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Washington post columnist Christine Emba offers her thoughts on sexual consent and societal attitudes towards in the 21st century. She’s interviewed by author Donna Freitas. After Words is a weekly interview program with relevant guest hosts interviewing top nonfiction authors about their latest work.

DONNA FREITAS: Hi Christine and congratulations on your new book Rethinking Sex. I’m really excited to be talking to you today about it. My first question for you is just why did you decide to write this book? I would like to understand what went into your your thinking when you decided to take on this project.

But more than that there came to light these cases that were not so clear um cases of that weren’t not necessarily un consensual but consensual and yet still bad, degrading, traumatizing. And so many women related to these stories, stories like Cat Person, the new Yorker short piece of fiction that I think is still the most read piece fiction, piece of short fiction ever. And there was a general sense among young people, people my age, my peers and colleagues that something was off in our sexual culture. The #MeToo movement had highlighted it, but there was something much more personal going on to. So many people were having that they were supposed to enjoy but weren’t. And I wanted to figure out why what was happening, Was there something wrong with our definition of consent? Was there something off about our understanding of what even? Was was there something off about our cultural understandings of what surrounded So, I kept writing columns about this. I started writing longer pieces and then finally, there was just enough to write a book on and that’s where this began.

DONNA FREITAS: I feel like you just touched on all the different topics that I want to ask you more about. But I do wanna you you mentioned that whole list of possibilities about what what is off with what’s going on with especially among young people. And I’m wondering is there something that really rises to the top for you about what is off?

The Question of Consent

CHRISTINE EMBA: Well, one of the threads that runs through thinking rethinking the most is this question of consent. I feel that we have arrived at a moment in time, you know, again, post sexual revolution, post feminist movement, even post sort of college education plans that talk about how you have to respect that no means no, and only yes means yes, that you have to get consent. We’ve almost established consent as sort of the dividing line between good and bad But consent is a floor, you know, it’s a it’s a non negotiable baseline, but it was never meant to be the ceiling. And so we spent a lot of time talking about whether is a sensibly consensual that is legal, but we don’t spend a lot of time talking about whether is good, meaning ethically good morally good, good for the person having it, good for the encounter, and what it creates in society at large. And there just seems a space that’s that’s sort of missing there. People know not to do the worst thing, but there’s a lack of clarity around what the better thing should be, what we should actually be aiming for. We talk about legality all the time, but we aren’t talking about ethics or morals or how people really feel.

DONNA FREITAS: Here’s there’s actually there’s a passage from your book that really struck me that’s related to what you were just talking about, and I wanted to read it, and then have you respond to it? I keep going back to it as I’ve looked at your book. So you say even the newer, qualified version of consent, the affirmative, the enthusiastic still have that as their baseline take off my glasses. Their baseline question, did I get permission of the right kind so that what I’m going to do to this person is not stated lee against their will. The modifiers may try to complicate the question, but they’re most often perceived as simply shifting the goalposts, rather than stopping when your partner says no, you now have to get them to say yes. But the end goal is still to get the from someone else without having committed an actual violation. If we end just getting consent as an ideal, the ideal, the highest ethical standard for any encounter, we’re giving ourselves a path on the hard but meaningful questions whether that consent was fairly gotten what our partners actually want, whether we even should be doing what we’ve gotten consent to do. And then you go on to talk about how, you know, in the end consent as a legal criterion, not an ethical one. And I was wondering if you could say more about that, this idea that our conversations around consent, you know, seem to have moved us toward the idea that as long as you get a yes, then everything is fine. That this is this is the goal. So, um, yeah, can you say more? Yeah,

