Why You Can't Say No: How the Mormon Church Hijacks Consent

It wasn't until I was in my thirties that I really understood what consent meant. I knew the word. I could have given you a definition. But the actual lived understanding of it — what it means to check in with yourself before you agree to something, to treat your own yes and no as information worth collecting — that didn't come until much later.

This episode is about that. About every place the church engineered my body's compliance and called it a choice. About the performed yes that followed me out of the institution long after I stopped believing.

Here's what I walk through in this episode: Why I didn't understand consent until my thirties — and why that had nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with a system that needed me not to understand it

The difference between the absence of consent and the performance of it — and why the performance is the more dangerous thing

Every place the church required my body to perform the yes: baptism at eight, confirmation, callings, sustaining church officers, temple covenants, confession, and the sexual consent education that was never given

Why "it's not the church's job to teach sex ed" falls apart when the church had extensive opinions about my hemline, my desire, and my worthiness

How the absence of sexual consent education left women without the language to name what was happening to their bodies — and how that silence became shame, and how that shame walked them into a bishop's office to confess what was done to them

The Dallin Oaks quote that states the policy out loud: it is wrong to criticize leaders of the church even if the criticism is true — and what that does to a woman's ability to trust her own accurate perception of reality

How a lifetime of physical compliance trains the nervous system to override interior experience

The practical work of reclaiming consent: the pause, the body check, the small daily practice of letting my yes mean yes and my no mean no

What I want you to walk away with: You did not agree to as much as you were told you agreed to.

The covenants that have been used to hold you accountable were not made under the conditions that make real covenants possible.

The shame you have been carrying about your body may be built entirely on a foundation that was never real.

Physical action is not consent. Say it again if you need to.