The 2023 film How to Have Sex follows three sixteen-year-old girls on their first holiday abroad together, intent on a bender of drink, dancing, poolside suntans and, perhaps more aspirationally, sex. Tara, Em and Skye arrive in Crete, high on youthful exuberance. They do each other’s makeup with tenderness, share a bed in their underwear, laugh as they pretend to fellate fries and field texts from their mums. They are at once invincible and deeply vulnerable. Drunk and vomiting on their first night, they swear to be best friends forever, but over the course of the week the pressure of negotiating the social status of sex distorts their bond, and their joyful, boundless confidence gives way to a set of more complicated dynamics.
Tara hasn’t ever had sex, and that weighs heavily on her. Sex matters not just for its own sake, it turns out, but because it determines one’s place within a social matrix: having sex is the gateway to a particular kind of adult status. Skye weaponizes the fact of Tara’s virginity against her, partly out of envy of the interest the boys in the apartment next door show in her. Soon Tara has brief, uncomfortable sex for the first time with one of them, in a setting that involves a tenuous moment of explicit consent and a whole lot of pressure. Afterwards her friends ask her excitedly if he was good. She can’t say no, in part because it would mean admitting to her own alienation not just from the act itself but from the rite of passage that it represents.
Later, the same boy has sex with Tara again, this time clearly without her consent. “You should have said something,” Em says, dismayed and sympathetic, when Tara discloses this to her at the airport on their way home. But again, what Tara needed to say couldn’t be heard. In both cases, what Tara needed wasn’t just to be able to say yes or no to the activity on offer, but something else entirely.
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We live in the age of consent. Consent is increasingly taken to be crucial to distinguishing rape from permissible sex and liberating women from certain forms of sexual oppression, and to be a linchpin of sex education. The Netherlands, for instance, earlier this year became the seventeenth European country to adopt a consent-based definition of rape, removing the requirement that rape must involve physical force, threat or coercion. In France, amid a high-profile sexual assault and drugging case, policymakers are seeking to redefine rape from an “act of sexual penetration” resulting from “violence, coercion, threat or surprise” to any sex act performed without consent—stipulating that consent can be revoked at any point and cannot be given freely in an impaired state. And in Australia, the federal government recently launched a campaign that encourages parents to educate themselves about sexual consent so that they can in turn talk to their children about it. The central message of the Consent Can’t Wait campaign is “If we don’t know the answers, how will our kids?”
None of this is uncontroversial. Over the past decade, consent and its place in sex has become a battleground in the broader culture wars in the wake of #MeToo. In response to repeated revelations of how widespread rape and sexual assault against women are, some have emphasized the importance of explicit, verbal consent at all stages of a sexual encounter. Others have ridiculed that demand as a “boner killer” incompatible with the flow of a genuinely erotic engagement. And as How to Have Sex shows, it’s clear that consent isn’t on its own sufficient protection from negative sexual experiences.
Manon Garcia’s recent book The Joy of Consent (2021), published in English last year, is a sophisticated and welcome intervention in these contested waters. She asks, What role does consent play in good sex? By this she means sex that is both morally okay, and also good in the sense of being pleasurable and satisfying for all parties. Garcia has worked as a philosopher in the U.S. (where some of the voices most vociferously encouraging an emphasis on consent have sprung from) but is French (where the cultural milieu has historically been more wary of the strictures of the Anglo-American consent framework). She steps between the marshaled cannons on both sides to try to better understand the role of consent in “enabl[ing] the passage from a repressive and heteronormative sexuality to egalitarian intimate and erotic relationships.”
There are two notions of consent in play, as Garcia sees it, which often get confused. One is the formal notion of consent as the expression of one’s will, the sort of thing involved in forging a contract or agreement. Here one creates a permission by giving up a right (to the exclusive use of one’s property, for instance). The second is a more substantive notion on which “my consent to the actions I choose expresses my humanity, my dignity, and my morality.” This sort of consent is “the expression of the deep will and freedom of the subject,” Garcia writes, and so it requires a genuine choice, and a choice between options that engage with the personhood and humanity of the individual consenting. Here, consent manifests autonomy. Garcia warns us that the first, thin notion of formal consent cannot get us the benefits of the thicker, autonomy-oriented notion of consent: it doesn’t seem to distinguish good sex from the rest. That second notion plausibly has the normative power we need to draw the relevant distinctions between different forms of sex; the problem is that it’s very difficult to implement as a standard.
