Apple pulls app that encouraged casual sex on campus

A new mobile app designed to reduce nonconsensual sex among college students lasted nine days on iTunes before Apple removed it last week for “objectionable content.”

The app, called Good2Go, was created to provide a mobile platform for students to initiate and gain consent before casual sex. Its developers claimed it would reduce sexual abuse and assault on campus.

But some critics argue that sex with someone you barely know, the kind of sex this app encourages, is a root cause of sexual assault on today’s college campuses.

“If not for the hook-up culture, ‘rape culture’ could never have acquired its current foothold at our universities,” wrote Adelaide Mena and Caitlin Seery La Ruffa, two recent Princeton University graduates, in an article for the Witherspoon Institute’s Public Discourse. “[O]nce we get used to heedlessly using one another’s bodies, it is dangerously easy to see using another’s body for our own gratification as unproblematic, even if the other person isn’t doing the same to us.”

Developers created Good2Go in response to California’s new “Yes is Yes” sexual consent law, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown in late September. It makes California the first state to outline new standards for sexual assault investigations on college campuses.

Instead of the standard “no means no” mantra, the California law requires colleges and universities receiving state funding to define sexual consent as “an affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.” There must be a verbal or nonverbal “yes,” not just the absence of a “no.” The law also states someone who is unresponsive—drunk, drugged, asleep, or unconscious—cannot grant consent.

The app, which could be downloaded for free from iTunes or Google Play until last week, launched with an opening screen containing the question, “Are We Good2Go?” The initiating person was supposed to hand his or her phone over to the proposed sex partner to select one of three responses: “No, thanks,” “Yes, but … we need to talk,” or “I’m Good2Go.”

If the partner selected the latter, the app moved to a screen that asked about intoxication, which four options: “Sober,” “Mildly intoxicated,” “Intoxicated but Good2Go,” or “Pretty wasted.” If the partner selected the last option, the app told them they were not able to give affirmative consent. If the partner selected any of the first three options, the app moved to a registration page. Only after a complex process that required entering cell numbers, confirming that each person was 18, and entering a password or code texted to a user’s cell phone, would the app clear the couple for sex. The final on-screen reminder for the initiator warned a “yes” could turn into a “no” at any point during sex.

Lee Ann Allman, the app’s creator and a mother of college-aged students, toldSlate she launched the program in response to confusion among college-aged kids about “how they should be approaching somebody they’re interested in.” She said the app meets students where they live—on their phones—and teaches them the basics of affirmative consent and the importance of considering intoxication before sex.

But college students “see from the outset that consent—as it is currently conceived—doesn’t make sense,” say Mena and Ruffa.

“Out of one side of their mouths, [college] administrators acknowledge the alcohol-fueled hook-up culture with a proverbial shrug of the shoulders, and out of the other side tell students that any alcohol use negates the possibility of consent. … The standard is viewed as inconsistent and absurd, so it gets shrugged off.”

Allman plans to re-launch a new version of the app—Good2Go 2.0—this spring.