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Consent in a Neo-Puritan World
What happens at the University of Minnesota — in this case, an “affirmative consent” policy for sex — doesn’t always stay in Minnesota:
The proposed policy is currently under review for another 30 days before it becomes official. Its language is fairly standard, which leads me to believe that it will suffer from the same problems as other “Yes Means Yes” policies:
[…]
Equally troubling is the mandate that each and every sexual act be hammered out beforehand. May I touch your hand? What about your wrist? May I touch your shoulder? May I kiss this spot on your neck? May I kiss this other spot on your neck? May I kiss the first spot again while I touch your hand? Nobody is going to do this. Does that mean everyone is a rapist?
The article at Reason not so reassuringly concludes:
The new policy will only make things easier for adjudicators to the extent that everyone accused of sexual assault will very likely be technically guilty, since no one is going to sign a detailed consent contract before engaging in sex.
That day has not yet arrived. It’s coming soon.
Just over a decade ago, in the wake of Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, there was an uptick in conservatives bemoaning the hedonism of modern college campuses. The years since have seen the general level of debauchery increase without let or hindrance. Even the staunchest of so-cons have gone silent from a kind of cultural shell shock. It is simply understood that the modern college is a strange parallel universe where sexual liberalism and Stalinistic speech codes coexist on the taxpayer’s dime.
It’s been a conservative complaint for years that the traditional idea that colleges acted in loco parentis is dead. Look a bit more closely and you see that the idea is as firmly entrenched as ever on campuses across the country. What’s changed is that the traditional model of parenting has been replaced by its hippie alternative. Colleges are making sure that Jimmy is growing up right; their notion of “right,” however, is terribly at odds with the values held by the vast majority of real parents.
The power of sexual liberalism as a political instrument is that it weakens the family structure. The generations who have matured on a staple of casual sex will find, and have found, that monogamy and long-term relationships are a dreary chore. A culture of instant gratification will find it impossible to think in the span of years, much less in the decades it takes to build a successful family.
The undermining of the traditional nuclear family removes the basic conservative bulwark of American society. With it’s decline, the outcome of elections, the course of popular entertainment, or the fluctuations in the debt-to-GDP ratio will little matter. What are perceived as conservative values are simply those values that are required to maintain a traditional family structure. If there are no more traditional families, there will be little need to adhere to those traditional values.
Sexual liberalism, however, is a form of moral anarchy. It cannot persist for very long for the same reason that no form of anarchy can exist for very long. Life requires some kind of order to survive. The hook-up culture quickly becomes a crash course in little more than cynicism and narcissism. No one can live like this for more than a few years. It eats away at the souls of those who fail to reject it. Sooner or later, order is restored. As the anarchy winds down, the open question becomes what sort of order will be established in its place.
The rise of Affirmative Consent programs, complete with T-shirts, gives us a pretty good idea of what the new sexual order will look like. It should not be surprising that a political ideology that thought nothing of minutely regulating the American economy would, in time, apply the same legal pettifogging to sex. Soon enough there will not be a single aspect of human life that will not require a form signed in triplicate.
Revolutions destroy their own. Liberalism created the hedonistic campus culture. That culture will, in time, produce a new sexual conservatism. Put yourself in the place of a young man seeking sex on a modern college campus. You understand that even a slight slip-up in the sexual marketplace can destroy your career prospects and possibly lead to criminal charges. The quasi-legal system employed by colleges has essentially dispensed with due process. You are guilty until proven semi-innocent. In this context, even the most aggressive of males will become, as a matter of necessity, risk-averse in sexual matters.
Faced with such prospects that young man now has a powerful incentive to become monogamous. A long-term emotionally stable relationship is likely to be his safest bet. Beyond its narrow confines lie all manner of snares. For both young men and women, the default option will be to return to something like the traditional courtship patterns of their grandparents. Sexual liberalism will, having consumed itself, become a powerful force for re-establishing traditional sexual norms.
Published in Culture, General
Richard,
Now that I have been reading about this strange new campus phenomenon a short skit forms in my head. A synopsis would be:
Scene: Moderate sized apartment furnished as a twenty something would furnish it.
The young man and women come in the door. It is her apartment. They are embracing and kissing intensely as they enter. Obviously, something will probably happen further quite soon. Suddenly they simultaneously pull away from each other and say “attorney!” loudly. Out of two closets pop two different attorneys. Immediately the attorneys go to the couch with the young man to one side of his attorney and the young women to the other side of her’s. The attorneys negotiate a long agreement stopping to question their clients repeatedly. Finally, having hammered out all the issues it is time to sign. Now out of a third closet two witnesses appear and a notary. The document is properly signed, witnessed and notarized. Now everyone leaves. The young man and young woman are sitting on the couch. The agreement is sitting on the coffee table in front of them. They look at it for a moment. They look at each other.
They get up. After a light kiss he says to her. “I’ll call you”. She says “great”. He leaves. Curtain goes dark.
Regards,
Jim
What if there were an organized effort to have university guys stop dating other college girls and just start pursuing townies?
If the objective is give women arbitrary and capricious power over every sexual encounter, then men have to stop sleeping with those women and find other alternatives.
Lysistrata by the men against the women.
James – I could almost swear that was a SNL skit at some point. If it isn’t it should be.
Quinn – I believe the male sex drive renders your argument moot.
Townies. Pornography. The ladies underwear section of the Sears catalog.
Nature finds a way.
Fair enough Quinn
I have seen this skit on YouTube. can’t find it at the moment but I have seen it.
It won’t stop until they require you to be married before sex.
We call them neo-puritans, but this is just way too on the nose.