What does it take to be autonomous in the context of sex, if it isn’t just to formally agree to the activities undertaken? It is tempting to think that we have sex autonomously when we do so in a way that is driven by our own desires or the pursuit of pleasure. But that is a high bar. As Garcia observes, the worry then arises that not very much sex is consensual in this more demanding sense. After all, people have sex for a wide range of reasons that don’t have very much, at least in the first instance, to do with obtaining sexual pleasure. You might have sex in pursuit of emotional intimacy, or because you will get to sleep sooner that way, or because you are anxious to shore up your own sexual identity, or because doing so will bring access to other material goods, or because you are worried your partner will lose interest if you don’t, or so that you can tell your friends about it afterwards, or because you want to maintain a relationship essential to having full access to your own children, or because you are afraid of violent reprisals from your partner if you say no. Which of these count as autonomous reasons for sex?
This isn’t just a problem with drawing a line in some indeterminate sands: there are broader, more fundamental difficulties with understanding what it is to be autonomous in the context of sex. It is tempting to cash out the notion of autonomy by appeal to something like a true self that gives rise to certain desires or goals whose satisfaction is privileged over others: I am autonomous when I act in accordance not just with my passing whims, or the desires that have been inculcated in me by others, but with the values and reasons I most deeply own. The trouble with this approach, as writers like Katherine Angel and Maggie Nelson have noted, is that it presupposes that there is some true me doing the owning, that I enter the forum of choice with determinate desires and a fully formed self. Sex in particular seems to expose the lie that my self and my desires are independent from and preexist the others with whom I engage. This is a point Angel makes in her book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: an emphasis on consent puts pressure on women in particular to determinately know what they want prior to engaging in sex. But sex is not an athletics meet, and we don’t often arrive knowing precisely which events we wish to enter.
More than that, good sex is the proper remit of Bacchus—it can erase and reform the boundaries of our identity. Sex can be a kind of blast furnace for the self—a space in which it is smelted down and recreated, sometimes briefly, sometimes with lasting results, sometimes painfully. At its best, it is a process of finding out what is possible.
But it isn’t just ourselves and our preferences that are shifting and uncertain. Sex is, too. It’s an inherently social endeavor—so what it is, what it can be, depends on its construction by others around us. Tara’s consensual but uncomfortable sexual experience in How to Have Sex is a demonstration of Garcia’s point that formal consent is a long way from autonomous sex. Tara is consenting to an activity, but she has no space to define on her own terms what that activity is—which is what it would take for sex to truly be autonomous. Yet conversations around consent, even Garcia’s and Angel’s, generally take for granted the settled status of sex itself. But sex is curiously hard to define. How can we understand consent, much less what qualifies as “good sex,” if we can’t first say what sex is?
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I used to think I knew what sex was, but I’m not sure I do any longer. I realized this in a conversation with my eight-year-old. Confidently, even nonchalantly, I’d told him that he could ask us anything about sex. He was curious about nuns, and why they’re celibate. He’d assumed it was because they didn’t want to have children. I explained that there were other ways to avoid that consequence. But how then to make sense of why some people would make the deliberate choice to refrain from sex?
“You know,” I said, “sex isn’t just about making babies—it’s not just about reproduction. Lots of aspects of sex aren’t really anything to do with making babies. And you can make babies without having sex.”
“Oh, okay,” he said. “So what is it?”
“What?”
“What is sex? If it’s not just about making babies. What is it?”
Asked like that, I didn’t know what to say. It seemed like an obvious nonstarter to simply list activities that counted as sex. I wanted to communicate to him how broad it could be, how many forms of physical intimacy could count as sex—but it seemed hopelessly confusing to say that to a child with whom I am physically intimate in various ways. If sex doesn’t just amount to a certain set of activities, what is it that makes something sex?
At the time, I didn’t think my son was asking a question that had much to do with consent, but the more I thought about it, the more inextricable these two questions seemed. Approaches that seek to place consent at the center of an ethics of sex tacitly assume that sex itself is possible without consent, that consent can be added or subtracted while leaving the sexual nature of the activity itself fundamentally unaltered. But why shouldn’t consent of some kind be part of what makes something sex, not just something one does to sex?
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In my childhood, sex was explained primarily in terms of reproduction, at least in most of the formal sex education I received. The paradigm instance of sex was vaginal penetration by a penis in a manner that might lead to the insemination of an egg by a sperm. Of course, you could use contraception to allow you to partake in that activity without the consequences of either Children or Disease, but that was just an instance of Frustrated Sex for Reproduction. Sex between men was assumed to primarily be anal sex, because that was the closest physical imitation of the reproductive paradigm. Lesbian sex wasn’t just mysterious but something close to a conceptual contradiction to my immature mind: there were holes aplenty for sure, but what was there to put in them? It seemed akin to trying to play a game of golf without any balls, or hoopla with quoits but no pins. Since I started my own sex life with the conceptually impossible, this educational approach had proved largely useless at best. I was keen not to burden my kid with the same unhelpful starting point.
