Consent isn’t enough

A while back, writer Auron MacIntyre astutely observed: “Periodically progressives reverse engineer healthy sexual behavior and they act like they’ve discovered Atlantis.” Writers in the nation’s top papers seem determined to make his tweet’s point. But the modern reengineering project of human sexuality will never succeed until we all accept that healthy sex requires and is safeguarded by marital commitment.

In recent months we’ve been treated to an essay in Vice extoling the virtues of something called “radical monogamy” (it’s not what it sounds like) and both a book and multiple columns from The Washington Post’s Christine Emba calling for a sexual ethic that goes beyond consent. Last week, the New York Times ran an earnest reflection by Emma Camp on why consent doesn’t seem to keep partners in casual sex (especially women) from feeling “terrible” afterward.

On the one hand, it’s great to see mainstream voices questioning the established wisdom that anything goes sexually, just as long as you don’t commit assault. For years, “enthusiastic, affirmative consent” has been the gold standard in freshman orientations, brandished like a talisman against rampant campus rape allegations. This reductionist ethic has left women in particular feeling degraded, exploited, and pressured into acts and encounters they would prefer to avoid. A growing chorus of voices is now recognizing that just because these acts are technically consensual doesn’t mean they are healthy or leave people happy.

On the other hand, most of these writers attempt to salvage casual sex as not only a moral option, but a potentially dignifying one. Emba, for instance, stops short of calling for Christian chastity, and seems to imagine we can “pursue joy” with sexual partners to whom we have no intention of committing. Likewise, Camp, who makes an admirable case against mere “consent box checking” offers as her alternative a series of vague platitudes about “duty,” “trust,” and “valuing one another as equal people”:

“Sex education should start from the assertion that each person deserves pleasurable, mutually respectful sex—not sex that is merely consensual. In turn, it should teach students how to think for themselves about their desires and talk openly with their partners about them, without shame.”

In other words, the solution to the hollowness of the consent ethic is to know what you want in bed and have the courage to tell your partner (whoever that happens to be). Problem solved!

The truth these writers come frustratingly close to acknowledging before they waffle is that there’s no such thing as casual sex. When a man and woman come together physically, there is built-in-meaning in their embrace. Bodies, themselves, are packed with moral significance. Whatever their words and intentions, their bodies shout with every touch, “I am yours, and you are mine, completely and without reservation!”

This mutual self-giving is not something we can contracept or contain. It is automatically conveyed in the act, a covenantal promise that, as Joel Clarkson writes in Sensing God, “expresses the irreversible and mystical fusion of two people.”

He continues:

“The glory of sex is not meant to be found in the individual experience of each person but rather in the joy that comes from participation in and with each other. … The symbiosis of gift in sex means that to receive the full and complete gift of the other requires the full and complete gift of one’s self in return.”

Casual sex—or any kind of sex not accompanied by a genuine promise of lifelong faithfulness—places an expiration date on that gift. It says, “I want you only as long as you can gratify my desires, but after that I want nothing more to do with you. I want only as much of your humanity as my appetites require, and when it’s over, it’s over.”

But as Peter Leithart pointed out recently at First Things, no act as consequential as sex is “over when it’s over.” Instead, “our actions escape our grasp, stretching beyond our purposes and desires toward completions we neither intended nor wanted.” One of those completions is pregnancy, which we convince ourselves we’ve solved through birth control and abortion. But another is something less obvious, which C. S. Lewis identifies in The Screwtape Letters: that “wherever a man lies with a woman, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured.”

Many in our culture imagine that because we have stifled fertility and cleared a very low legal bar, we have rendered sex safe. But much more is going on in this most intimate human embrace than pleasure and procreation. Much more has always been going on. Bodies and souls are being knit together in a bond built to last forever, and every touch makes a promise that says, “I give you all of me and accept all of you, now and always.”

Christianity teaches that any sexual relationship short of marriage shatters this promise and does great damage to both parties. The secular culture is beginning to admit some of that damage. But until it is willing to stop setting expiration dates and receive that gift in its fullness, sex will always disappoint.