Ethics first.

The connection between sexual oppression and social repression has been explored by philosophers for centuries. Oscar Wilde reportedly wrote that ‘everything is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.’ The conversation being had right now is about the place where sex and power meet. It’s not enough to just reframe the rules, to ask how precisely flirting and fucking should work now that women are asking to be treated at every stage like people, rather than status objects or receptacles for men’s pleasure and pain. To change the culture of consent, we need to move on from talking about rules and start talking, instead, about ethics – about what sort of society we want to live in, and what it will take to get there. Consent culture, first named by activist and sex-critical feminist Kitty Stryker, is the alternative to all this. Resisting a culture of rape and abuse must involve more than insisting on the individual right to say no, although that’s both a decent starting place and a difficult concept for some people to wrap their foreheads around. There’s a reason for that. The reason that the notion of the real, continuous, enthusiastic sexual consent is so outrageous is that the concept of female sexual agency – let alone active desire – is still a fearful one. Our culture still has very little room for the idea that women and queer people, given the chance, want to enjoy sex just as much as men do. We must get to grips with the idea of consent as ongoing and negotiable, rather than consent as an object, a one-time contract that can be fudged or debated in court. If people of all genders are going to stand a chance of living in this weird new world together without destroying one another, consent is going to have to mean more than that. Consent is more than the absence of no. It is possibility of a real yes. It is the presence of mutual human agency. It is lust and lusciousness and shamelessness. It is the horizon of desire. We are teetering, as society, on the edge of a powerful transformation – but we could just as easily collapse back into the petty, violent certainties of the past. We could stop talking about ending ritual sexual violence in colleges, in schools, in religious and political institution. We could stop insisting on the importance of consent as a baseline for pleasure and desire. We could stop calling out rapists and abusers. We could keep bullying and pressuring and isolating survivors until it’s just too much pressure to speak out, until once again the impact of a rape accusation on a man’s life is considered more important than the impact of rape itself on a woman’s. We could stop all of it and pretend – if we can – that none of it ever happened. Or we could try something new. We could try being better than we’ve been before. We could decide to do better than just trying not to get in trouble, trying not to actively commit rape and assault. We could start to talk about desire and consent as if they matter.