CHRISTINE EMBA: No, I think that’s one of the key passages in the book, and it’s one that I like that, I quote very frequently, and it, you know, later on on that page, I actually have a copy of the book here with me to, um, you know, I say non consensual is always wrong, but the inverse is tricky is consensual always right now, not necessarily can consensual be damaging to an individual, to their partner, to their society. Absolutely. You know, and it’s hard to look at our sexual marketplace and say that consent has fixed the problems of in some ways, it’s a fig leaf and it’s it’s falling off. And I think that, you know, consent is in some ways made our conversation about what should look like about what the good looks like a lot smaller. Um, I quote later on in the book, the uh, Georgetown feminist law professor Robin West, whose work has been really influential for me. She talks about this idea of consent beginning to serve almost a legitimating function when it comes to sex. There’s this idea that, you know, we make agreements based on consent, this sort of contractual question, and then once something is consented to, you know, consent sort of legitimizes the action. We assume that anything that’s consented to must then be, you know, good or fine or we’re getting something out of it. And when that happens with you know, something you’ve consented to, you feel like it should be good. There’s no space to talk about what else might be happening, um, whether something has gone wrong post consent, you know, what it actually means to be doing the thing that you’ve consented to doing, and that has led to problems. I think socially for so many young women and men who have these encounters that they may have consented to, but then they still don’t feel good about. And yet they don’t have, they don’t have recourse to complain. They don’t have anything that they can say to sort of explain their discontent because theoretically, you know, they legitimated their act by consenting to it. And I think that there can be a lot of sort of pain and hurt hidden there. And also big questions that end up swept under the rug, just because you consented to something again, doesn’t mean that it’s good, doesn’t mean that it’s good for society at large? We sort of lose the ability to interrogate more more fully. You know, what do we want? Why do we want? What we want? What would be good for us to want, in some sense.

DONNA FREITAS: Yeah, this was a phenomenon that I observed over and over and talking to people about So, for this book, I did dozens of interviews with, you know, young men, young women, um kind of across the US and in some other countries too. And there was this, first of all, I would say that people were really excited, like, more exciting than more excited than I would have guessed to have someone to have this conversation with to be able to talk, sort of openly about their feelings about what they thought meant, what they wanted it to mean what they had hoped for, and how they were being disappointed in some ways, but there was a real reluctance in some ways to admit that was meaningful, or rather not a reluctance to admit it, you know, and I would ask people out, right, okay, what what is to you, what does it mean? What do you want from it? Um they talked about big things, you know, they talked about intimacy, transcendence. The desire for care, even love, but they felt almost sheepish about it about saying that they wanted to mean something because they felt so much cultural pressure to say that it meant nothing. Um that they were collecting experiences, you know, a young woman told me that she sort of struggled with this question because she wanted to be, you know, kind of a good, modern sort of liberated person. And to her that meant that, you know, she should be hooking up with abandoned. She should be having as much as she could have because she was in her twenties and that was what youth was for, right? And you know, she should be cool about it. She should be chill. It shouldn’t mean that much. And yet it did, it did mean a lot to her. And she was hurt by encounters that were supposed to be meaningless and feel good. And she felt embarrassed talking about that. Um, and so in some sense, part of this book is just a legitimating function for me saying, no, it’s not crazy for you to feel that way. You’re you’re not the crazy one for thinking that something meaningful is meaningful, that you have feelings about something

Shame

DONNA FREITAS: That makes me think so much about shame. And, you know, for the last 20 years, I’ve been having conversations similar to yours with with college students about these issues. And one of the things I’ve also found is just There’s this um, shame in talking about how, you know, people will say, I know I’m not supposed to care, but I do care. And there’s embarrassment that they can’t seem to not care. And and so this has been going on for 20 years. I’ve been hearing this conversation and you’re clearly hearing that too. And one of the ironies I see in that expression of shame is that we are supposed to be so liberated around And yet we are so um like I feel like the shame has shifted elsewhere. The shame that we experience is not from when we have Like it used to be. It’s because we actually have feelings about the we’re having and we’re embarrassed to admit this. And I’m wondering if you could comment a little bit about that. You have a chapter called Were liberated and we’re miserable. And I was wondering if that resonates with you what I just said. And you know, with regard to that chapter?

