This reminds me of something I read some time ago about consent in sexual encounters. (Here's the reference, actually: Cameron, Deborah and Don Kulick 2003 Agency, Responsibility and Consent. In Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp.34-43.)

The author cites a particular case - a rape trial - wherein the female victims were continually questioned on why they didn't resist the defendant, Matt, by force. Their apparent failure to show resistance was taken as proof that either they did consent or that Matt could reasonably believe that they had.

It all comes down to the discursive construction of 'consent'. Matt himself says that if a woman didn't say "no" or "stop" he would interpret it as consent; consent, based on this definition, is inferred from the absence of strong resistance. The women, on the other hand, insisted that they gave Matt reasonable evidence that they didn't want to sleep with him; they were unresponsive physically, and they said they were tired and wanted to sleep. They thought that Matt should've been able to deduce the absent of consent from these clues, without them having to explicitly say it or fight him off.

One of my friends has suggested that this is because women are socialised into not being able to directly say "no" in sexual contexts (I'd add that they're often unable to say "yes" explicitly, due to the slut-shaming phenomenon). Here's a brief blog article that touches on this kind of thing: http://pervocracy.blogspot.ie/2011/01/do-you-scream.html

Actually, Cameron and Kulick come to the same conclusion: a woman can't say "no" and be certain that it will be understand as unequivocal refusal. "No" will often be interpreted as meaning "maybe" or "keep trying".

The denial of sexual agency to women means that saying ‘yes’ to sex (or initiating it) is disapproved of. Nice girls should demur coyly in order to demonstrate that they are not sluts or nymphomaniacs, but this is a ritual, formulaic gesture and men should not be deterred – resistance is only to be expected from women, and women for their part are held to expect men to grind down their resistance. (p. 37)

I'm not suggesting that what was going on in the author's experience was 'rape', but it does seem like an interesting example of the explicit-implicit consent problem.

As one of the comments suggests, I'd imagine that the girl was into the making out part but didn't want to have sex sex and started losing interest when it began to go in that direction. The thing about girls is that they can back down and become cold seemingly at any point.

It can be very troublesome. Because men are expected to be the active partners, we basically have to take certain leaps and make moves without knowing if it's what the girl really wants. In the case of the Guy Talk article, the guy leapt too far, but it seems like he had absolutely no way of knowing.

So Cameron and Kulick suggest that this is because women are not properly equipped with the language to speak about sex or about what they want to do. Following the discussion of the rape case, they describe an experiment at Antioch College in Ohio, which launched a campus-wide sexual consent policy in which consent was defined not as the absence of "no" but as the presence of "yes". You had to specifically ask for consent to every act - kissing, removing a blouse, touching a breast. This does seem ridiculous and stifling - it's amazingly unsmooth, and so much of sexual interaction is based on picking up unspoken cues. So on the one hand this seems like 'political correctness gone mad'.

On the other hand, it had the inadvertent effect of impelling women to develop a language for representing their desires, both to themselves and to their sexual partners. They were able to talk more explicitly about sexual acts, and ending up having better and more pleasurable sex!

On this matter, then, I would suggest that the problem is that women are not equipped with the language or the ability to appropriately express their desires (or lack thereof) and the confidence that said expression will be understood; this, too, is connected to the fact that women are expected to be much more discerning in their sexual habits than men are - the old slut-stud dichotomy.

That was uncomfortable as I've been there too. Before moving back the U.S. this past year I lived in Southeast Asia and during my 4+ years there, sexually charged situations or interactions seemed to fall much more clearly in to the 'yes' or 'no' categories. Maybe it's because the reality of a communication breakdown was a frequent occurrence and so I and the women I was with tended to be much clearer about our intentions.

On moving back to the U.S. it really seems like there's a whole lot of trepidation and anxiety about sex, be it from the possibility of contracting an STD or STI or to situations described in the article. In matters of sex, it seems like the go to advice is "communicate" but given how often I see the advice given, it seems like a whole lot of people aren't communicating their intentions or desires as well as they could. Mind you, that's a very casual observation.

Recently I had an encounter with a young woman here and when the moment arrived, we had to arrest it and do a little dance.

"I'm on birth control, but use a condom."

"Yeah, of course. I just got tested for everything a month ago and it came back clean, how about you?"

"Me too. Wait, let me get cleaned up first."

I'm glad we got that sorted, but it really did pull me out of the moment. Admittedly, I'm not the smoothest guy ever, but with a new partner I'd love it if I could find a way to 1) establish unequivocally that she is consenting 2) the fact that condoms will be used and 3) if we can safely play with each other without having to worry about herpes, HPV or anything else.