I was six years old, the first time I can recall a man touching my genitals without my consent. I was waiting in a parked car with my brother for my mother to return from the bakery, the window open to the warm night air. The man walked over, put his hand through the window and started touching my crotch. He fled as my mother returned. Why hadn’t we, my mother asked us, wound up the window? It hadn’t occurred to me that I might take steps to halt the intentional actions of an adult. I was used, at that age, to being acted upon, sometimes without my consent. It was a glancing encounter, and I was more puzzled than troubled by it.
Men have continued to sometimes touch me without my consent, mostly in ways so fleeting they often hardly seem worth mentioning, alongside the litany of worse that many women encounter. A few stand out—waking on a train to find the man in the seat behind running his hand over the side of my breast accessible to him; a toilet attendant in a deserted washroom who lunged and violently grabbed my breast while I washed my hands—but most blur into an indiscriminate montage of squeezes or grabs or holds on public transport or in bars or even just while waiting to cross the road. Those in turn rest on a penumbra of more ambiguous one-sided intimacies—hands of family friends that linger on my waist and fleetingly brush over my bottom, lingering handshakes that blur into holds; unconformable innuendoes; the weight of a gaze rather than a hand on one’s breasts; and accompanying them the ongoing work of trying to tease apart what could be my own imagination or interpretation from intention and action: Did I imagine that or…?
We call these things sexual. But it’s an open question to me what the relationship is between these behaviors and sex. As the recipient of these actions, they have often been distressing, and annoying. Sometimes they have been traumatizing, but they have not from my point of view been sexual, except insofar as I can identify the libidinal energy of another behind them. They seem more like the opposite of sex, a perversion, in the true sense, of sex—something that purports to aim at sex but ends up somewhere totally different. We call these things sexual because we assume they are driven by and serve to satisfy the sexual appetites of those who execute them. But in doing so, we privilege the perspective of the perpetrator, whose sexual intentions or gratifications come to define the nature of the act. That may seem warranted: part of the harm of sexual assault, after all, is that we’re subjected to something conventionally considered sexual against our will. But why do we allow that something nonconsensual can count as sex, that sex doesn’t constitutively require the consent of all participants? As I thought about my son’s question, I realized that when we ask what sex is, we needn’t just be asking what activities count as sexual. We can also be asking what other conditions need to be met for them to count as such. Should consent be one of these?
The project of delineating sex from not-sex has been pursued by psychology, and psychoanalysis in particular, through attempts to delineate fetish—the supposed pathological cousin of sex—from sex proper. Early sexologists and psychoanalysts used the term fetishism to indicate a sexual preoccupation that fell outside the remit of what was legitimately taken to be sexual, which was in turn limited to things that related fairly directly to the genitals.
But the idea that the dividing line between fetish and appropriate sexual investment can be delineated by body parts alone seems like a nonstarter. Much that involves the genitals is not sexual (think health care). Much that is sexual has little to do with the genitals. What is sexy (as a selection of entries into Dan Savage’s annual HUMP! Film Festival attests) can include being sucked into quicksand fully clothed, peeing while bouncing on a trampoline and a mockumentary about “the elusive wild gimp”—men lying on the ground entirely encased in PVC suits and unable to move except by wriggling. The erotic libido has many homes, and there is no limit to what we can infuse with its energy.
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What, then, is sex? It is not defined by the involvement of any given parts of the body. Nor is it an activity or a set of activities. Perhaps we can more properly call sex a dimension—a physical and conceptual space that is the shared creation of all parties to a sexual encounter, and into which they can bring whatever activities or objects or drives they like. Baking bread, or squeezing a spot, or pressing brake pedals aren’t generally sexual activities, but they can be if you want them to be. Elbows and armpits aren’t sex organs, but that doesn’t mean they too can’t be brought into the sexual dimension.
When we think of sex as defined by an activity, that activity can be perpetrated unilaterally without changing its fundamental nature: you can add or subtract consent of whatever form you like without altering the act itself. We are not bound to conceive of the sexual dimension in this way. We could say, instead, that the consent of all parties is constitutive of the sexual dimension.
Autonomy implies a form of power: an understanding of one’s situation and desires, and the ability to act on them. Co-creation of a sexual dimension, by contrast, can start from a mutual acknowledgment of vulnerability, or uncertainty. The autonomy framework implies an independence of the self from the other(s) with whom one has sex. Co-creation, meanwhile, entails a more fundamental mutual dependency, in ways that can simultaneously threaten and bolster our self-conceptions, because sex isn’t just up to us, it’s something we can only build with others.