CHRISTINE EMBA: No, completely. And that there’s a chapter called deliberated and we’re miserable. And then the chapter that follows that is actually called we want to catch feelings and what you’re saying makes so much sense to me actually, um there was kind of this feeling that, you know, post sexual revolution with the advances that the feminist movement had made, and these are really important advances to be clear. The boundaries around had fallen. You know, the barriers to having good were finally down. And that was supposed to be again liberating for us. But I’m finding that for a lot of young people, the liberation, you know, the sort of open field of that’s rolling out before them actually leaves them feeling a bit lost, um, a bit unsure of what to do. You know, there’s a lack of clarity, especially post me too, of how to approach members of the opposite You know what a sexual encounter, what even a romantic encounter should look like the first or second time. And so you kind of see a retreat actually from this open playing field by both women and men. You know, there are a lot of men who, especially young men, who feel almost afraid to approach now because they’re worried that they might be doing something wrong because the boundaries are unclear. And then for women, they often experience these encounters where, you know, they think one thing is going to happen and then something wildly different happens in a sexual encounter and they feel taken aback or shocked or even abused in some way. But again, there are really no boundaries to point to you to say, well, you shouldn’t you shouldn’t have done that apart from the very, very low bar of consent. Um, you know, you can say, well, you shouldn’t have assaulted me perhaps, but apart from that it seems like they can’t really criticize anything because again, they’re supposed to be liberated, they’re supposed to be free. And I think this creates a lot of sort of confusion and dismay in the sexual landscape. A lot of almost milling about trying to figure it out. And this is not bringing the happiness that was promised all of this freedom, you know, does not necessarily make people happier in some ways. You know, it makes them more confused.

The Hook up in theory vs. the hook up in reality

DONNA FREITAS: It’s interesting. I one of the things that I’ve talked for so long about in my work is the idea that there’s the hook up in theory versus the hook up in reality. And the hook up in theory is supposed to be incredibly wonderful and liberating and amazing. And but it’s really hard to find someone who reports that actually it was amazing in reality. And mostly it’s it’s really a mix of confusion and, you know, sort of uncomfortable feelings and uncertainty. And, you know, I feel like, you know, we we have to really think about reality. And I one of the things that always seems like a revelation when I’m talking to college students about my research is this idea that I say a lot, you know, you have the right to decide what you want to do and what you don’t want to do, you have the right to say to draw boundaries, like you have the right to take time to think about, You know, what is it that I really want from sex? Like, you don’t have to just go along and you know, why do you think it’s so hard um to ask for boundaries or to say like, I will do this, but not this, or like I’m not ready for this. Like, what is going on with our nervousness about drawing lines around for ourselves?

CHRISTINE EMBA: That’s a really interesting question. You know, I one thing that I found interesting in writing this book, interesting both in the research and also in thinking through my own feelings here, is that as a culture, as we talk about we have sort of accepted a a definition of positivity that seems at odds. Well, that is at odds with the original definition of positivity. Um I describe, you know, the sort of modern idea of positivity with the descriptor. Uncritical. Uncritical positivity. And it’s this idea that well, we have to be really positive about basically, that, you know, all is good that we should be having more of it, that any activity that happens between two consenting adults is great or it’s their own business and you can’t be critical of it. You shouldn’t be asking questions that sort of walls off those encounters and I call this Uncritical because, you know, it doesn’t allow us to interrogate anything more about about about, you know, whether certain desires should be acted upon about, you know, what the emotional or even physical ramifications are for the people who are taking part about what the societal implications are of, you know, certain things being mainstreamed, whether it’s, you know, fetishes that implicate race or or sexism or classism or anything else. Um, I think a lot of young people feel that to to be seen as modern to be seen as positive. They just have to be up for it all the time, in some in some sense, that to complain or to, you know, raise qualms about a certain actor encounter would mean that they’re judgmental or repressive or old fashioned in some way. And, you know, there’s it almost feels as though there’s almost a stigma against making judgments in some ways against, you know, trying to say, you know, well, certain things might be good or bad or even good or bad for me, because you don’t want to feel like you’re judging other people, you know, we know what that has looked like in the past. And also in some senses, because by making judgment calls, some of our behaviors might be implicated too. So it’s almost a sort of don’t ask don’t tell don’t don’t make judgments. Don’t ask for boundaries because that’s unfair in some way that’s too critical, that’s not positive, that’s anti or negative when in fact boundaries can be good for us, You know, as any therapist would tell you boundaries are important and we have to make them. But there’s almost a push to have none in the quest to be seen as ultimately positive. Does that make sense?

