The first rule of consent is: You can’t consent if you were drunk.
The second rule of consent is: You can’t consent if you were drinking.
In truth, there is very little you can meaningfully consent to, as a woman. Drinking a beverage he paid for; climbing into a cab he called; inviting him into your bedroom after he invites himself into your home. You are just so vulnerable to coercion, so socialized to say “yes” when you really mean “no,” that even the slightest hint of pressure causes your agency to crumble into dust—as does the presence of a power imbalance between yourself and your partner.
On that note, another rule: If you work in a similar field and he’s more professionally successful than you, you definitely can’t consent.
For the record, these rules aren’t mine; rather, they offer the ideological framework for an article, published this week by the Columbia Journalism Review, alleging sexual misconduct by star journalist Wesley Lowery.
The accused, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former staffer at both CBS News and The Washington Post, was one of the most powerful media allies of the Black Lives Matter movement; it was he who wrote the famous New York Times op-ed, in the wake of George Floyd’s death in June 2020, demanding that his colleagues abandon objectivity in favor of “moral clarity.” In the following years, Lowery was at the forefront of a class of journalists who unabashedly married reporting with activism; in 2023, he joined the faculty at American University as an associate professor and as the executive editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop.
Then, in March 2025, Lowery abruptly resigned from his teaching position amid whispers that he was being investigated for misconduct. And last week, a bombshell report accusing Lowery of sexual assault and inappropriate advances was published in the CJR.