In The Joy of Consent, one of Garcia’s final recommendations for arriving at good, autonomous sex is to think of it as a conversation, and to have more conversations about sex, too: “When we talk comfortably about sex, we are breathing new language into the world, which others can use to help themselves have better sex, know themselves better, and in turn contribute to a collective capacity to talk about sex.” I think Garcia is right about that: conversations are part of what it takes to create and define the limits of the sexual dimension. But they are just one part of it. Sex is a creative, often irrational endeavor: to be sexually autonomous we often need to be weird, whatever that means for us. Fetish subcultures can provide a glimpse into the autonomous edge of sexual community: spaces in which the limits of the sexual dimension are explicitly up for grabs (though like all subcultures they too have a tendency to calcify around their own norms and conventions). The point at which social scripts give out is where we have to resort to a creativity grounded in our own potential for pleasure.
“If we don’t know the answers,” asks the Australian government in relation to sexual consent, “how will our kids?” My kids are in trouble if that’s the case: I’m still working out the answers for myself. Maybe it’s better for us all to know there are no straightforward answers, that sex is above all a process of mutual inquiry, an undoing of ourselves and the questions we began with, but don’t ask me how I’m going to explain that to my eight-year-old.
If I’m realistic, he’ll learn from his peer group as much or more than he learns from his parents. How to Have Sex dramatizes that: other people create the sexual context against which we form our own identity, and which shapes what sex can be for us. Even if I did know the answers, I couldn’t straightforwardly give them to my son. But I want to make sure that he’ll be able to chart his own path through the maps that his peers draw around him; to give him a strong enough rudder that he can confront the demands sex makes of us to be not just autonomous, but vulnerable and creative too.
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When I was at school, it was rarely the good kids who seemed the most autonomous. As a teenager, I was mildly in awe of my older brother’s friend Anna, three years above me, who bleached her hair and smoked behind the bike sheds, and would generously waggle her eyebrows at me in recognition as I passed her in the corridors. My brother once told me she was passed a note in class that said, “Hi, my name’s Fiona, your name’s slut,” to which she sent a note back that read, “No, my name’s Anna, your name’s wannabe slut.” What I liked about this story was her transformation of an attempt at a slur into a point of pride. Legend had it that when a man on the street had flashed her, she’d responded by saying, “It’s not very big, is it? I think you’d better put it away.” People tried to compel her to accept their construal of sex and its normative status, and she refused.
But that degree of self-authorship is unusual. We often can’t control others’ views of the encounters we’ve had, or fully insulate ourselves from their judgments and intentions. If we hope to adequately describe the wrong of rape and sexualized assault, then, we have to recognize the ways in which any one individual’s authority over the social status of their own experiences is limited. After all, part of the harm of those actions stems from how something can be made sexual for the individual, whether or not the individual wants to accept it as such.
And yet, while sex is inherently interdependent and social, that need not leave the individual powerless. I’d like it if we treated sex as a success term: something that emerges through co-creation in such a way that it is incompatible with the reluctance of another party. That would entail a redistribution of power: you can’t make something sex without the cooperation of others in drawing it into the sexual dimension. I take comfort in that possibility, when I think about the unwanted sexual contact I’ve had from men. Perhaps a year or two after the man reached his arm through the window of the car to touch my crotch, I stayed for a weekend at my grandparents’ home in Cromer. My grandmother had two large poodles whose hair she kept trimmed into pom-poms like a topiaried hedge, but no toys for children. Rootling hopefully in the cupboards of the guest bedroom I was staying in, I found a pile of magazines, mostly old copies of National Geographic, which I began to read, and since I had time on my hands, I even read the letters pages. One irate reader had written to complain about a feature in the previous issue, which I also had in my pile. It was a spread of high-tech night photography of lions hunting and killing their prey in the wild.
The photographs were impressive—the musculature of the lion’s pounce; antelope captured mid-leap above the ground, like panicked birds clamoring up in flight; the bloody spittle at the corner of the zebra’s mouth as it fell, fur dark with blood and grass, whites of the eyes rolled back in fear. It was that capturing in print of the dying animals’ terror that the reader objected to—the presentation for our edification of their fear and pain. It was, she wrote, disrespectful to show them in this moment where they had lost all control, become subject to a power that was not their own.
I thought about this for a long time afterwards. Sometimes I dwelled on the vividness of death, how something alive and moving could become an open, bloody object. I wondered what it would be like to be the lioness, one eye closed, teeth deep in the still-warm and bleeding face of another animal. But I thought too about the letter, and the nature of the complaint it was making. I thought about the possibility that my gaze as a reader could be what drew the animals’ behavior into a social frame, to become a source of shame; that looking could change the significance of what was seen.
When I think of the unwanted hands that have reached for me without my consent over the years, that have forced and pushed and grabbed my body, I think again of that letter. I am neither the hunter nor their prey. I am the reader whose gaze reveals these men as incontinent victims to their own desires, little hands frantically knocking for entry in their panic and fear at the Edenic dome of the sexual dimension, their fur matted with spittle and blood and excrement. That’s not sex, I want to say to them, that’s wannabe sex.
