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I don't think consent can only ever be verbal. I have given my fair share of back slaps and shoulder grabs and hugs and so on that I didn't ask permission for in advance but that were nevertheless consensual. Part of it is the shared context the action is occurring in. Like, if you're on a date and your partner leans in for a kiss, they probably want to be kissed and it is ok to kiss them. If you have to grab their head with both hands and hold them in place to forcibly kiss them? Less obviously consensual.
I guess this demonstrates the problem with trying to collapse all interpersonal contact into the legalistic 'consensual-nonconsensual' binary. In the examples you give, you clearly did not seek consent, nor were you granted it. That's fine, because the model isn't suited to most human behaviour, and we shouldn't act as if it is. Somebody being okay with a physical interaction after the fact isn't consent. If that were the case, then someone not being okay with it after the fact would have to be treated as non-consent, whereas in reality consent wasn't sought in either case.
Your example of kissing is valid but not that helpful, since almost all actual kisses will be less cut and dry than the example. In reality, women rarely lean in for a kiss, they wait for the man to move to them. They may give lots of non-verbal signals of course, but those are ambiguous, and so can't be taken as explicit consent.
So how about we ask her permission before kissing her? Well, you could do that, but there's a good chance that will kill any latent sexual attraction she had for you.
My favorite verbal signal while hesitating to kiss a girl was "you better not ask to kiss me", which spurred me to rather successful action.
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Ultimately, all roads lead back to "just read her mind, bro."
Regardless of the object-level topic-of-the-day at hand, men need to take on maximal agency and accountability when it comes to approaching, escalating, and reading The Signs, where The Signs are extremely ambiguous, inconsistent across women, and ambiguous and inconsistent even within the same woman.
It's almost as if it's a shit-test to filter for men who are willing to just shrug off and trample over such "Signs," a filter for men with sufficient mental fortitude and/or social capital to just dominate interactions and treat women as passive NPCs.
As you noted, treating her as your equal in agency and accountability, asking for explicit consent each step of the way, would just kill her attraction toward you and her ability to feel "omg, it just like happened!"
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To be fair, feminism articles from 2014 might as well have been pulled out of the Qumran caves.
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I guess I don't think that the presence or absence of consent is only determined by some explication of its presence or absence.
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