The days of men being slick and removing a condom during sexual intercourse could soon be over in California. The California legislature has passed a new bill called AB-453 that makes the practice known as “stealthing” illegal and the act is now listed as a form of sexual battery in the California Civil Code.
The bill makes California the first state to ban stealthing.
The bill was introduced by Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, who told the New York Times that the passing of AB-453 will “make it clear that this is not just amoral, but also illegal.
“It is a big week for victims. It is a big week for discussions around these issues, and it is a big week to talk about consent.”
Garcia had been fighting to get the bill passed since 2017. AB-453 was unanimously passed and is now waiting to be signed by California Governor Gavin Newsom who has until October 10 to put the law into effect. If the bill is signed, people who remove condoms without consent can be sued.
Stealthing turned into a heated discussion in 2017 after Yale Law student Alexandra Brodsky published a paper on it titled Rape Adjacent: Imagining Legal Responses To Nonconsensual Condom Renewal. Her paper contended that stealthing transformed consensual sex into nonconsensual sex and was a “grave violation of dignity and autonomy.”
“I wrote the paper in my third year of law school and never dreamed it would actually influence law in any kind of way,” Brodsky, 31, now a civil rights lawyer, told BuzzFeed.
Garcia, the bill’s sponsor, said she began working on the issue of stealthing after reading Brodsky’s study that showed how widespread the practice was and how groups of perpetrators encouraged it online. The New York State senate has also tried to pass a stealthing bill, S4401, but they haven’t been successful.