Yes–when I first read about this sort of thing it immediately occurred to me that this is just a backhanded way of reestablishing some sexual mores, but in a vastly inferior way to the old one, which taught us that sex has a serious moral component besides protecting ourselves. Those who fomented the sexual revolution thought they were gaining “freedom”. Nope–it was just a path to the most invasive kind of intrusion into every aspect of life. Pretty soon I think young people might begin to rediscover the beauties of chastity for the right reason. Then there will be hope of reversing the terrible toll of the sexual revolution, that was really just a form of immaturity.
I found at least 2 versions of the skit online.
Links, people, links!!
Three versions…
I haven’t watched them through, so they might not be safe for work.
Jordan,
You’ve heard of re-inventing the wheel. This is re-inventing Western Civilization’s Marriage Morality the hard way.
Regards,
Jim
Not the link you’re looking for, Zafar, but here is a spoof on the consent contract idea by my daughter from The Federalist this morning.
http://thefederalist.com/2015/07/13/5-ways-to-ensure-safe-sex/
Quinn,
This one was the closest. The negotiation was good but they signed much too quickly. The two witnesses and notary should have been there too.
Regards,
Jim
Thing is, serial sexual monogamy isn’t such a great thing either.
It’s good to meet a lot of people before settling down. Just, you know, not have sex with all of them. A mating culture where casual dating wasn’t equated with casual sex would be more helpful, I think, than serial monogamy is in choosing a spouse.
For women, at least, serial monogamy can feel like a slo-mo game of musical chairs. Eventually, the music stops, and you end up having to grab the chair you have at the time, rather than the chair you would have chosen if you weren’t investing precious years in each chair, but instead could sample many chairs at once, without the pressure of sexual obligation.
Obviously not written by a lawyer. You could do a whole skit on the definitions sections of the contract alone. It would be truly NSFW. South Park territory.
I still say conservatives should get on board with the whole “positive consent” movement because the natural endgame is abstinence.
Conservatives were unable to convince young women that the only 100% effective method of birth control is abstinence, but perhaps conservatives can convince young men that the only 100% effective method for avoiding a rape charge is also abstinence.
Nah. We were unable to convince noisy activists who want to get young women on birth control for all their lives that abstinence is effective.
There were too many “realities” about human sexuality which were beyond control, save that of artificially expensive hormonal contraceptives, which of course cannot be OTC for any reason whatsoever, and whose cost are obviously too much to bear for individuals, so they should be carried by all.
The problem here is that “positive consent” does not end with pre-marital sex. How many married people are going to do the whole procedure every time? In a day and age when marriages go bad and the splitting spouses spew venom at each other, we don’t need to start down that road…
I appreciate the sentiment, but this is a kind of Pandora’s box of bad news. We should encourage people to act right, but also for the right reasons. Because it is unbecoming the dignity of a human being to play musical partners, not because relatively common human behavior is now one of the worst crimes on the books.
Thing is, abortion offers young women a 100% effective alternative to abstinence. Even if the condom breaks or the pill doesn’t work, abortion is always there as another option.
Young men have no such alternative when accused of rape.
I don’t buy it. I don’t believe there can be a wrong reason for refraining from sin. St. Peter’s never gonna send someone to Hell for abstaining for the wrong reason.
That’s why you marry someone who doesn’t buy in to all this hipposcat, and why you expend an enormous amount of time getting to know your intended before marriage. The whole point, at the end of the day, is to encourage caution and forethought.
Or if not an enormous amount of time (let’s be honest, women have less time than men), a substantial amount of energy snooping ;-)
Doing some sleuthing on my husband before I even got involved paid off handsomely. Since the espionage revealed he was an uncommonly honest guy right from the start, we could lay our cards out on the table much faster with less risk of betrayal. By modern standards, ours was a “whirlwind courtship”, not because we were willing to forge ahead without information on each other, but because we got to that information faster.
I like the old patterns where you knew the family and most of your intended’s past by virtue of community gossip, and so his reputation preceded him. That worked for us.
Realistically, these days you often don’t get a chance to find out much about the family before you’re already heavily invested. Still, finding sources you can trust to give you the lowdown on the man’s past and reputation may still possible. We had some friends in common, friends with enough loyalty to me (or at least to their fellow women) that I could trust their “No” when I asked them point-blank “So is he a creep? Do you have any dirt on him?”
I also checked up on some other things. Virtuous women are going to have a tough time staying virtuous if they don’t find ways to adapt to certain modern realities.
Merina,
Here’s an exchange from Arahant’s recent post mostly about computer software.
Ari’s off hand remark has so much relevance to what is going on all around us.
Regards,
Jim
It seems like more than enough punishment to be divorced. The burden of wondering whether your ex-spouse will press charges only pours gasoline on that fire. This puts too much power in the hands of wicked and perjurious people.
Merina were you there when your mom said this to Rachel?
“As we all know, a proper young lady never drops her drawers without first securing a contract. (I’m pretty sure my grandmother said that. Well, it was something along those lines.) It’s great to see we’re bringing our college codes up to snuff.”
Or are you going to blame your mother in law? ;)
III
This wouldn’t work because “affirmative consent” only works for some types of guys.
The guy who’s kind of awkward will be even more awkward with these new rules, but the ultra-smooth guy that every women wants will act like they don’t even exist (and she’ll be fine with it).
Affirmative consent is merely another barrier to keep the weak and average guys from trying to hook up the pretty girl so that the badboys have less competition. In this respect it’s quite similar to sexual harassment rules at work. Josh (who every woman wants) can come on as crudely as possible and nothing will happen, whereas ugly Tony will find himself in HR hell for merely asking somebody out.
At the risk of re-igniting an old argument, did you hear that Bristol Palin is out-of-wedlock pregnant again?