Beyond consent culture

Some women in their 20s are asking for sex education that comprehends more than just consent or even enthusiastic consent.

From the perspective of a millennial woman like me, about a decade older than these would-be counter-revolutionaries, such a demand is long overdue. Young women have been dissatisfied with the sexual and (un)romantic landscape around them for some time.

But I guess things had to get even worse than they were 15 years ago before more than a few women with mainstream sensibilities (that is, not affiliated with any purity counterculture) could be taken seriously rather than mocked when raising questions about where the 1960’s sexual revolution and its 1990’s codification has ultimately taken us.

As the oldest baby boomers and original sexual revolutionaries enter their mid-70s, they may be largely unaware that their teenage and 20-something granddaughters are routinely contending with the following: young men who are less interested in sexual intercourse with actual humans than they are in (often violent and degrading) pornography; young men who think (due largely to said pornography) that it is unremarkable to choke their sexual partners mid-intercourse if those partners have indeed consented to intimacy more generally (not to mention widely accepted social mores that prompt young women to consider whether it would be “impolite” to request not to be thus choked); and app-based dating in which women and men seem thoroughly dispensable because there are no common social dynamics or acquaintances between sexual partners whose connections are inorganic and commodified by design.

But while it is easy to regard the 1960’s sexual revolutionaries and their more unflinchingly pro-sex 1990’s heirs with scorn, the truth is that recklessness – sexual and other – has always been the province of youth. It is not surprising or really anyone’s fault, looking back, that the baby boomers – a generation so much larger in numbers and so better educated on average than their World War II-generation parents – so thoroughly steamrolled the courtship conventions of their elders.

What is surprising (and blameworthy) is that the boomers’ understanding of sexual mores never matured. Even as they left organized religion, one would think that they might have appreciated, as parents and grandparents, the social usefulness of espousing sexual conventions sufficiently restrictive that young people could experience the rebelliousness that defined their own youth without resorting to mid-coital choking.

Now, even if more older adults were to understand what their lifelong denigration of earlier sexual and romantic conventions has truly wrought for those who are coming of age today, it would be too late for them to do much about it. At bottom, this is a problem beyond the scope of formal education. Therefore, the older adults who are (too) often still in charge of educational and other institutions cannot do much.

Meanwhile, the 20-something women brave enough to flout ostensibly feminist orthodoxy and speak the truth about the degradation and decadence that we have bequeathed to them are at this point overmatched by the sheer inertia of the sexual landscape’s combination of clinical legalism and nihilistic amoralism. They are undoubtedly correct in their diagnosis; but, economically speaking, they have a cartel problem.

It’s both too late and too unlikely to get enough of their fellow teen and 20-something girls and women (raised by boomers and Gen-Xers who assumed that safe, consensual sex was at least safe and consensual enough) to rebel en masse against all the legalistic amoralism in which they’ve been inculcated — and in a way that forces them to take more personal, moral and social responsibility rather than less. Not to mention their having to contend with boys and men who have been inculcated in the same (and often embraced it with much greater zeal on a basic level, regardless of how it may or may not affect them on a deeper one).

So, my fellow Gen-X and millennial parents of children and pre-teens, winning this long game for a healthier sexual landscape among tomorrow’s youth is up to us. I do not know how it will end. But I know that it begins with an acknowledgement that things sexual and romantic have gone dreadfully wrong in a host of ways among every demographic of people our juniors, and that we want better for our own children.

And I know that it continues with a willingness to seem uncool when we impart to our children what every generation save the one presently entering its golden years imparted to theirs: that sex is for marriage. They won’t listen forever, of course (few people ever really did), but part of the wisdom in that old standard was its ability to lend an air of illicitness to even the most “vanilla” premarital sexual activity.

It seems fair to assume that a world in which one can feel somewhat transgressive about old-fashioned sex without a wedding band would be far more empowering for tomorrow’s young women (after all, if it’s at least a little transgressive, it is not so awkward to decline if you want to) than one in which attempted asphyxiation is apparently no longer shocking enough to unambiguously warrant a police report, let alone a mere withdrawal of intimate consent.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about culture, politics and religion for various publications, including America magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Follow her on Twitter @ElizabethGMat.