Critical Positivity

DONNA FREITAS: Yeah. You know, the your your phrase on critical positivity, it was one of the places I really paused in your book to to think just because I think it’s such an interesting phrase, and, you know, it it I think we’re we’re so pro positivity, and I understand why understand what’s behind that we want to affirm as a good and we want to empower people to feel good about having it. But uh, you know, there is this sort of like, are we allowed, like, are we allowed to say no to something? And one of the things I was thinking about when you were talking was this conversation I had once with a group of college students, where they ended up talking about how, like, really, what we want to do is just make out on the dance floor, and but then there’s all this other stuff like around it where we have to go, you know, we have to go home with people if we, because if we start making out it has to lead to And and one of the things I kept asking them was why can’t you just make out on the dance floor, if that’s really what you want to do, like, what is stopping you from stopping there, and you know, then I think about how somehow, you know, in the in our conversations, you know, there’s a coercive element around like, we are actually like, people are afraid to say no and or they’re afraid to set limits and I find this a strange situation given also the Primacy we’re putting on our conversations about consent. Like, I feel like there’s a disconnect there, but then we’re we’re not seeing it. I don’t know if that makes sense to you or if if that’s also sort of what you’re talking about, but I see a conflict there.

Yeah, now I see that, I see that too. Um I mean, I think that it it stems from a sort of mismatch that I feel like we’ve inherited around and how we think about it, you know, on the one hand, whether it’s through shows like literally in the City or girls or any of these other sort of media productions that makes out to be the thing that sort of defines you as a person, something that helps you self actualize that makes you liberated and modern and sort of a real human in the world, there’s this idea that you should be having to to sort of be a full and fulfilled person and, you know, so many of the people I talked to in this book told me about this, sort of this idea that they had about what they should be happening, even if that wasn’t necessarily what they wanted. You know, there was a young woman who told me about hooking up with somebody who she didn’t really like, well, she liked him a lot, actually, but he was moving away and it was complicated and she had one chance to hook up with him and she was like, well, I mean, I did it for this for the story, right? For because I’m supposed to, like, that’s what I’m supposed to be doing in my twenties, even though it had emotional ramifications, and she was fairly upset afterwards. So, there’s this idea that that to be kind of a full adult in some way, you should be having these encounters, even if you don’t personally want, you should be adventurous and be pushing your boundaries and going for it. Um so that’s that’s sort of one angle on the other side, though, there’s this is kind of a paradoxical view of what is supposed to mean, means everything, and that it’s this self defining act, but it’s also supposed to be something that means nothing that you don’t have feelings about, actually, it’s just one physical act like any other. And so it would be weird if you had and then felt bad about it, or that you didn’t want to do something because, you know, like, what does it matter? It’s it’s just a thing. Um so there’s almost this like kind of dual idea of what is everything and nothing that makes it something that you have to do and also something that you shouldn’t feel anything about, you shouldn’t feel emotional about. And so in pursuit of that ideal, you know, young people especially, I think who are really open to kind of these social pressures feel feel like they have to go after these encounters. I feel like that’s what they should be doing and that if they have, you know, some sort of emotional blowback or a bad experience, that’s their fault personally for not being as, as with it or as liberated as they should as they’re told that they should be.

Yeah. You know, the your your phrase on critical positivity, it was one of the places I really paused in your book to to think just because I think it’s such an interesting phrase, and, you know, it it I think we’re we’re so pro positivity, and I understand why understand what’s behind that we want to affirm as a good and we want to empower people to feel good about having it. But uh, you know, there is this sort of like, are we allowed, like, are we allowed to say no to something? And one of the things I was thinking about when you were talking was this conversation I had once with a group of college students, where they ended up talking about how, like, really, what we want to do is just make out on the dance floor, and but then there’s all this other stuff like around it where we have to go, you know, we have to go home with people if we, because if we start making out it has to lead to And and one of the things I kept asking them was why can’t you just make out on the dance floor, if that’s really what you want to do, like, what is stopping you from stopping there, and you know, then I think about how somehow, you know, in the in our conversations, you know, there’s a coercive element around like, we are actually like, people are afraid to say no and or they’re afraid to set limits and I find this a strange situation given also the Primacy we’re putting on our conversations about consent. Like, I feel like there’s a disconnect there, but then we’re we’re not seeing it. I don’t know if that makes sense to you or if if that’s also sort of what you’re talking about, but I see a conflict there.

