After Stimulation
Responsive desire is sexual interest that develops after welcome emotional, sensual, romantic, or sexual stimulation has already begun.