No, “consent” is, like “intent” on the other side, a mental state rather than an action: it is the active desire for the act.

An ambiguous and enthusiastic yes is outward evidence of consent, though, and it tends to be the kind of evidence without which (or at least, some similarly very clear sign) we would tend not to infer consent to other acts where consent negates criminality, like battery.

Human communication is complicated and complex and error prone. Combine it with sexuality and you have a mess.

There must be room for error and for dialogue. Humans are not binary machines. We're probabilistic ones.

Yeah, if I beat someone up and they didn’t explicitly agree or explicitly ask me not to pummel them, no one is going to hem and haw about whether or not it was battery or whether it wasn’t because of secret unexpressed consent.

But no, when the issue is battery-that-involves-sexual-penetration, *which legally had the same basic “without consent” factor (except that there tend to be more factors which explicitly negate or make the alleged victim legally incapable of consent), suddenly lots of people have a radically different view.

Just painting this as a simplistic "powerful male predator abuses helpless little female" does not help to move society forward one bit.