Don’t Believe Your Lying Eyes: Young Adults Describe and Disavow the “Copulatory Gaze” In Sexual Communication

Background: The cultivation of romantic and sexual relationships is an important component of development in young adulthood (Morgan & van Dulmen, 2021), and much of college social life is structured around the search for potential partners. Unfortunately, sexual violence sometimes interrupts this natural and life-affirming activity, prompting an array of institutional and legal policy responses designed to curb violence and pursue justice. Among these is affirmative consent—a model that hinges on clear communication and is anchored by the assertion that “only ‘yes’ means ‘yes’” in sexual encounters (Malae, 2022). Researchers have documented discrepancies between affirmative consent policies and self-described student behavior (Hardesty et al., 2022), and have noted the paradoxical persistence of ambiguous definitions of clear communication among those who purport to understand and enact these policies. Institutional definitions of sexual consent are premised on the idea that sexual communication is rational and intentional. Thus, they do not account for pre-reflexive, evolutionarily-grounded courtship behaviors and signals. This is a significant omission, given extensive naturalistic data documenting the salience and predictability of nonverbal cues (Moore, 2010), particularly prolonged eye contact (Hoffmann, 2024) or “the copulatory gaze” (Fisher, 1992), in attracting and selecting partners. The present study was designed to explore the relationship between college students’ self-reported sexual communication and the university’s affirmative consent policy.

Methods: A total of 33 undergraduate students from a mid-sized university were recruited into one of eight same or mixed-gender focus groups. Facilitators used a semi-structured interview guide to elicit accounts of how college students convey and interpret sexual interest in typical social scenarios. Data analysis was an iterative process of tacking back and forth between the interview transcripts, published data, and relevant cultural texts about contemporary sexual behavior and consent. The key analytic insight discussed in this presentation came from triangulating participants’ descriptions of nonverbal communication with research on the neurobiology of human courtship.

Results: Participants identified non-verbal cues—proximity cues, eye contact, and “breaking the touch barrier”—as primary conduits for communicating sexual interest. Each focus group gave similar accounts of a phenomenon, later recognized by the researchers as the copulatory gaze; it is characterized by repetitive, intense, or prolonged eye contact. Participants were initially confident about the power and discernability of such eye contact as a cue of sexual interest. Further probes by the facilitator led many to roll back this confidence and conclude that the whole enterprise was “a guessing game.”

Conclusions & Implications: The consistency of student descriptions with studies of human and primate courtship points, not to a random guessing game, but to an embodied form of knowledge that is rooted in pre-conscious interpretation. Such knowledge is difficult to explain through logical, verbal communication and is largely not accounted for in institutional framings of sexual consent and education. This study demonstrates the power of interpretive research to disrupt dominant institutional frames—including discipline-specific research frames—and calls attention to the reality that human beings are simultaneously symbolic creatures and “intimate animals” (Garcia, 2016).