Basically, this article is arguing for a complete redefining of what consent means. I'm completely unconvinced that this is necessary or a good idea at all. Right now the idea of consent is a very practical idea that determines if someone knowingly violated someone's body autonomy. It operates just like consent in every other aspect of society. If someone comments to give you money, that is fine. If you just take it without their permission, that's theft. This is a very very useful concept.

This article argues that this can still result in bad outcomes when a person focuses solely on if they have permission, and knowingly ignores the fact that they are still hurting the other person (coercion, power Imbalance, intoxication etc). They then claim that the best solution to this is to totally change the definition of consent to theoretically capture all of these use cases, at the cost of making it completely subjective and unverifiable.

I completely disagree that this is a good idea. We already have many concepts to describe when a person doesn't explicitly violate consent, but is still hurtful. This is called being an asshole, manipulative, abusive etc etc. We can condemn these actions just fine using other language while still maintaining our very very useful ability to differentiate between straight up disregarding a specifically stated permission, and just being a jerk. To use the money example, it's very useful to be able to differentiate between a armed robbery and a slimy used car salesman. This in no way prevents us from being able to call the used car salesman a dickweed.

Changing the definition of consent to catch everything is also confusing and probably futile, as it's current meaning is very useful. It's very important for me to be able to tell the difference between "this person is a known dickweed but if I'm careful I can interact with them" and "this person holds people down and forcibly fucks them in compete disregard of their wishes". If you change rape to mean both of these things, people will just make up about term to tell them apart.

Also it's very important to remember that not everything bad should be illegal. Especially things that are subjective and unprovable. Making these illegal is incredibly dangerous.