Consent: for a long time I thought that the act of consenting highlighted the greatest intimacy, a mixture of desire and will, whose truth resided in a deep self. When I heard the word consent in political venues, in the European Parliament, in television debates, in associative discussions, I understood that it penetrated the public space as a weighty argument. Consent has been imposed as a key word, the word made to open the door of questions. In matters of freedom or equality of the sexes, you must state your opinion, for or against, then give your reasons. For or against parity, for or against prostitution, for or against the difference or indifference of the sexes. We join to choose and loudly. The rest, the demonstration, goes to the background: both the affection marks the sexual history. I prefer, for my part, to set aside my opinion without cowardice, and find the door open to a reflective path. At the moment of parity, I had separated the question of women's “power” (of their lack of power) from the concepts of “governing” and “representing”. Likewise, in the debate on the use of the veil or the sale of sex, the word consent is the axis around which the problem of the bond or social obligation revolves. Starting from a word as from a knot that must be undone is a way of taming the dispute and giving it content.