What if consent isn't enough?
 | By Eleanor Barkhorn Editor at Large, Opinion |
When you go to a dinner party, you pretty much know what to expect, though you've likely also experienced moments of serendipity. Maybe you sat next to the host's hilarious co-worker. You were served a "mocktail" so delicious you didn't notice it was alcohol free. A friend who always vowed he'd never get married revealed he's engaged. |
I'd assume that any surprises have been well within a pretty tight, safe boundary. As the Washington University professor and ethicist Fannie Bialek told Christine Emba in an essay published this week, "I can be interested in what someone says instead of worrying that they will stab me with a dinner knife. Not having to worry about all these radically unexpected things frees up that attention and that possibility of enjoyment." |
Emba argues that the pleasures of the dinner party hold lessons for modern sexual norms. She says that in this age of freedom, there are too few rules around sex between men and women, and it is making people — women especially — miserable. (As Emba writes, "Queer relationships, being less beholden to male-female gender dynamics, may present fewer issues — but they aren't perfect either.") |
Emba, an opinion columnist at the Washington Post who interviewed dozens of people for a recent book on sex and relationships, found that "women, in particular, discussed their sexual experiences in visceral terms: encounters that end in unexpected and alarming acts — a choking, say, or other porn-inspired violence — that they go along with out of surprise or resignation." |
What would it look like to have better-established boundaries, so that sexual encounters were characterized by good surprises — the kind that lead to greater connection and genuine shared pleasure — rather than bad ones? |
Emba doesn't claim to have all the answers, but as she writes, "It's time to raise the standard for what good sexual encounters look like and hold ourselves and our peers accountable to it. Good — that is to say, ethical — sex is not simply about getting consent so that we can do what we want." |
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