The 2023 film How to Have Sex follows three sixteen-year-old girls on their first holiday abroad together, intent on a bender of drink, dancing, poolside suntans and, perhaps more aspirationally, sex. Tara, Em and Skye arrive in Crete, high on youthful exuberance. They do each other’s makeup with tenderness, share a bed in their underwear, laugh as they pretend to fellate fries and field texts from their mums. They are at once invincible and deeply vulnerable. Drunk and vomiting on their first night, they swear to be best friends forever, but over the course of the week the pressure of negotiating the social status of sex distorts their bond, and their joyful, boundless confidence gives way to a set of more complicated dynamics.
Tara hasn’t ever had sex, and that weighs heavily on her. Sex matters not just for its own sake, it turns out, but because it determines one’s place within a social matrix: having sex is the gateway to a particular kind of adult status. Skye weaponizes the fact of Tara’s virginity against her, partly out of envy of the interest the boys in the apartment next door show in her. Soon Tara has brief, uncomfortable sex for the first time with one of them, in a setting that involves a tenuous moment of explicit consent and a whole lot of pressure. Afterwards her friends ask her excitedly if he was good. She can’t say no, in part because it would mean admitting to her own alienation not just from the act itself but from the rite of passage that it represents.
Later, the same boy has sex with Tara again, this time clearly without her consent. “You should have said something,” Em says, dismayed and sympathetic, when Tara discloses this to her at the airport on their way home. But again, what Tara needed to say couldn’t be heard. In both cases, what Tara needed wasn’t just to be able to say yes or no to the activity on offer, but something else entirely.
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We live in the age of consent. Consent is increasingly taken to be crucial to distinguishing rape from permissible sex and liberating women from certain forms of sexual oppression, and to be a linchpin of sex education. The Netherlands, for instance, earlier this year became the seventeenth European country to adopt a consent-based definition of rape, removing the requirement that rape must involve physical force, threat or coercion. In France, amid a high-profile sexual assault and drugging case, policymakers are seeking to redefine rape from an “act of sexual penetration” resulting from “violence, coercion, threat or surprise” to any sex act performed without consent—stipulating that consent can be revoked at any point and cannot be given freely in an impaired state. And in Australia, the federal government recently launched a campaign that encourages parents to educate themselves about sexual consent so that they can in turn talk to their children about it. The central message of the Consent Can’t Wait campaign is “If we don’t know the answers, how will our kids?”
None of this is uncontroversial. Over the past decade, consent and its place in sex has become a battleground in the broader culture wars in the wake of #MeToo. In response to repeated revelations of how widespread rape and sexual assault against women are, some have emphasized the importance of explicit, verbal consent at all stages of a sexual encounter. Others have ridiculed that demand as a “boner killer” incompatible with the flow of a genuinely erotic engagement. And as How to Have Sex shows, it’s clear that consent isn’t on its own sufficient protection from negative sexual experiences.
Manon Garcia’s recent book The Joy of Consent (2021), published in English last year, is a sophisticated and welcome intervention in these contested waters. She asks, What role does consent play in good sex? By this she means sex that is both morally okay, and also good in the sense of being pleasurable and satisfying for all parties. Garcia has worked as a philosopher in the U.S. (where some of the voices most vociferously encouraging an emphasis on consent have sprung from) but is French (where the cultural milieu has historically been more wary of the strictures of the Anglo-American consent framework). She steps between the marshaled cannons on both sides to try to better understand the role of consent in “enabl[ing] the passage from a repressive and heteronormative sexuality to egalitarian intimate and erotic relationships.”
There are two notions of consent in play, as Garcia sees it, which often get confused. One is the formal notion of consent as the expression of one’s will, the sort of thing involved in forging a contract or agreement. Here one creates a permission by giving up a right (to the exclusive use of one’s property, for instance). The second is a more substantive notion on which “my consent to the actions I choose expresses my humanity, my dignity, and my morality.” This sort of consent is “the expression of the deep will and freedom of the subject,” Garcia writes, and so it requires a genuine choice, and a choice between options that engage with the personhood and humanity of the individual consenting. Here, consent manifests autonomy. Garcia warns us that the first, thin notion of formal consent cannot get us the benefits of the thicker, autonomy-oriented notion of consent: it doesn’t seem to distinguish good sex from the rest. That second notion plausibly has the normative power we need to draw the relevant distinctions between different forms of sex; the problem is that it’s very difficult to implement as a standard.