Yeah, now I see that, I see that too. Um I mean, I think that it it stems from a sort of mismatch that I feel like we’ve inherited around and how we think about it, you know, on the one hand, whether it’s through shows like literally in the City or girls or any of these other sort of media productions that makes out to be the thing that sort of defines you as a person, something that helps you self actualize that makes you liberated and modern and sort of a real human in the world, there’s this idea that you should be having to to sort of be a full and fulfilled person and, you know, so many of the people I talked to in this book told me about this, sort of this idea that they had about what they should be happening, even if that wasn’t necessarily what they wanted. You know, there was a young woman who told me about hooking up with somebody who she didn’t really like, well, she liked him a lot, actually, but he was moving away and it was complicated and she had one chance to hook up with him and she was like, well, I mean, I did it for this for the story, right? For because I’m supposed to, like, that’s what I’m supposed to be doing in my twenties, even though it had emotional ramifications, and she was fairly upset afterwards. So, there’s this idea that that to be kind of a full adult in some way, you should be having these encounters, even if you don’t personally want, you should be adventurous and be pushing your boundaries and going for it. Um so that’s that’s sort of one angle on the other side, though, there’s this is kind of a paradoxical view of what is supposed to mean, means everything, and that it’s this self defining act, but it’s also supposed to be something that means nothing that you don’t have feelings about, actually, it’s just one physical act like any other. And so it would be weird if you had and then felt bad about it, or that you didn’t want to do something because, you know, like, what does it matter? It’s it’s just a thing. Um so there’s almost this like kind of dual idea of what is everything and nothing that makes it something that you have to do and also something that you shouldn’t feel anything about, you shouldn’t feel emotional about. And so in pursuit of that ideal, you know, young people especially, I think who are really open to kind of these social pressures feel feel like they have to go after these encounters. I feel like that’s what they should be doing and that if they have, you know, some sort of emotional blowback or a bad experience, that’s their fault personally for not being as, as with it or as liberated as they should as they’re told that they should be.

Well, again, I mean, to go back to kind of an earlier question, we talk a lot about liberation and freedom and how having more choice is good, but in the same way that, you know, being shamed for having uh is not free, is kind of a boundary being shamed for not having is not free either. That’s just sort of uh you know, a constraint in the opposite direction. And so when we talk about liberation, you know, we want people to be free to to choose and pursue sort of the sexual life that helps them flourish. Um that is fitting to them, you know, a culture that actually helps them reach their goals. And that could look like a lot of different things. I mean,

I mean, I guess, you know, thinking about that chapter, this this idea of reclaiming a pause or you know what if we had less in writing that it almost felt a little bit taboo. Like that was something that we’re not supposed to suggest. And I think a lot of, you know, some of the early responses to this book were like, oh, you must like dislike sex. You must be anti because you’re suggesting that people should have less of it. But you know what I’m actually pushing for in this book is for, again, people to rethink their experiences to really think about what means to them and what they want from it and to have fewer of those encounters that you walk into. You know, you have, but you don’t really want to be there, but you’re just doing it because you thought you should.

One of the things that I love that you talked about this pause and one of the things that I’ve been advocating, um for a really long time is I usually tell students when I come to campus is, you know, you should take a whole semester just to like devoted to thinking about and what it means to you. Like that’s your right. It’s it’s your obligation to yourself. Like you get to do that. And I think we often don’t stop and think and we don’t necessarily ask ourselves what does this mean to us. And I want to go back to a word you used earlier that I think is related to this topic, which is you you talked about the sexual marketplace and when I hear that, you know, just the idea that there’s a there’s a marketplace, which means, you know, we’re talking about business terms, which then I feel like leads us to conversation about branding and all kinds of, all kinds of things like that, that I don’t really want to associate with my humanity and but I do think we we think about in terms of a marketplace like just even, you know, Tinder, you know, like the different apps we have that that support that notion. And I’m wondering how do you, do you think that thinking about that we have now, does that affect our ability to be able to think about as meaningful? Or how does it how does it affect that if at all

