Sex shatters our egos, and the acts that are most revealing of this fundamental truth are the most apparently degrading ones. Unlike Mackinnon, however, they take this to be a good thing. Taking up this conflation another way, more ostentatiously radical thinkers have agreed with Mackinnon that sex is inherently abject and violating. Here, the search to give consent a solid foundation, to divide good sex from bad sex, tips over into a totalising conflation of sex with rape. She extended this point in Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, where she claimed that women, as a group, lack “power” relative to men and thus cannot ever consent. Already in 1981, feminist legal theorist Catherine Mackinnon argued that any sex after which a woman feels “violated” is rape, whether she consented to it or not. But consent is a more difficult concept than it seems.
Progressives in their churches - universities - also believe in a magical boundary that transforms the degrading into the delightful. The lesson: that’s what will happen to your soul, and possibly your genitals, if you don’t wait until marriage. Its petals were plucked off one by one by a line of boys, leaving her with a bare stem. Once after chapel, they organised a skit in which a girl held a rose. They’d warn us, however, that sex outside of marriage is degrading. It was more effective pro-abstinence education than all the videos of STDs and abortions they showed us. They’d quote the Song of Solomon or, worse, talk about how great sex with their spouses was. Growing up in an evangelical community in the American South during the Clinton and Bush years, I was often told by teachers and pastors that sex is a wonderful, beautiful experience - for married straight couples. One is to separate “good” sex from “bad” sex, a strategy familiar to both conservatives and progressives. There are several ways in which we try to ignore the non-consensual core of sex. More from this author René Girard's apocalypse is now Sex with a partner works, when and to the extent that it does, in part by letting us suspend our inhibitions and want things without having to admit to ourselves that we want them. We notice how attractive the “wrong” person is - a boyfriend’s brother, an ex, a colleague, a student - and feel violated by our own urges. It can be a distraction, an excruciating deprivation, even a source of catastrophic humiliation. It can conjure feelings of disgust and embarrassment. We are born, we mature, and at some point in this process we discover that we our prisoners of our sexuality. This relation is not consensual but something we experience as a given. The original sexual relation - prior to the one we have with any particular person - is our relation to sex itself. Indeed, enjoying sex seems to involve a certain suspension of our usual relationship to ourselves, one in which we are overtaken not so much by the other person as by sex itself. In other words, while we can and should maintain a distinction between consensual and non-consensual acts, there is an important sense in which we are never able to say “yes” to sex. But the deeper problem with this model is that it produces, or rather reveals, exactly what it is meant to avoid, which is the ineradicable ambivalence at the heart of sex. This model of consent has been roundly criticised for deflating erotic tension, leading to sometimes-cringeworthy campaigns to insist that “ consent is sexy” (“If asking for consent ruins sex you’re what? A rapist who sucks at talking dirty?”, reads one viral Tumblr post). Instead of making consent as simple as saying “yes”, these questions had plunged me into a deeply unsexy uncertainty. With my own desire in doubt, I started to feel the very thing this line of interrogation had been meant to avoid. But it’s one thing to want someone in an unspecified way, quite another to start itemising what it is you actually want from them. “Is this ok? And this?” Soon I began to wonder: “ Is it ok?” I’d thought it was when I’d told him to come over. Instead I tried, with a soft laugh and what I hoped was a seductive “ok”, to seem as if I needed my reticence knocked out of me. But it didn’t occur to me to answer with the eagerness of a child agreeing to dessert. I suppose he expected, or hoped for, an enthusiastic “yes!”, signalling what the orientation-day workshops on college campuses call “affirmative consent”.
#Unherd of sex series
“Is it okay if I touch you?” Half an hour after I’d started chatting with this guy on Grindr he was in my bedroom, beginning a series of questions meant to lead from touching to any number of other acts.
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