The year of rethinking sex
Madeline Fry Schultz
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If the 1960s heralded the start of the sexual revolution, the 2020s might be the decade of rethinking sex. The past couple of years have seen the publication of Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and Rethinking Sex.
That’s a lot of sex, which shouldn’t be surprising in our age of boundary-free relationships, but what is surprising is that each of these books finds otherwise liberal (or classically liberal) writers reexamining the tenets of mainstream feminism.
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In Rethinking Sex, Christine Emba makes it personal. Emba, who heralds from the Washington Post, where she writes columns on “ideas and society,” uses extensive interviews with young men and women frustrated with the current sexual landscape to paint a picture of a wasteland in which people exploit each other for their own pleasure and society happily condones it as long as it can hide under the umbrella of consent. But consensual sex doesn’t mean good sex.
This is somewhat of a watershed moment for consent, in which mainstream, otherwise “sex-positive” figures are discovering what the more prudish among us knew all along: Simply agreeing to sex doesn’t make it the right thing to do.
In a recent profile in the Los Angeles Times, self-proclaimed “consent educator” Mia Schachter notes that consent is more complicated than it seems. There are reasons one might say “yes” when one wants to say “no,” for example.
“The big revelation was the way I had been violating my own boundaries, that I was not listening to my body,” Schachter said of her own past experiences. “[I was doing] a lot of mind-over-matter thinking, telling my body, ‘Suck it up.’ When I started listening to myself, my body felt better.”
Likewise, Emba tells the story of Rachel, a young woman who says she has never “been in a situation where I felt pushed into something, exactly,” but “there have been times when I felt like, ‘Oh, we’re already here. We’re already in bed.” So she’ll engage in sexual acts that she doesn’t want to do, “and I don’t like it but it’s like: this is the situation we’re in, and I kind of feel like we have to…follow suit.”
When you put it bluntly, having sex to “follow suit” sounds like a terribly dismal outlook. But this type of attitude is plaguing young women who have grown up with the concept that being self-actualized means having a lot of sex — even when they don’t want it.
Emba puts the problem this way: “If we invoke just getting consent as an ideal—the ideal, the highest ethical standard for any encounter—we’re giving ourselves a pass 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.”
Emba also dedicates a whole chapter to the idea that “some desires are worse than others,” using as one example the strange case of the media’s response to the Armie Hammer scandal last year. When it came out that the actor had allegedly abused multiple women and sent disturbing texts about his cannibalism fetish, media outlets were wary of condemning him.
As Emba notes, a Slate article offered the advice that “outing someone specifically for having a fetish isn’t very acceptable,” and a Bitch Media article said Hammer’s problem was that he “crossed boundaries,” not “that he has a cannibalism kink.”
Rarely do media outlets offer such an explicit example of our culture’s unwillingness to accept any sexual mores beyond those of consent. If you can’t say “cannibalism is bad,” what’s left to say?
There’s clearly a lot missing from our current cultural conversation around sex, and in fewer than 200 pages, Emba starts to fill in some gaps. Emba concludes by arguing for a sexual ethic that involves “willing the good of the other,” even if it means having less sex.
And while critics may pose that, rather than provoking, this position is “conventional and conservative,” it’s certainly not conventional in the media spaces that Emba and her critics occupy, which makes it radical indeed.
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Remember that article about the millennial nuns? Or the BuzzFeed piece on how “Gen Z women think sex positivity is overrated”? Young women and men who buck the sexual conventions of their day will always be radicals. And if critics think the answer to the #MeToo movement is more consent workshops, they’re really not paying attention.
Rethinking Sex joins the small but significant handful of recent literature that invites us to reconsider what we as a culture have deemed “good.” What makes Emba’s work so radical is that she’s willing to admit what most people don’t want to: We can’t have a sexual ethic that works if it’s all about us.