How Consent Can—and Cannot—Help Us Have Better Sex
The latest and most vigorous addition to this genre is “Sex Beyond ‘Yes’: Pleasure and Agency for Everyone” (Norton), by Quill Kukla, a professor of philosophy and disability studies at Georgetown University. Part manual, part manifesto, “Sex Beyond ‘Yes’ ” has plenty of can-do ideas about how we might turn consensual sex into “good sex”—how we might learn not only to accept and reject but also to invite, warn, ask, and order. Kukla, who is nonbinary, and who has both an academic and a personal interest in kink, sometimes writes with a certain condescension toward vanilla heterosexual couples, who having “never been forced to think reflectively about their sexual practices and desires may not have had the chance to develop these skills.” But their book touches on topics that will interest a wide audience: how to ethically have sex with a partner with dementia, for example, or the liberatory possibility of teaching children how to define physical boundaries using safe words.
Kukla complains that we talk too little about how to have good sex, and too much about how to avoid bad sex. They are sharp on the counterproductiveness of initiatives like Take Back the Night, which, by suggesting that women are at high risk from strangers on the street, can heighten their dependence on partners and acquaintances, who commit more than ninety per cent of rapes. They argue that the mainstream (and sometimes feminist) idea that male bodies are gross and threatening is actually a form of rape culture, because it upholds the idea of sex as something men must extract from women. One could close Kukla’s book with the sense that rapists are simply people who have not yet had the chance to develop the “complicated skills” of good sex. This is not as Pollyannaish as it sounds—a D.O.J. report from 2000 found that the most common age of sexual-assault offenders was fourteen. And anyone who wants to advocate for better sex must take as a first principle that boys and men are capable of change.
As sex education goes, “Sex Beyond ‘Yes’ ” is lucid and straightforward; in a better world, it would be taught in high schools. But sex education, as Kukla admits, is not everything: “The best communicators in the world cannot have strong sexual agency in a country with maximally restrictive and punitive sexual norms or laws, or when trapped in a brightly lit room in an institution, such as a prison or hospital, that offers no privacy.” Sexual “agency,” Kukla’s preferred term, differs from sexual consent in much the same way that a walkable neighborhood differs from a gated community. If consent is our right to briefly release other people from their obligation not to touch us, agency is our right to live under conditions where we can freely pursue our desires. Kukla calls such conditions the “scaffolding” of good sex.
A sorority sister, for example, has better scaffolding if she has a place to dance and get drunk and kiss strangers that is not a house operated entirely by men who have sworn loyalty oaths to each other, and who themselves are no strangers to sexual hazing. A foster child has better scaffolding if he has a bedroom of his own, with a door that locks. Birth control and PREP can be scaffolds for better sex, as can financial independence. Kukla mentions “twenty-four-hour public transportation,” which allows people to “be confident that they can leave safely and easily whenever they choose to.” When I read this, I thought of John Rideout’s assault on Sheila Moxley, after he had drunk too much to bike himself home. Had there been a bus stop outside, could Moxley have more confidently turned out Rideout, locked the doors, and slept peacefully through the night?
There is something unsatisfying—almost victim-blaming—about my question. Rideout, after all, did not rape Moxley because he didn’t want to pay for a cab; he raped her because he didn’t see her as a full human being. Kukla, who is surely aware of such cases, nevertheless avoids a gendered analysis of sex in order to focus on the material realities that abet bad sex. Scaffolding, ultimately, is less like reparations and more like universal basic income.
In any case, money’s money, and we can wonder how Greta Hibbard’s life might have gone differently had she been cut a slightly larger sexual-agency check. Pregnant at nineteen, she at first turned down Rideout’s marriage proposal because she thought he was “irresponsible.” After several months of trying to raise the baby alone on welfare, she reconsidered, and accepted Rideout, who had since joined the Army. Even after Hibbard told her parents that Rideout had begun to kick and punch her, her father told her that she had a duty to stay in the marriage, and her mother refused to help pay for a divorce. Hibbard may or may not have been surrounded by monsters. But she was certainly living inside a monstrous architecture. ♦