Yeah, the concept of a sexual marketplace is a depressing one. And yet I think it really it really is relevant, you know, I have a whole chapter in rethinking actually, where I talk about sort of the advent of Tinder and Hinge and Bumble and all of these swipe dating apps. And there is research that shows that as those apps became ascendant, they just shot up and became the number one way that people meet other people romantically um where we used to meet people through friends or through work or even family that drops off sharply and it’s you know, taken up by apps. But you know, the thing about these apps is that again, they are their commercial tools, they make money off of people being on them and and staying on them and staying single and the way that they are set up um promotes a certain vision of and romance and of other people. You know, if you look at any of the popular dating apps, Tinder and Bumble especially are set up to look like kind of a deck of cards right, where you see someone’s face and a few lines about them and then you just swipe left or right, you’re kind of flipping through people. Um, and that does lead to a sort of transactional mindset where other individuals are viewed as commodities in a sense. Um, and you are sort of taking your pick as to what’s the best fit for you and discarding what might not fit and we might not think that we’re being affected by these setups, that we have a certain idea of what means to us or for what romance should look like. You know, our society does in fact shape how we approach I remember talking to one woman um as we talked about these dating apps and she told me that she had joked with her friends about ordering a guy off of Tinder, um, because you know, she too wanted to prove that she could have no strings attached And even as she said, that phrase, ordering a guy off Tinder, she herself paused and was like, I don’t, I don’t know why I said that, maybe that’s not. I mean that was a joke, that’s that’s not how I should think about other people, but I mean, this sort of idea of the marketplace and people as sort of products that you can choose from was very firmly baked into kind of the mindset through which she was approaching dating. And I think that this, you know, is also in some ways a factor of again, consent culture, where it sort of feels like you’re trading in some way you agree with somebody else too, allow them to have with you or get from them. You know, it’s sort of a transactional approach in nature, but the thing is most people don’t want to have transactional you know, their idea of a good relationship isn’t, you know, two people bartering for this act, but actually something that sees them as a full person, something that involves empathy and care and being seen for who they are and something that leaves their humanity and their human dignity intact. Um and so while I I think that we are sort of being trained to see ourselves as members of a sexual marketplace, there’s something within a lot of people that is really repelled by and wants to reject that framing we just have to figure out how to do. So,

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, I can give two, I have two thoughts on this one. You know, I started writing rethinking in 2019 and kept writing it through the pandemic. And so there was an interesting shift that I saw happen um pre pandemic people were moving around, they’re really busy, they were swiping away dating away. Um but when the first lockdowns hit, you know, when people finally had to pause, sort of stay home alone or not alone and think about what they wanted from their lives from their relationships. A lot of thinking did happen actually, people finally had a second to stop and think like is this thing I’m doing, really bringing me closer to the goals that I have. Um and so forced pause was helpful that said, I am not advocating for another pandemic or another, you know, sad reason for a forced pause. I I think um sorry, I’m just catching my train of thought here. I think another thing that we need to do. Um and that I was actually kind of the impetus for for writing this book to was after the Me Too Moment, you know, with the media men list with the Aziz Ansari story, cat person, etcetera. It did seem like there was a moment where people had through conversation through these stories that were finally bubbling up into the public eye, stopped and said, oh yeah, there’s this is bad, I’m not enjoying this scene, something something is off here. But that almost felt like where the conversation stopped with the recognition that things were bad. I think that the next step in pushing people to actually take a moment and really think aloud, is to have the next step in an open conversation to kind of propose substantive, you know, statements or claims about say what means, what we want from it, what is ethical, what is not ethical, etcetera and do this in public in conversation with each other, not just whispered at bars or among our friends so that these questions can be sort of argued about debated, we can correct our assumptions if they’re false. And in that way, move forward to something better. I mean, rethinking is subtitled a provocation, but you know, it’s meant to be a provocation to this kind of conversation actually by making claims about what is. Say that it’s that it’s meaningful that it could in fact be spiritual about what our experiences with might be, that we might want to catch feelings actually. You know, that some longings maybe shouldn’t be acted upon because they’re not good for us by actually proposing claims that we can talk about and build understandings from there, we can move forward in the discussion.

I do. Absolutely. I mean, I think in you know, just the introduction to the book, there’s a part where I say you’re not crazy right to the reader, You’re you’re not crazy. The thing you feel is off is off. It’s not crazy to want something better than the sexual culture that we have now. It’s not crazy to be asking questions about whether what’s going on is is really right for for you or for society at large. And I think by just allowing people to speak up about what they feel, um to not necessarily feel like they have to abide by a certain vision of what positivity looks like, or a certain vision of, you know, girl boss or lean in feminism. Um, that expands the conversation and, you know, also allows us to change the culture if we wish.

