Consent is not enough
Perusing various magazines and news sites in recent months, I’ve noticed a growing number of commentators who recommend we reexamine our society’s norms surrounding sexuality. Casual sexual encounters bring more misery than happiness, they say, and “consent” isn’t a high enough standard to bring about sexual fulfillment and freedom. The Problem of Being Cool About Sex Consider an article from Helen Lewis in the Atlantic last year, “The Problem with Being Cool about Sex.” Lewis claims that the new generation of feminists hasn’t reconciled “what we should want with what we do want.” Pornography has saturated the lives of young people and colored an entire generation’s expectations of what sex should be. “If two or more adults consent to it, whatever it is, no one else is entitled to an opinion,” or so goes the commonsense thinking about sexual encounters. The problem, Lewis writes, is that the sexual revolution’s promises haven’t panned out. “Our enlightened values—less stigma regarding