WomensStuff

I think part of what consent education is trying to work against are gendered sexual scripts we follow, e.g. the expectations that men will seek and initiate dates with a woman, that the man is trying to get the "sex" the woman "has", and her job then is to guard the "sex" and make the man work hard for it, etc. This sexual and gender culture then leads to men's virginity being a liability (a sign he can't successfully "hunt") but a woman's virginity is a sign of her virtue and value (a sign that she is worth pursuing).

In this model and way of thinking, men are viewed as predatory, and consent goes against the default sexual script - which tells women to play hard to get and send false signals of disinterest that men have to navigate and push past to successfully "get" the "sex" the woman has.

To this end, finding a path to de-sexualizing women, teaching that men can be receptive sexual partners to women, that women can initiate and pursue, etc. would probably go a long way to helping resolve consent violations, since there wouldn't be a default staus quo assumption everyone shares that the man should be pushing the woman's boundaries as a normal part of dating and sex.

These changes have already begun to happen I think, and it shows in the different ways people respond to songs like "Baby, It's Cold Outside" which exemplifies that traditional sexual script (the woman wants to leave, the man increasingly pressures her to stay while implying he wants sex). For many people the behavior in that song is normal courtship, for others it's rape culture. Similar divided reactions are seen to the tendency for certain men to feel comfortable picking up and carrying women without their consent.

Anyway, yes - the idea of consent is often not absent, but modelling new norms is basically what consent education is, and what will hopefully help play a role in reversing the dominant sexual culture which is so permissive to sexual assault.