Sex is like a cup of tea.

If you have someone over to visit, you might offer them a cup of tea. They can either accept or decline, and either way is perfectly fine.

They might say they don’t know if they want tea, in which case you would not make them feel guilty for not wanting tea or assume that ‘I don’t know’ means that they do, in fact, want tea. If at first they say they want a cup of tea and, halfway through brewing the cup, they change their minds, you would not proceed to force-feed them the tea since they initially said they wanted it.

If they are unconscious you cannot ask them if they want tea, and therefore you would not make them a cup of tea.

That’s consent, folks. It’s as easy as making someone a cup of tea. This popular video made the rounds on Facebook last year, and it shares an important message – consent does not have to be that complicated.

As your local Sports for Dummies columnist, I’m taking a different approach to my column this week in honor of the Sex Edition. We won’t really be discussing sports – unless you consider sex a sport. You do burn calories, I suppose.

So I want to take sex to the most basic level, since it’s something that apparently people still have a very difficult time understanding – consent.

A poll by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 1 in 5 women have been sexually assaulted in college. Clearly consent is still an issue people need to talk about.

Consent is a requirement for sex. There is no such thing as nonconsensual sex. Without consent, it’s no longer sex; it is rape. It does not belong in the same category as sex.

Consent is not just the absence of saying “no.” Consent is a clear, strong, vocalized “Yes.” If a person is not in a position to give a clear, enthusiastic “Yes,” they are not capable of giving consent. A person who is heavily intoxicated, for example, cannot give consent since judgment is impaired.

An unconscious person cannot give consent.

Don’t make them drink the tea. Just because someone is incapable of saying ‘no’ doesn’t mean they are implying a ‘yes.’

Similarly, there is no such thing as ‘implied consent.’ If a woman dresses in a revealing outfit, dances with a man all night, and then declines having sex with him, she has done absolutely nothing wrong. She does not owe him sex. Nobody in any situation, ever, owes another person sex. It doesn’t matter if you’ve had sex before. It doesn’t matter how she is dressed.

Assuming someone will always have sex with you because they’ve had sex with you before is like assuming that because they loaned you $20 before, you are now entitled to go through their wallet and take money from them whenever you want. It just doesn’t work that way.

Consent is a critically important concept to understand, and it provides the most basic foundation for sex. It is vitally important that anybody who is sexually active or wants to become sexually active understands this concept with absolute clarity.

Without consent, sex does not happen.