Sexual liberation and its accompanying guardrail of legal consent have “shrunk” happiness for women and men says left-wing Washington Post columnist Christine Emba.
“The gap between what young people want the sexual landscape to look like and what the consent paradigm offers is turning many off of sex entirely, as evidenced by falling rates of sexual activity, partnership and marriage,” Emba wrote.
“Some have dubbed this [loss of sexual activity as] the “sex recession” — that recently hit a 30-year low,” she continued. “One woman told me that at the age of 34 she had ‘just stopped thinking a relationship is even possible.’ Rather than expanding our happiness, liberation seems to have shrunk it.”
Emba sifted through her various conversations with disgruntled singles, men and women alike, who have felt more than dissatisfied with the playing field — specifically, the inability to find people who are searching for the same kind of relationship. “Sexually liberated” singles often “consent” to sex in search of a relationship but instead end up caught in an endless stream of casual and very often damaging sexual interactions.
The author honed in on how the concept of “consent” (agreeing to and participating in a consensual sexual activity) is merely a legal definition and does not make up for the lack of ethics and regard for human dignity during sex, and does not remedy the inclination act-out disturbing and sometimes violent behaviors witnessed in widely available online pornography. “Consent,” a broad idea intended by progressives to limit the harm men and women may face in casual encounters, has ultimately failed to protect singles from being disrespected and has not led to more fulfilling relationships, she posits.
The fix, she says, is love and a 13th-century Christian theologian and philosopher, Thomas Aquinas. More specifically, she points to Aquinas’ idea that love is “willing to good of the other.”
“He borrowed that definition from Aristotle, who talked about love as an intention to bear goodwill toward another for the sake of that person and not oneself. Willing the good means caring enough about another person to consider how your actions (and their consequences) might affect them — and then choosing not to act if the outcome would be negative,” she wrote. “It’s mutual concern — thinking about someone other than yourself and then working so their experience is as good as you hope yours to be. It’s taking responsibility for navigating interactions that might seem ambiguous, rather than using that ambiguity to excuse self-serving ‘misunderstandings.”’
Emba argues that while there are many situations in which a person will consent to sex, the sex could still be “ethically wrong.” She concludes through the lens of Aquinas’ philosophy that “willing the good of the other” is better realized in “inaction rather than action.”
“This involves a certain level of maturity and self-knowledge on all our parts: an understanding that if we aren’t able to manage this level of consideration — in the moment or more broadly — we probably shouldn’t be having sex. And, yes, it might lead to less casual sex, not more,” she wrote. “It’s a much higher standard than consent. But consent was always the floor — it never should have been the ceiling.”
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Twitter.
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