I want to ask aboutual ethics, which and, you know, you brought up earlier in our conversation the idea of the good and like the ual good. And you just brought up sexual ethics again in a second ago, and I wanted to there’s a passage in your book uh in this chapter called Some desires are worse than others. And, you know, you’re you’re talking before this section about how we fear being asked to look closely at our own desires. And so, um so here’s the section, you say the consent paradigm gives us a way out of this discomfort, or at least makes it easier for us to stick to a position of moral neutrality. In the contemporary era, we have settled upon consent as the lowest common denominator that we can all agree on once we see that is established, consent functions as an iron curtain, a social and political divider that cuts our experiences in half. We use it to separate our intimate lives into those parts that are up for discussion and those that are seen as exempt from critique. But in allowing consent to be that divider, we have arbitrarily and incorrectly set many of our deepest tensions and disagreements behind a veil consent has helpfully given us a way of dodging difficult questions about morality and autonomy, but they are unhealthy ones to dodge because some things are worse than others, or at least should not be mainstreamed, and we should be able to say so. And you go on about how hard it is to express our discomfort. And and then you say, when we do want to object to a particular actor, practice often the best we can do is frame it as not a moral failing, but a failure of consent. And I wanted you to say more about that, that, you know, you like consent is sort of our only way through, but we’re we still can’t seem to talk about ethics or morality in the context of

right? I mean, I think one thing, one of the things that’s interesting about the current sexual landscape is that, again, as as we said at the very beginning, we have a fairly robust sort of legal doctrine um about were able to talk about what’s allowed and what’s not allowed. But again, consent. And, you know, the legal questions leave so much out, you know, practices that are consensual can still be damaging. You know, the lack of consent alone is not the only indicator of problematic And then there’s the fact that we can consent to things that are still harmful to us, and we don’t really have a language to talk about that when we’re only talking about consent? I think that we also just don’t really have a strong language for for talking about what is good or, you know, what is bad in some sense? We have in some ways in the modern era, sort of pushed the idea of morality, or at least a shared morality kind of out of the public square, um, within the public square in public, you can talk about whether things are legal. You know, whether they’re consented to whether they’re not, whether something was actively criminal, but to go deeper and ask, you know, what does this say about us? What are our moral standards and frameworks? Do we do we share those when we talk about what should they be? What ideals should we hold up that’s seen as something private and personal, something that maybe you can hold for yourself, but, you know, you can’t put on another person. But then that becomes a little bit strange, you know, when it comes to because that is something that you’re doing with another person where ideally you want to be sharing the same standards and then in and of itself is such, such a social act in some ways. You know, it’s something that we’re all doing. It’s something that we all talk about, but it also kind of shapes our society up to, you know, the creation of another person, it’s implicated in so many other factors. So if we can’t really make judgments there, then we leave a lot of space open for, you know, problems to arise that we can’t really address.

Well, I think there are a couple of reasons and one actually, I think is really justified. You know, one of the push backs that people have against, you know, talking about sexual ethics or sort of old school sexual ethics is that they’ve been repressive in the past and we we know this right. The sexual revolution happened for a reason, the feminist movements happened and are happening for a reason. We’ve seen how sort of top down hierarchical understandings of what’s right and what’s wrong in certain moral codes have been used to oppress and, you know, reject people for centuries, whether it’s women, whether it was sexual minorities, whether it was people of unflavored races or classes. We’ve seen how moral judgments can be used as, you know, not moral as actually just a way to sort of a press and and hurt other people and we don’t want to do that. We’ve very justifiably sort of moved away from that on purpose because we’ve seen the harm that it can cause. But I think that, you know, there’s still space to talk about morals in the public square. I think what we have to do, you know, to avoid those harms is to talk about them in public and in common making sure that we are inclusive of the views of, you know, groups that have been marginalized in the past and that we make our assumptions incorrigible as we learn more about other people who we didn’t know as we sort of get more input from other groups, who we might be thinking about making decisions for we actually bring that information into play into how we make up our boundaries today.