What does it take to be autonomous in the context of sex, if it isn’t just to formally agree to the activities undertaken? It is tempting to think that we have sex autonomously when we do so in a way that is driven by our own desires or the pursuit of pleasure. But that is a high bar. As Garcia observes, the worry then arises that not very much sex is consensual in this more demanding sense. After all, people have sex for a wide range of reasons that don’t have very much, at least in the first instance, to do with obtaining sexual pleasure. You might have sex in pursuit of emotional intimacy, or because you will get to sleep sooner that way, or because you are anxious to shore up your own sexual identity, or because doing so will bring access to other material goods, or because you are worried your partner will lose interest if you don’t, or so that you can tell your friends about it afterwards, or because you want to maintain a relationship essential to having full access to your own children, or because you are afraid of violent reprisals from your partner if you say no. Which of these count as autonomous reasons for sex?
This isn’t just a problem with drawing a line in some indeterminate sands: there are broader, more fundamental difficulties with understanding what it is to be autonomous in the context of sex. It is tempting to cash out the notion of autonomy by appeal to something like a true self that gives rise to certain desires or goals whose satisfaction is privileged over others: I am autonomous when I act in accordance not just with my passing whims, or the desires that have been inculcated in me by others, but with the values and reasons I most deeply own. The trouble with this approach, as writers like Katherine Angel and Maggie Nelson have noted, is that it presupposes that there is some true me doing the owning, that I enter the forum of choice with determinate desires and a fully formed self. Sex in particular seems to expose the lie that my self and my desires are independent from and preexist the others with whom I engage. This is a point Angel makes in her book Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: an emphasis on consent puts pressure on women in particular to determinately know what they want prior to engaging in sex. But sex is not an athletics meet, and we don’t often arrive knowing precisely which events we wish to enter.
More than that, good sex is the proper remit of Bacchus—it can erase and reform the boundaries of our identity. Sex can be a kind of blast furnace for the self—a space in which it is smelted down and recreated, sometimes briefly, sometimes with lasting results, sometimes painfully. At its best, it is a process of finding out what is possible.
But it isn’t just ourselves and our preferences that are shifting and uncertain. Sex is, too. It’s an inherently social endeavor—so what it is, what it can be, depends on its construction by others around us. Tara’s consensual but uncomfortable sexual experience in How to Have Sex is a demonstration of Garcia’s point that formal consent is a long way from autonomous sex. Tara is consenting to an activity, but she has no space to define on her own terms what that activity is—which is what it would take for sex to truly be autonomous. Yet conversations around consent, even Garcia’s and Angel’s, generally take for granted the settled status of sex itself. But sex is curiously hard to define. How can we understand consent, much less what qualifies as “good sex,” if we can’t first say what sex is?
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I used to think I knew what sex was, but I’m not sure I do any longer. I realized this in a conversation with my eight-year-old. Confidently, even nonchalantly, I’d told him that he could ask us anything about sex. He was curious about nuns, and why they’re celibate. He’d assumed it was because they didn’t want to have children. I explained that there were other ways to avoid that consequence. But how then to make sense of why some people would make the deliberate choice to refrain from sex?
“You know,” I said, “sex isn’t just about making babies—it’s not just about reproduction. Lots of aspects of sex aren’t really anything to do with making babies. And you can make babies without having sex.”
“Oh, okay,” he said. “So what is it?”
“What?”
“What is sex? If it’s not just about making babies. What is it?”
Asked like that, I didn’t know what to say. It seemed like an obvious nonstarter to simply list activities that counted as sex. I wanted to communicate to him how broad it could be, how many forms of physical intimacy could count as sex—but it seemed hopelessly confusing to say that to a child with whom I am physically intimate in various ways. If sex doesn’t just amount to a certain set of activities, what is it that makes something sex?
At the time, I didn’t think my son was asking a question that had much to do with consent, but the more I thought about it, the more inextricable these two questions seemed. Approaches that seek to place consent at the center of an ethics of sex tacitly assume that sex itself is possible without consent, that consent can be added or subtracted while leaving the sexual nature of the activity itself fundamentally unaltered. But why shouldn’t consent of some kind be part of what makes something sex, not just something one does to sex?
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In my childhood, sex was explained primarily in terms of reproduction, at least in most of the formal sex education I received. The paradigm instance of sex was vaginal penetration by a penis in a manner that might lead to the insemination of an egg by a sperm. Of course, you could use contraception to allow you to partake in that activity without the consequences of either Children or Disease, but that was just an instance of Frustrated Sex for Reproduction. Sex between men was assumed to primarily be anal sex, because that was the closest physical imitation of the reproductive paradigm. Lesbian sex wasn’t just mysterious but something close to a conceptual contradiction to my immature mind: there were holes aplenty for sure, but what was there to put in them? It seemed akin to trying to play a game of golf without any balls, or hoopla with quoits but no pins. Since I started my own sex life with the conceptually impossible, this educational approach had proved largely useless at best. I was keen not to burden my kid with the same unhelpful starting point.
