Yeah, It’s interesting. Der Trihs obviously either will or won’t explain himself as most suits him, and I can’t speak for him, but what I see from his post is the same thing I see from several posters on both sides of the issue, a sort of reflexive push away from the middle that takes a reasonable point and presents it unreasonably.
I think in the middle we’ve got this decision to administratively require affirmative consent for sex, and to say that sex that takes place without it is misconduct. This decision of course is motivated by the trend toward criticizing large institutions for having cultural influences that (allegedly, I guess) fail to prevent sexual assaults and simultaneously discourage the reporting of sexual assaults, which is to say the sort of hypothesis being tested is that too many people are harmed by sexual assaults, and that people’s tolerance of ambiguity as to consent is part of that problem. That’s the “whole idea,” it seems to me, or at least what the whole idea ought to be. And, I mean, there’s a lot we could observe about the policy compared to people’s reactions to it - it isn’t the law, it doesn’t say anything about a definition of rape, specifically, only sexual misconduct, and it doesn’t say anything about gender. But at the same time, it’s true that it does, by the letter and probably the spirit, too, make almost all real-world sexual contact a violation. It does represent a radical change in the way normal old sex becomes bad immoral sex, and probably almost nobody in the world has never technically violated the policy.
But really, as soon as the topic is broached, we’re talking about something else entirely. The second sentence of the OP is a misrepresentation, and we’re off and running talking about something that is related, but rhetorically very different.
On the one hand there’s this group whose main concern is the unfairness of the conflicting societal expectations of masculine assertiveness and respect for female autonomy. Through this lens, the Der Trihs kind of posts about how sexist it is to expect affirmative consent are perfectly rational: any guy who has been on at least a couple of dates with your average heteronormative kinds of girls has probably had an experience where he didn’t make a move and lost at least a bit of appeal because of it, and you don’t need to consume much popular media to pick up fairly quickly on the fact that this sort of experience tends to linger, psychologically speaking. Lesson: if you’re a guy and you don’t want to miss opportunities, you can’t come off as hesitant or diffident, ever. Sometimes no means yes, and all that, right. If you look at it from this perspective, the policy is nonsensical: asking is like literally the last thing it would ever be OK to do, because you’re actually saying out loud the thing that you don’t want the girl to think about you: “I’m not sure.” If this is where you’re coming from, you’re going to either get angry about the idea of affirmative consent, or you’re going to ridicule it, or both. Which is pretty much what this thread’s been about - men are now being punished for enjoying sex and traveling the well-worn footpaths that lead there?
Then on the other hand, you’ve got the feminist side, which not to hide the ball or anything is the side I’m on, that approaches this from the starting point that we’ve got a group of people - a fairly large one, by almost all measures, incidentally - who are being harmed by sexual assault. Which means you’re looking for solutions to that problem, focusing on the victims of the harm, instead of the motivations of what you’re going to be classifying as violators of the policy. Through that lens it makes a lot of sense to look at what the group of people being hurt have in common, and what you find is that again and again, there’s this violation of boundaries that seems to stem from a certain sense of entitlement. There’s this act of seizing upon ambiguities to push push push, and where there’s enough push back, there’s no technical assault, just a really awful experience, and the almost-villain is free to try it again with the next person, because hey, push push push. And this is where “no means no” comes from. And from this perspective, when you hear the facts of life about how a guy has to get his mack on and what’re you gonna do, you’re going to get angry or you’re going to ridicule it or both. So one side thinks this is sexist because they all know that in any given interaction, you’re much less likely to seem cool / get laid / get the next date / find true love if you aren’t confident and badass all the time because honey badger takes what he wants. And that’s actually generally true, which makes it hard to dismiss. The other side thinks that’s sexist because sexual assault is a serious problem that we as a society are trying to fix, and honey badger isn’t helping, because literally every time you have a sexual assault, you have a person who was confident and assertive about their desires and went for it, damn the unambiguous preference of the victim. And that’s also definitely true, which makes it hard to dismiss.
And those two things are in conflict with each other, even though they’re both grounded in reality as far as I can tell. So you end up with group 1 hyperbolizing about a girl changing her mind and making every man a dangerous scary rapist registered sex offender, ruined lives, and why can’t a woman say no for herself, and group 2 hyperbolizing about you aren’t going to die if you don’t have sex in the next 12 hours, use your words like a big boy, and maybe you should stop dating crazy insane women who give mixed signals, creepy rapey fratty mansplainer.
And you end up with comparatively fewer people who are prepared to say, well, it does seem to be true that this will put people in a pretty difficult situation vis a vis their sexual partners, and will be shall we say “overinclusive” by the letter of the law, but maybe in practice this is the best compromise.