Yeah. You know, writing this book was it started out as almost an academic question in some ways, thinking about the sexual culture post Me too, and being like, what’s wrong here? How do we fix it? And then in the course of writing a book about andual ethics, I became implicated myself. And, you know, I had to think about where did I get my ideas about what is good and not good or what’s right and what’s wrong and how relatable are those and, you know, the way that I think about these questions about a lot of questions is influenced by my faith, I’m catholic christian. Um, but I also wanted to write a book that was, you know, relevant to not just christians or not just people of faith, but anybody who wanted to enter this conversation about our sexual culture and how to make it better. So in the book, I talk about, for instance, what might be a better standard for a better sexual ethic. And I proposed the idea of willing the good of the other. Um, and that’s Aristotle by way of ST thomas, Aquinas, you know, and willing the good of the other implies that you think about the other person’s good as much as you would think about your own. You know, you you weigh care for them as highly as you care for yourself. And it also suggests that you have to figure out what the good is right. You actually have to be searching for the good, the common good. And I like this ideal, even though it’s sort of it does spring in some ways from faith and catholic social teaching because it’s legible to anyone. You know, in some ways the golden rule crosses crosses all sort of faith and religious boundaries, even if you’re not religious, you can still have a sense for what the good is, what you might be searching for. We all have a sense of what human flourishing might look like and we all want that for ourselves. But I also, I think talk about religion in the book too, because religion is in some ways a record of how people across millennia have tried to grapple with these big questions right about again, what the good looks like, what a good life looks like. You know, talking about through the lens of faith. There are many traditions that have helped us think through what might look like, what it might mean again, what the good might look like there. And there’s richness to draw from that has helped inform my beliefs and you know, is still relevant to people even who don’t share my faith.

Oh wow. Well you know, first I’ll say one thing um if you write us about if you’re writing a book about or even if you’re just writing on these topics, at least I found that people just tell you things. Um sometimes it’s in interviews, but sometimes many times actually people just seek you out um because they have things that they want to unload or questions that they want to ask that, you know, they didn’t feel that they could ask someone else without being sort of judged for it. Um and even just those encounters um kind of shaped how I felt about the book in many ways and the direction that I went. But there’s one encounter that I that I relay in the book that seemed to encapsulate so many of the the problems with our current sexual ethic and the questions that we’ve talked about even now. Um I was at a holiday party, you know, holiday house party in D. C. Um and I was talking to people I mentioned that I was writing this book and a woman who had never met, you know, pulled me aside to sensibly chat about sex. And you know, she told me about how she was dating this guy, it was early, she really liked him, but he choked her during and you know, she consented to it I guess, but she didn’t really like it and was that okay? And so she was sort of asking me basically a perfect stranger whether it was okay to dislike being subjected to this surprise, extreme act during a sexual encounter. Um, and that was a surprising thing to occur just at a, at a party. This wasn’t even an interview and it was a conversation that seemed to to show so many of the failings of our culture. Um the fact that this woman didn’t feel comfortable judging in somewhere, you know, having boundaries as we talked about before, that she felt that it might be kind of like a bad or out there thing too, to not like this extreme act to the point that she had to ask a stranger if it was okay for her to not like this. Um the fact that she felt that she, you know, consented to it, and so like maybe it was her fault that was that this was happening, that she was just like putting up with it because that’s what you do now, and this is normal. Um as if, you know, consenting to this made it, made it better. There was, and then I think also just this, you know, I didn’t have anyone to ask about this because like who do we really talk to about the problems that we’re facing in because we’re supposed to be so positive, it’s like kind of a downer to say that you don’t like something. So I guess I like pull this stranger aside um and sort of reveal myself to them because I don’t feel comfortable saying anything negative, you know, to my partner, there was just so much in this conversation and in this encounter that that informed, you know, thinking through questions of power questions of how we talk about questions of what consent can and can’t do. That really stuck with me as I was thinking through the questions throughout the entire book, not just the chapter that the story is featured in. Show Less Text

Wow! Well, I mean, I would say that my audience is kind of anyone who’s thinking about but I’ll say that in writing this book, I was thinking about my peers, you know, my my friends like this girl who asked me this question about this encounter that she felt that she couldn’t say no to um you know, college students and, you know, my younger siblings who are encountering this culture and, you know, may feel that it’s not quite right, but don’t, you know, know exactly what to say about it. Um talking about, you know, talking to, I guess people who realized during the Me Too movement that they had had encounters that might have been consensual but were still bad. And it’s okay to say that, you know, they were still bad whether you consented to them or not. My hope for this book is, you know, as we talked about earlier for people to realize that, you know, they’re not in the wrong for wanting something more, for wanting something better, that they should be able to talk about this out loud to have honest conversations about what means to them and to, you know, society more broadly and to actually shape what the culture looks like rather than just be shaped by it.