I was six years old, the first time I can recall a man touching my genitals without my consent. I was waiting in a parked car with my brother for my mother to return from the bakery, the window open to the warm night air. The man walked over, put his hand through the window and started touching my crotch. He fled as my mother returned. Why hadn’t we, my mother asked us, wound up the window? It hadn’t occurred to me that I might take steps to halt the intentional actions of an adult. I was used, at that age, to being acted upon, sometimes without my consent. It was a glancing encounter, and I was more puzzled than troubled by it.
Men have continued to sometimes touch me without my consent, mostly in ways so fleeting they often hardly seem worth mentioning, alongside the litany of worse that many women encounter. A few stand out—waking on a train to find the man in the seat behind running his hand over the side of my breast accessible to him; a toilet attendant in a deserted washroom who lunged and violently grabbed my breast while I washed my hands—but most blur into an indiscriminate montage of squeezes or grabs or holds on public transport or in bars or even just while waiting to cross the road. Those in turn rest on a penumbra of more ambiguous one-sided intimacies—hands of family friends that linger on my waist and fleetingly brush over my bottom, lingering handshakes that blur into holds; unconformable innuendoes; the weight of a gaze rather than a hand on one’s breasts; and accompanying them the ongoing work of trying to tease apart what could be my own imagination or interpretation from intention and action: Did I imagine that or…?
We call these things sexual. But it’s an open question to me what the relationship is between these behaviors and sex. As the recipient of these actions, they have often been distressing, and annoying. Sometimes they have been traumatizing, but they have not from my point of view been sexual, except insofar as I can identify the libidinal energy of another behind them. They seem more like the opposite of sex, a perversion, in the true sense, of sex—something that purports to aim at sex but ends up somewhere totally different. We call these things sexual because we assume they are driven by and serve to satisfy the sexual appetites of those who execute them. But in doing so, we privilege the perspective of the perpetrator, whose sexual intentions or gratifications come to define the nature of the act. That may seem warranted: part of the harm of sexual assault, after all, is that we’re subjected to something conventionally considered sexual against our will. But why do we allow that something nonconsensual can count as sex, that sex doesn’t constitutively require the consent of all participants? As I thought about my son’s question, I realized that when we ask what sex is, we needn’t just be asking what activities count as sexual. We can also be asking what other conditions need to be met for them to count as such. Should consent be one of these?
The project of delineating sex from not-sex has been pursued by psychology, and psychoanalysis in particular, through attempts to delineate fetish—the supposed pathological cousin of sex—from sex proper. Early sexologists and psychoanalysts used the term fetishism to indicate a sexual preoccupation that fell outside the remit of what was legitimately taken to be sexual, which was in turn limited to things that related fairly directly to the genitals.
But the idea that the dividing line between fetish and appropriate sexual investment can be delineated by body parts alone seems like a nonstarter. Much that involves the genitals is not sexual (think health care). Much that is sexual has little to do with the genitals. What is sexy (as a selection of entries into Dan Savage’s annual HUMP! Film Festival attests) can include being sucked into quicksand fully clothed, peeing while bouncing on a trampoline and a mockumentary about “the elusive wild gimp”—men lying on the ground entirely encased in PVC suits and unable to move except by wriggling. The erotic libido has many homes, and there is no limit to what we can infuse with its energy.
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What, then, is sex? It is not defined by the involvement of any given parts of the body. Nor is it an activity or a set of activities. Perhaps we can more properly call sex a dimension—a physical and conceptual space that is the shared creation of all parties to a sexual encounter, and into which they can bring whatever activities or objects or drives they like. Baking bread, or squeezing a spot, or pressing brake pedals aren’t generally sexual activities, but they can be if you want them to be. Elbows and armpits aren’t sex organs, but that doesn’t mean they too can’t be brought into the sexual dimension.
When we think of sex as defined by an activity, that activity can be perpetrated unilaterally without changing its fundamental nature: you can add or subtract consent of whatever form you like without altering the act itself. We are not bound to conceive of the sexual dimension in this way. We could say, instead, that the consent of all parties is constitutive of the sexual dimension.
Autonomy implies a form of power: an understanding of one’s situation and desires, and the ability to act on them. Co-creation of a sexual dimension, by contrast, can start from a mutual acknowledgment of vulnerability, or uncertainty. The autonomy framework implies an independence of the self from the other(s) with whom one has sex. Co-creation, meanwhile, entails a more fundamental mutual dependency, in ways that can simultaneously threaten and bolster our self-conceptions, because sex isn’t just up to us, it’s something we can only build with others.
