I don't think it would be easier, but I think it might be more beneficial if it worked.
I don't know how accurate that statistic really is, but my understanding is that it is a measure (accurate or not) of the number of women who say they had sex in college without consenting to it. The 20% figure is credible to me, taken as measured in that way, and might be accurate, even though I would also not be surprised if the true figure is only 10%.
I would guess, however, that the following situation makes at least some contribution to that situation. A man and a woman have sex. Neither of them mention it explicitly. No one says, "do you want to have sex?" or anything like that. But both of them make positive behavioral contributions, and a reasonable person, judging from the behavior alone, would assume that both are consenting.
Then, the woman feels bad afterwards. This surely does happen in real life, for many reasons. Now as Katja Grace mentioned in a recent post, frequently we do not know our own desires directly, but infer them from signs. So it is perfectly possible for the woman in this situation to reason, "look, I feel bad about this, and although I was cooperating physically, I never actually said I wanted it. So I likely did not give real consent."
You could say that we could repair this situation by requiring that people actually mention it and say yes.
That would repair the situation, in the sense that the woman would no longer be able to complain that she had sex without consenting. But notice that when she felt bad, that probably had little to do with whether or not she explicitly said yes: she could feel bad even if she did. And the yes-means-yes policy would do nothing to fix this.
And the yes-means-yes policy would do nothing to fix this.
The question isn't about yes-means-yes as policy but yes-means-yes as cultural value.
No one says, "do you want to have sex?" or anything like that.
The fact that you don't know anyone who practices explicit consent doesn't mean that nobody practices explicit consent.
In the BDSM community it's standard to have explicit consent. Having sex with a person who's tied up without being explicit about bondaries beforehand is seen there as bad.
In Tantra they consigrate sexual sex before tho...
I've started a podcast called Future Strategist which will focus on decision making and futurism. I have created seven shows so far: interviews of computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy, LW contributor Gleb Tsipursky, and artist/free speech activist Rachel Haywire, and monologues on game theory and Greek Mythology, the Prisoners' Dilemma, the sunk cost fallacy, and the Map and Territory.
If you enjoy the show and use iTunes I would be grateful if you left a positive review at iTunes. I would also be grateful for any feedback you might have including suggestions for future shows. I'm not used to interviewing people and I know that I need to work on being more articulate in my interviews.