The paper had provocatively named article today: "Straight People Need Better Rules for Sex". Much of the article is good and the thesis is something that deserves attention, but I want to focus for a moment on where it begins in the context of where it sort of ends:

. . .

“I don’t think older generations realize how TERRIFYING dating is for the current generation,” fumed one young Twitter user, to the tune of 18,000 likes. “Absolutely chaotic out here.” When I interviewed dozens of people for my book on sex and relationships, I found that women, in particular, discussed their sexual experiences in visceral terms: encounters that end in unexpected and alarming acts — a choking, say, or other porn-inspired violence — that they go along with out of surprise or resignation. After all, if consent is given (and it often is), there are no grounds left for protest.

. . .

That enjoyment of dinner parties rests on a clear set of social standards: broadly shared, community-regulated understandings of what we hope a gathering will look like and how attendees should behave. For sexual encounters, setting these standards will require heated debate, and our vision for what sex means in our society must be corrected together. ... — Emba

These ideas strike me as things that sort of work together - consent and norms. From a legal perspective, call it something like "volenti non fit injuria" (“to a willing person, it is not a wrong.”) and assumption of the risk prior to the development of comparative liability or, if you prefer, inalienable rights in contract law (like you can't sell yourself as a slave despite the general policy of enforcing voluntary contracts of consenting parties). Broadly speaking, these ideas represent that society has come to understand that even when we consent, that doesn't mean all is fair.

A sexual encounter is sort of tautologically the most intimate of encounters and performed in private, i.e. in a context generally outside of social view subject only to the desires/willingness of the participants. Two people (more perhaps) engage in a social behavior that requires negotiating interests, and society has simultaneously retreated from governing that space (who you can have sex with, the types of sex you can have, etc.) while at the same time elevating a notion of consent to serve as the gatekeeper between what is right and what is wrong.

Without a history lesson on sex and how we got here, suffice it to say that somehow things like explicit, affirmative, enthusiastic consent became the way in which we protect unwilling/unconsenting/etc. people from the desires/acts of their partners. The only check on behavior became the lowest common denominator of "Yes please!"

But is that what consent really does? Was the lack of a "yes please!" in a social context full of mores (don't have anal sex) a solvable problem whereas the presence of a "yest please!" in a context of no holds bard comes to represent the same sort of repression we hoped to alleviate? What role does consent play in the interaction where we have already acknowledge there are disparate interests/powers that result in unhappiness for at least one of the participants?

Recognizing in advance that this sounds horrible, if the line in the sand in prior years was evidence of violent rebuke to demonstrate a lack of consent (after all, she put herself in that position), why is it that moving the symbolic action of "consent" from refraining from punching someone in the nose to saying "Yes please!" addresses the dynamic at issue? If someone is feeling pressured to do something they don't want to do and they are interested in maintaining a relationship with the person applying the pressure, how does "performing" the consenting symbol suddenly make the price of continued maintenance of the relationship justifiable?

The suggestion here is that the "price" of relationship management has changed. That once upon a time the most an aggressor could hope for was lifting a skirt and getting a relatively chaste quicky because society made it abundantly clear that anything more was beyond the pail (perversion if you will), but now an aggressor is free to demand anything because society says "if he/she/they consent, then it is fine by us." It feels strongly like we mistook the symbol (consent) in one context and keep using it in another context as if it solves the same problem.

Paternalism/authoritarianism/etc. are problematic, but the cost of a relationship shouldn't be getting choked. Maybe what we should have been advocating was proper sexual behavior, that sex is not a commodity for relationship maintenance, and that we cannot punish people for saying "no" (or not saying "Yes please!"). If the reason that we pushed consent (however performed) is to solve the problem of coerced sexual behavior, it seems to have failed miserably.