In The Joy of Consent, one of Garcia’s final recommendations for arriving at good, autonomous sex is to think of it as a conversation, and to have more conversations about sex, too: “When we talk comfortably about sex, we are breathing new language into the world, which others can use to help themselves have better sex, know themselves better, and in turn contribute to a collective capacity to talk about sex.” I think Garcia is right about that: conversations are part of what it takes to create and define the limits of the sexual dimension. But they are just one part of it. Sex is a creative, often irrational endeavor: to be sexually autonomous we often need to be weird, whatever that means for us. Fetish subcultures can provide a glimpse into the autonomous edge of sexual community: spaces in which the limits of the sexual dimension are explicitly up for grabs (though like all subcultures they too have a tendency to calcify around their own norms and conventions). The point at which social scripts give out is where we have to resort to a creativity grounded in our own potential for pleasure.
“If we don’t know the answers,” asks the Australian government in relation to sexual consent, “how will our kids?” My kids are in trouble if that’s the case: I’m still working out the answers for myself. Maybe it’s better for us all to know there are no straightforward answers, that sex is above all a process of mutual inquiry, an undoing of ourselves and the questions we began with, but don’t ask me how I’m going to explain that to my eight-year-old.
If I’m realistic, he’ll learn from his peer group as much or more than he learns from his parents. How to Have Sex dramatizes that: other people create the sexual context against which we form our own identity, and which shapes what sex can be for us. Even if I did know the answers, I couldn’t straightforwardly give them to my son. But I want to make sure that he’ll be able to chart his own path through the maps that his peers draw around him; to give him a strong enough rudder that he can confront the demands sex makes of us to be not just autonomous, but vulnerable and creative too.
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When I was at school, it was rarely the good kids who seemed the most autonomous. As a teenager, I was mildly in awe of my older brother’s friend Anna, three years above me, who bleached her hair and smoked behind the bike sheds, and would generously waggle her eyebrows at me in recognition as I passed her in the corridors. My brother once told me she was passed a note in class that said, “Hi, my name’s Fiona, your name’s slut,” to which she sent a note back that read, “No, my name’s Anna, your name’s wannabe slut.” What I liked about this story was her transformation of an attempt at a slur into a point of pride. Legend had it that when a man on the street had flashed her, she’d responded by saying, “It’s not very big, is it? I think you’d better put it away.” People tried to compel her to accept their construal of sex and its normative status, and she refused.
But that degree of self-authorship is unusual. We often can’t control others’ views of the encounters we’ve had, or fully insulate ourselves from their judgments and intentions. If we hope to adequately describe the wrong of rape and sexualized assault, then, we have to recognize the ways in which any one individual’s authority over the social status of their own experiences is limited. After all, part of the harm of those actions stems from how something can be made sexual for the individual, whether or not the individual wants to accept it as such.
And yet, while sex is inherently interdependent and social, that need not leave the individual powerless. I’d like it if we treated sex as a success term: something that emerges through co-creation in such a way that it is incompatible with the reluctance of another party. That would entail a redistribution of power: you can’t make something sex without the cooperation of others in drawing it into the sexual dimension. I take comfort in that possibility, when I think about the unwanted sexual contact I’ve had from men. Perhaps a year or two after the man reached his arm through the window of the car to touch my crotch, I stayed for a weekend at my grandparents’ home in Cromer. My grandmother had two large poodles whose hair she kept trimmed into pom-poms like a topiaried hedge, but no toys for children. Rootling hopefully in the cupboards of the guest bedroom I was staying in, I found a pile of magazines, mostly old copies of National Geographic, which I began to read, and since I had time on my hands, I even read the letters pages. One irate reader had written to complain about a feature in the previous issue, which I also had in my pile. It was a spread of high-tech night photography of lions hunting and killing their prey in the wild.
The photographs were impressive—the musculature of the lion’s pounce; antelope captured mid-leap above the ground, like panicked birds clamoring up in flight; the bloody spittle at the corner of the zebra’s mouth as it fell, fur dark with blood and grass, whites of the eyes rolled back in fear. It was that capturing in print of the dying animals’ terror that the reader objected to—the presentation for our edification of their fear and pain. It was, she wrote, disrespectful to show them in this moment where they had lost all control, become subject to a power that was not their own.
I thought about this for a long time afterwards. Sometimes I dwelled on the vividness of death, how something alive and moving could become an open, bloody object. I wondered what it would be like to be the lioness, one eye closed, teeth deep in the still-warm and bleeding face of another animal. But I thought too about the letter, and the nature of the complaint it was making. I thought about the possibility that my gaze as a reader could be what drew the animals’ behavior into a social frame, to become a source of shame; that looking could change the significance of what was seen.
When I think of the unwanted hands that have reached for me without my consent over the years, that have forced and pushed and grabbed my body, I think again of that letter. I am neither the hunter nor their prey. I am the reader whose gaze reveals these men as incontinent victims to their own desires, little hands frantically knocking for entry in their panic and fear at the Edenic dome of the sexual dimension, their fur matted with spittle and blood and excrement. That’s not sex, I want to say to them, that’s wannabe sex.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.