“How Consent Can—and Cannot—Help Us Have Better Sex”:
It’s widely accepted that a woman really can consent to sex with a husband on whom she is financially dependent. The immediate though rather less accepted corollary is that she can also consent to sex with a paying stranger. To say anything else, many feminists now argue, would be to infantilize her, to subordinate her—to the state, to moralism—rather than acknowledge her mastery of her own body.
Perhaps, some philosophers suggest, we should not be able to forfeit future consent, either by agreeing to serious bodily injury or death or by entering into a contract that strips us of long-term agency. But, if football players can consent to beat each other up on the field, why can’t we beat each other up in bed? If we want to forbid people from subjugating themselves in the pursuit of their fantasies, we’d have to criminalize both extreme forms of B.D.S.M. relationships and marriage vows that contain the word “serve.”
Critics of this shift worry about encounters where both parties are blackout drunk, or where one appears to retroactively withdraw consent. They argue that a lower bar for rape leads to the criminalization—or at least the litigation—of misunderstandings, and so discourages the sort of carefree sexual experimentation that some feminists very much hope to champion.
[T]he bureaucratization of our erotic lives is no path to liberation.
[A] cultural emphasis on consent—and especially “enthusiastic consent”—has divided “sex into the categories awesome and rape” (Fischel), ignored the complexity of female desire (Angel), and reinforced the notion of sex as something that women give to men, rather than something that equal people can enjoy together (Garcia).